When an “Amadeus” revival opened at Pasadena Playhouse in February, it was such a spectacular success on every level that you wouldn’t have minded if the keepers of the venerable San Gabriel Valley venue just turned over the keys to the place for a while to the two Tony winners most responsible for making it a smash: star Jefferson Mays and director Darko Tresnjak. And that’s kind of what the Playhouse has done. That dynamic duo is already back in Pasadena with “The Visit,” which has opened a mere seven months after “Amadeus” first hit the boards there.
With a good number of cast and crew members carrying over from the previous production to rock us again after “Amadeus,” this looks, for the moment, like as close a thing to an official house company as you can get in a major theater nowadays. But is “The Visit” as much fun as “Amadeus”? Let’s just say for the moment that this followup production is destined to be more polarizing than that across-the-board crowd pleaser, although it’s not even a bit less lively.
Like Peter Shaffer’s play before it, it is a vintage black comedy — even more vintage, as it was written by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1956, although it’s been subject to a lot of Engligh adaptations and re-writes in subsequent decades. It loosely belongs to the theater of absurdism, which means that there is increasing room as the tragicomedy proceeds for Tresnjak to play around with the initially realistic trappings and have some fun with surrealist, grotesque and/or anachronistic elements. But what it really belongs to is the theater of fatalism, where things line up along the way to increasingly convince us that society, government and individua people themselves are inevitably subject to corruption and venality.
So your enjoyment of the play may finally be subject to how much you feel you already do or don’t know that. Given that Mays is widely regarded as one of the most charismatic and capable actors in modern theater, would it surprise you to learn that he is not really the star of “The Visit”? Well, he is, certainly in billing, and in the fact that he is the clear protagonist, as Anton Schill, a humble shopkeeper in postwar (or is it 2020s?) Europe whose past comes back to haunt him.
But Mays is playing almost more of a mouse than a man. So, talk about a turnaround from Salieri. As much scenery-chewing as the actor was doing in “Amadeus” — and it was a glorious meal — that’s how little he’s doing here.
Mays admitted in a recent interview that he wasn’t sure he was right for the role, and you can see why he might have thought so, given the character’s passivity. But it takes a skilled actor to successfully put his mojo on mute, too. So if you know what he’s capable of, there’s some pleasure in watching him at first seem to embody the milk of human kindness, before he succumbs more of an emblem ofBut the the milquetoast of human depravity.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
