Living History

EDITOR'S NOTE: In the interest of objectivity, this review was edited by the Arts feature editor, Christina Rosenberger, and not the Arts theater editor, David Kornhaber, who wrote and produced A World Without History.

The Loeb Ex is a dark, black space and A World Without History feels like perpetual night; it is crowded with guilt, suspicion and bleak hope. The title itself refers to the wishful thought that personal histories could be forgotten, uttered midway through the play. It could just as well have been titled, "a world without guilt," except that the word history evokes the epic complications of the plot.

An autopsy shows that Richard White died two hours before his daughter Juliet phoned for help. Juliet goes to stay with the family of Henry Williams, her father's best friend. But Henry suspects that Juliet killed her father, and he isn't afraid to show it. His son Gary, on the other hand, feels sympathetic. Gary himself is constantly haunted by visions of his sister, who died ten years earlier, and he blames his father for her death. Henry in fact loved Juliet's father precisely because he was one of the few people who didn't blame Henry for his daughter's death.

David Kornhaber '02, a Crimson executive, has invented a web of back-breaking, heavy histories, and into it he drops the star-crossed lovers Gary and Juliet, whose romance is thwarted not by family rivalries but by this familial guilt. His best lines have gone to Juliet, whose troubles are most sinister. Or at least Brittani Sonnenberg '03 makes them seem like the best lines. Coming from her role as Cecily in last semester's runaway success The Importance of Being Earnest, Sonnenberg converts the coy navet of her Wildian role to the coy hopelessness of a wrecked teenage girl. She smiles, flares or stares into space with a studied cynicism.

Her counterpart, Dan Cozzens '03 as Gary, is more reserved. In the dress rehearsal the reviewer saw, Cozzens occasionally stumbled over his lines, but because it befits the adolescent awkwardness he wisely brings to his character, it almost doesn't matter. Gary could have been precociously sensitive, but Cozzens takes the more realistic route, portraying a small town boy who has seen a lot of trouble but has moral reserves to match.

Although the seriousness of the script sometimes requires long, intellectual exchanges between Gary and Juliet, the emotionalism of several supporting actors refreshes the stage at key moments. Daniel Berwick '01, who directed last semester's Jesus Christ Superstar, is well cast as Gary's angry father. His deep voice and subtle acting make the intensely angry and abusive character believable. He has the confidence the part of Henry requires. His concerned wife is played by Edith Bishop '00. Her role is given little room for development by the script, but she nonetheless brings real pathos to the blank sympathy she must show for both Gary and Henry.

Tegan Shohet '01 has the curious role of Mrs. Walker, a wise and vaguely omniscient old woman who Gary visits nightly. Although her character is not bound to the plot with hoops of steel, she gets to play the always-welcome role of explainer, which she does with maturity and a small dose of convincing senility. Theodora Konetsovska, a visiting student from Williams, plays the ghost of Gary's dead sister, Sarah. The script calls for too many appearances of Sarah's ghost for her role to be as poignant as it could, but Konetsovska deals with her ubiquity by creating a dynamic, puzzling ghost who is as much a part of the unfolding drama as the live participants.

Director Karin Alexander '02 has united these roles into a compact, efficient drama. Her actors seem at ease with their parts, and the intricacies of Kornhaber's themes are clearly born out in elegant, carefully paced sequences. The remarkable seriousness of Kornhaber's prize-winning script challenges both the actors and the director to bring two or three days of violence, revenge and love to life, and to make it believable and immersive. They go a long way towards doing the latter, and more impressively, they succeed at the former.