Features

Berkeley’s newest theater group, the two-year-old Transparent Theater, is closing its second season with the world premier of “Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day” by Tom Clyde. The multi-talented — and clearly energetic — Clyde is also the theater’s artistic director and co-founder, and has directed three out of four of the season’s plays, including the current one. 

The theater sees its mission as turning out “innovative, unusual, thought-provoking world premier theater,” according to their publicity handout. “This is a theater where you are free to think, again.” (There are some of us who may be a bit surprised to find out that we haven’t had that freedom previously.) However, despite the vigor and enthusiasm with which Clyde and his co-founder, Coley Lally, are addressing both the establishment of a new theater and, apparently, a new concept of theater, it may not be surprising if they don’t always hit the mark.  

This looks like the case with the current production, Clyde’s adaptation of Woolf’s second novel, “Night and Day.” Despite the success of movies based on Woolf herself, there’s a good argument that her work is just not fertile material for theater. The novel form is inherently much more akin to cinema than it is to the stage. (Just think how the two media differ in their limits on the presentation of space and time.) And Woolf is a particularly multilayered novelist.  

The cards were stacked against Clyde in the first place.  

It isn’t necessary to read much more than a few pages from Woolf’s novel to see how much more is developed there than can be presented on stage. Despite the efforts of some fine actors (Lucy Owen and Chloe Bronzan give particularly effective performances) the play is curiously unmoving. In his efforts to boil Woolf’s novel down to a structure for the stage, Clyde seems to have wandered into a form that could be described as an unfunny farce. The whole second act focuses on who will marry which person — and if one doesn’t work out, then another one will do quite nicely. And within a couple of minutes, too. 

But it isn’t funny. It can’t be. Woolf isn’t a funny writer. Clyde is simply attempting an impossible task.  

The switching back and forth between potential spouses is done so rapidly, and so casually, that it soon becomes the point of the play’s action, a technique of the farce that the play fails to deliver. 

In fact, the only sense of any real warmth between male and female in “Night and Day” occurs in a brief unelaborated scene between two cousins.  

It would be less than fair to fail to mention that the play contains some traces of early feminist thinking. Lucy Owen’s character, Katherine Hilberry, conceals her interest in mathematics as if it were a shameful secret; she plans her life around her marital prospects despite her lack of enthusiasm for the men in her life. Chloe Bronzan’s character, Mary Datchet, is forced to work by her economic circumstances and finds it a satisfying way of life. But the theme is not well developed and the play’s focus remains on the various efforts at romance. 

The technical aspects of the production present some interesting issues. The theater’s resident set designer, Anne Goldschmidt, has extremely long cords hanging from the top of the semi-circular set. At the end of a scene, they are frequently moved by one of the actors and tied down at a different place. The immediate explanation would seem to be that they designate different locations for the ensuing scenes. But there is enough inconsistency to suggest there may be some other meaning intended.  

The explanation given for Goldschmidt’s rounded set is that it is to “emphasize the characters’ sense of being watched at all times as they forge their identities in a world gone awry.” 

But, then, why does the play feel like nothing more than an unsuccessful comedy?