The first thing audience members notice at the start of "Tattooed Girl," the world premiere of the Joyce Carol Oates novel at Theatre J, is the set. The artful set and the brilliant lighting are by far the show's standout aspect, but the art direction sets up an expectation that the script and direction could not meet.
The script is rushed, clocking in at just more than an hour and a half. The character-driven intricacies that unfold over the 320-page novel are too rushed in the play to establish a proper rapport with the audience. The play ends abruptly, and the audience files out of the theater a bit bewildered.
"Tattooed Girl" chronicles the transformation of Alma, played by Michelle Shupe, the character from whom the play takes its name, from drug-addicted, anti-Semitic street dweller to, we must surmise, a more enlightened individual, though this is not particularly clear. Alma, who is from rural Pennsylvania, speaks with a Texan accent and is dressed like an Eastern European immigrant of 100 years ago.
Backstory reveals that Alma was tattooed practically from head to toe by attackers who assaulted her and left her for dead. She is hired out of pity to be the personal assistant to Joshua Seagle (Michael Russotto), an emotionally, creatively and physically ailing Jewish novelist and the son of wealthy Holocaust survivors.
The production does not skimp on acting talent - both Shupe and Russotto deliver performances that push the bounds of the script. But it is the direction of John Vreeke that is ultimately the show's undoing. It is clear that Roth does not understand the characters that Oates has painstakingly created. The actors are pushed to overdo it, making this dramatic work play out like melodrama.
The audience must take refuge in the show's design. The stage is modestly raked, and downstage, the wood is gracefully stained, like the interior of a house. As it extends upstage, the tint changes suddenly into a filthy shade of gray as it hits the backdrop made of corrugated metal, floor to ceiling. The entire left side of the stage is occupied by an enormous bookcase, the top of which is sloped downward toward the top of the stage that, together with the slope of the stage, creates a deep perspective tapering off at distant vanishing point. The staircase that ascends high above the stage creates a second perspective that converges with that of the bookcase, which is, perhaps, a metaphor for the different, but ultimately converging, points of view of the play's two main characters.
"Tattooed Girl," is not a bad way to spend the evening, but just don't let the set get your hopes up.
