Minimal Effects

...The odds might have Commonweal I W January 15,1999 seemed to be against the audacious composer/lyricist Paul Dick when Moses, My Love, his sung-through dramatization of the story of Moses, opened at the Judith Anderson Theater, only a few hundred yards away from a block-long billboard for the new DreamWorks animated feature film The Prince of Egypt...

...it was the audience's job to flesh out the details, place the narrative in a meaningful context, summon the associations, metaphors, and morals that made the story of Moses an epic worth singing about...

...Had the stage been less bare to begin with, the image might not have invited such reflection—Anna Karenina''s thrifty aesthetic was calculated to advance the company's mission, described in the program as fostering "the unique collaboration between actor and audience...

...Our stage," the influential Swiss designer Adolphe Appia wrote, "is a vista into the unknown...space for which our souls long in order that our imagination can be submerged in it...

...And, oh yes—these dreamlike figures were locked in the passions of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina...

...Early on, in a sequence expressing her efforts to stifle her guilty love, Anna marched to a curved red wall at the back of the stage and pushed it until it slid, obscuring the silhouette of Vronsky, who had been standing to one side...

...Commonweal I 8 January 15,1999...

...Instead of simply following Levin's agricultural innovations, as a reader of the novel does, one found oneself analyzing an image—drawing a parallel between the suitcase's bizarre contents and the incongruities that surface in dreams, or the strange associations that may derail a train of thought...

...How could a musical with a rock-bottom budget compete with animated splendor bankrolled by Steven Spielberg and friends...

...Will The Prince of Egypt allow viewers to be active co-creators of an experience in this way...

...simultaneously, the silhouette of her husband popped out on the other end...

...Throughout, in fact, the production demanded that the audience connect with it, sit up and think, rather than sit back and allow an illusion to unfold...

...The normal laws of cause and effect had been suspended...

...Tuneful, dignified, and surprisingly hip, Moses, My Love showcased a cast of first-rate performers whose services, the program announced, had been proffered free of charge, presumably out of love for the material...

...Certainly some of the production's most astonishing moments appeared to ask the audience for recognition, rather than emotion...

...one of Pharaoh's guards complained when Moses and Aaron put in an appearance at court...

...Because you wouldn't be alone there: individuals would constantly flit in and out—co-workers, acquaintances, friends, reenacting scenes you have remembered or imagined over and over again, the ghosts of an overactive mind...

...The less clutter—not just the physical kind—the better the vista...

...As directed by Marc Geller, Moses, My Love was almost more of a cantata than a play, with narrative scenes like the miracle of the burning bush (represented— with truly stylish understatement—by a spotlight fixed on a trash can) giving way to more expansive, meditative numbers...

...As directed by Nancy Meckler, Anna Karenina seemed too dispassionate to some New York theatergoers...

...There was precious little illusion, in any case: Shared Experience recreated nineteenth-century Russia without the aid of sets or props, apart from two suitcases, a few chairs, and the dull-red wall and stage floor...

...When Anna and Vronsky (actors Teresa Banham and Derek Riddell) first made love, they entwined their limbs in exaggerated, robotic gestures that repeated cyclically, as if a hex had imprisoned the pair inside a modern dance sequence...

...But the visual simplicity emphasized the difference between Moses, My Love and most other plays: instead of telling a story, the pared-down spectacle aimed to celebrate one—and the project required the participation of an audience versed in the Judeo-Christian tradition...

...At moments like these, it almost seemed as if the story's tragedy and social maneuvering had taken place before, perhaps many times...

...Probably everyone sitting in the steeply raked auditorium could remember what it felt like to thrust away an uncomfortable thought or painful memory with such deliberate, and futile, resolve...

...If the block-long billboard is anything to go by, the movie will be too busy, crammed with bright colors and attractive shapes and exhilarating movement...

...In Anna Karenina (adapted from Tolstoy's text by Helen Edmundson), they spun out a mesmerizing, streamlined version of the book's complex plot, using stylized movements that tipped the scenes into the surreal...

...The music and simplified tableaus were incomplete on their own...

...Later, as Anna sank deeper into unhappiness, she played tug-of-war with a silent, hooded figure who had haunted the play throughout...

...we are trapped inside a recurrent memory—or perhaps inside an artist's obsessive imagination...

...Too many distractions may make it impossible to see the mind in a grain-filled suitcase, or a miracle in a trash can...

...Dick, whose adventurous projects have included musical versions of Wuthering Heights and Madame Bovary, had stoked his biblical adaptation with engaging melodies and lyrics appealingly balanced between the solemn and the colloquial ("That nut and his loony brother again...

...On their recent trip to the United States, the innovative British troupe Shared Experience turned the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theater into such a mind, peopling the stage with characters who seemed real but distanced, as if filtered through recollection and sleeplessness...

...Simple costumes, and a modicum of stage business, did keep the performance grounded in theater...

...At one point, for example, in a scene expressing the idealistic landowner Levin's ardent relationship with farming (the subject, readers may remember, of some of the novel's more tedious passages), the actor playing Levin (Richard Hope) opened a suitcase that turned out to contain grain, which he proceeded to churn with a large shovel...

...The artists of Shared Experience are old hands at staging hefty novels, including The Mill on the Floss and War and Peace...

...0 round the same time, in another part of New York City, an even more spartan stage design was involving theatergoers in the dynamics of a very different play...

...As it turned out, the play had no trouble holding its own ground...

...Andrew Cavanaugh Holland's bare-bones set consisted of little more than two metal scaffolds, onto which the cast occasionally climbed, as when Miriam (Rachel Gottlieb) spied on Pharaoh's daughter (Lauren Wales) during the latter's discovery of the infant Moses...

...The minimalist design (by Lucy Weller) forced viewers to make an imaginative investment in the experience...

...Sometimes less is more—in theater, less can be a lot more...

...Individuals coming to the story for the first time would have had a hard time interpreting the trash can...

...What would the furniture look like—and the other people...