Those who have crossed the line from aging to dying share certain mannerisms. Eyes squint. Voices rise and fall. Hands twitch uncontrollably. The world has lost its focus and keeps coming in and out of clarity like an old record player whose needle can’t hit the groove.
“Moonlight,” the latest production at Studio Theatre, casts the spotlight on Andy, a former British Civil Servant, lying on his deathbed. He grips his white bed sheets with both hands as he contemplates the riddle of old age to his wife who sits knitting beside him.
“The past is a fog,” he says, eyes scanning the audience as though his life hides among it. Andy’s musings about age propel into focus the play’s theme of familial estrangement. Indeed, the little mannerisms that tie “Moonlight” together capture a family struggling to understand its own alienation.
The play opens with a monologue from the family’s deceased daughter in what appears to be the middle of the night. Moonlight overwhelms the woman’s porcelain skin into a ghostly paleness. Isolated to a balcony, she watches over her family throughout the play and articulates their drama in enigmatic monologues.
To the right of the stage, the family’s two sons live a sort of half-life riddled with madness. They never get out of their pajamas or leave their claustrophobic apartment. Speaking in elliptical dialogue, they broach the subject of their estranged father only to careen away to different, more comfortable subjects. To the left, the husband and wife engage in conversation shaped by jealousy; their dialogue is both bitter and affectionate.
The audience goes into the play expecting a tale of familial drama, as this is what the program has promised them. However, the relationships between the family members are so tenuous that one would not immediately assume that the characters on stage are related and share an emotional past.
The three distinct scenes of the play collide into each other physically. The sons’ bed even juts into the father’s bedroom. Despite this, the members of the family never directly communicate with one another. The play takes its time forging the connections among the characters, allowing the audience to experience the isolation before the relationship.
Powerful acting finds the humanity amid the family’s estrangement and madness. D.C. theater superstar Ted Van Griethson coaxes emotional complexity out of Andy’s character. He captures the confusion and insanity of old age: his body gesture alone conveys an inarticulate disappointment. Sybil Lines, the actress in the role Andy’s wife Bel, beautifully brings to life a woman who escapes our expectations about love and relationships. Lastly, Anatol Yusef and Tom Story ground the insanity of the sons with eerie believability.
“Moonlight” is one of playwright Harold Pinter’s most personal and poetic works. The family depicted is an academic one that converses in an elevated register, but amid all the intellectual words they can never actually communicate with one another. Pinter meditates on the disappointment and betrayal of modern family life to evoke the more specific tragedy of a family that can’t overcome them. Andy’s eyes scan the audience with desperate poignancy, searching not just for signs of the life he lived, but also for the point where it all went wrong.
“Moonlight” plays through Oct. 18 at Studio Theatre. Students can get $19 tickets half an hour before curtain for all showings except those on Saturday nights.
You can reach this staff writer at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
