Playwright: Mary Zimmerman
At: Goodman Theatre
Phone: ( 312 ) 443-3800; $20-$60
Runs through: June 5
Silk, newly adapted from the Alessandro Baricco novella by Mary Zimmerman, is saturated with sensuousness, charged with restrained eroticism and scented with mystery. Zimmerman's dream-like staging is rich with visual beauty as it casts a hypnotic aural spell ( both spoken and musical ) .
The deliberate quietude of the 100-minute piece is established by verbal and physical repetitions that form patterns approaching ritual, coupled with a romantic musical score ( by usual Zimmerman collaborators Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman ) and sumptuous costume and scenic devices ( by Mara Blumenfeld and Scott Bradley respectively ) . Very little is fast or loud or brightly lit ( although much is warm as lit by T. J. Gerckens ) . It's a tale in which all characters are amiable but studied, their passions as shadowed as the societies in which the tale is set—1860's Europe and Japan.
Silk contrasts the superficially bourgeois society of Louis-Napoleon's France with the even more constrained society of late-feudal Japan. Bridging the cultures is a young French trader in silkworm eggs, who journeys to Japan in search of eggs free of a decimating European blight ( historical fact ) . On four successive trips, Herve Joncour trades through a powerful warlord, Hara Kei, and shares an erotic obsession with the wordless and beautiful woman at Hara Kei's side. They never speak, they never make love, they touch only once, but it is everything for Joncour.
Silk shows how an alien culture becomes a lens through which Joncour sees himself more clearly. Joncour finds Hara Kei to be a man of impeccable honor and exquisite refinement—sometimes too symbolically so, as in his caged exotic birds. Unconsciously, Joncour mirrors Hara Kei, especially in assuming authority and responsibility—at great personal cost—for the well-being of his French village. Silk may be a love story, but its political philosophy also is important.
The love story is a triangle. Joncour's unfulfilled love in Japan fires his imagination, while in France he has a beautiful, resourceful and passionate wife, Helene. Hurting but caring, she wisely senses the other woman and finds a surprising way—some might say shocking—to both feed and destroy Joncour's Japanese obsession. Helene's secret is revealed as the culmination of the story, providing bittersweet wisdom.
The Baricco novella is a masterful study in concentrated story-telling, just as Zimmerman's adaptation is the refined essence of theater, showing us as much as it tells us and doing both with bold and sure choices. It is the rare theater artist who dares to use extensive silence and build virtually an entire work out of tense but hushed expectation, and that's what Zimmerman has done.
Her splendid cast features Ryan Artzberger ( Joncour ) , Colleen Delaney ( Helene ) , Tohuru Masamune ( Hara Kei ) and Elaine Yuko Qualter ( Hara Kei's woman ) . Important supporting roles are played by the remarkably droll Glenn Fleshler as Joncour's ebullient mentor, Lisa Tejero as a wily madam and Christopher Donahue as the narrator who has far more to say than anyone else.