With Describe the Night, the 2018 Obie Award winner for Best New American Play now showing at Woolly Mammoth, playwright Rajiv Joseph (a Woolly regular with Gruesome Playground Injuries and Guards at the Taj) dramatizes a 90-year-long round of narrative Tetris. Much like that quintessentially Russian video game, this production can be riveting, but also frustrating. The story opens within the Polish countryside in 1920, leaps forward to the site of a 2010 plane crash near the Russian city of Smolensk, and then hopscotches back and forth across time and place via a series of vignettes, mismatched puzzle pieces that eventually lock into an orderly (if unsatisfying) whole.
The playwright’s non-linear, and predominantly ahistorical, approach is engineered to be spoiler-heavy and, consequently, impossible to dig into with specificity. But I can say this: Joseph imagines a deep friendship between real-life figures Isaac Babel (a celebrated journalist and the author of Red Cavalry) and Nikolai Yezhov (a key villain in Joseph Stalin’s murderous “Great Purge”) that spans decades, a connection that’s crucial to Describe the Night’s melodramatic and made-up twists and turns. Director John Vreeke and scenic designer Misha Kachman (Woolly veterans, both) are working on an alley staging (with the audience flanking a catwalk-like stage) that feels inherently menacing.
When our two protagonists first meet in Poland in 1920, Nikolai (Tim Getman, a slobbering puppy dressed in Soviet military garb) is portrayed as a truth absolutist. Isaac (the sad-eyed Jonathan David Martin) is a dogged reporter on a mission (he’s also an unapologetic storyteller and fabulist). Their initial verbal interplay, where Isaac illustrates the power of a well-crafted yarn, reverberates throughout the play’s lengthy runtime. And Isaac’s journal, which is passed from one hand to the next like a red violin, becomes the show’s all-important MacGuffin.
Truth and fiction blur late into Describe the Night. A pistol fires in 1940, tipping the first tile in this show’s elaborate domino formation, which collapses backwards and forwards and reshapes everything and everyone we’ve seen thus far. Among those characters: a woman (Karen Eastwood Norris, always great) seeking a rental car from a nervous attendant (Justin Weaks) after a tragedy in 2010. Those two may or may not be connected to two other prominent characters (Moriamo Temidayo Akibu and Regina Aquino, both excellent) we meet in the 1930s and 1980s. And a lowly soldier (the foreboding Danny Gavigan) who rises, rung by rung, and is somehow tangled up in this mess, bears an awful lot of resemblance to Vladimir Putin.
An assumption like that is never confirmed in this play, of course, because truth is forever malleable under a totalitarian regime. Describe the Night, however convoluted, resonates more in our upside-down world, where Orwellian phrases like “fake news” and “alternative facts” have slipped into the lexicon with frightening ease.
Describe the Night is playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company through June 23. Tickets $20-$89. Runtime approximately two hours and 45 minutes with one intermission.
