Let us now praise melodrama, at least conditionally. Coarser examples—say, soap operas, or mega-musicals involving bloody wars or misunderstood creatures besotted with nubile women—may not offer much to recommend the form. But approached with imagination, skill and a clear sense of purpose—and a few dashes of knowing irony, where appropriate—it can provide riveting and even thought-provoking entertainment.
A case in point is on ravishing display at Park Avenue Armory, home to Christopher Shinn’s new adaptation of Austro-Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth’s Judgment Day. As helmed by the British director Richard Jones—whose credits range from numerous operas to the Broadway musical Titanic to the Armory’s acclaimed 2017 staging of The Hairy Ape—this socially, morally and psychologically charged thriller has become a triumph of overstatement in service of plain but difficult truths.
It would be unjust to not also mention, straight away, the contributions of this production’s design team, who have turned the vast space at the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall into a glorious (and essentially minimalist) landscape, with facsimiles of towering trees surrounding a set, by Paul Steinberg, that looms over 25 feet high. Two enormous pieces continually shift and rotate to suggest an inn, a viaduct, an apartment over a shop and a railway station, the scene of the tragedy that sets a chain of equally devastating events in motion. It’s here that Thomas Hudetz, the respected, dedicated Stationmaster—portrayed, in a deftly shaded and ultimately blistering performance, by Luke Kirby, best known for playing Lenny Bruce on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—is distracted by the innkeeper’s beautiful young daughter, Anna (a mischievous but later haunting Susannah Perkins) and fails to send the signal that will keep a train on its safe course.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
The resulting crash, which kills 18 people, is preceded by lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound designers Daniel Kluger and Drew Levy with vivid flashes and the loud, ominous clanking of other trains passing by, as onlookers—among them Harriet Harris, providing reliable and welcome comic relief as local busybody Frau Liemgruber—indulge in gossip. Their subjects include Anna, the Stationmaster and his older wife, whom Frau Liemgrauber dismisses as a hag and a nag: “She’s just horrible—a really hateful woman. Tortures the Stationmaster—the most wonderful man.”
If there is initial debate about such matters, the accident sets the townspeople in lockstep, at times literally. As judgment in Judgment Day lands on different characters, following various twists in the plot, groupthink is a constant; Jones has his characters laugh, jeer, carouse and glare virtually in unison. At one point, they watch two men speaking at opposite ends of the stage, their heads turning back and forth simultaneously, like observers at a tennis game. At another, they march towards a perceived villain, backed up by a police officer (a deceptively genial Charles Brice) whose broad, controlled strides eerily evoke goose-stepping.
Indeed, Von Horváth wrote and set Judgment Day in the 1930s, as Hitler was embarking on the reign of terror that would infect much of Europe, and the play has been widely perceived as warning us of the ever-present dangers of mob mentality—while also examining the corrosive effects of repression and guilt. This new production underscores these aspects in both substance and style, leaving us jarred and mesmerized throughout its 90-minute duration. Even the sounds we hear, which can veer in an instant from the chirping of birds to loud, dissonant horn riffs (via Kluger’s music design), evoking a Kurt Weill-scored horror flick, leave us constantly, eagerly on edge.
Where the characters in Judgment Day prefer not to stand out in a crowd, the actors playing them deliver memorable individual performances. In addition to those previously mentioned, there is Tom McGowan as the fatuous, unctuous Innkeeper; Alyssa Bresnahan as Hudetz’s hysterical, albeit much put-upon, wife, and Henry Stram as Alfons, her brother, who emerges as the play’s moral conscience.
“Sometimes I ask myself—what crimes are we atoning for?” Frau Hudetz says to Alfons at one point. “Our own,” he responds. “I haven’t done anything,” she counters. “Yes you have,” he replies. “You just forgot.” His words are spoken more softly than others in this breathtaking Judgment Day, but they resonate and linger just like the rest.
Judgment Day opened December 10, 2019, at the Park Avenue Armory and runs through January 10, 2020. Tickets and information: armoryonpark.org
