There’s plenty to be said for scale, and nothing in Manhattan—not even Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, which comes somewhat close—can accommodate anything as capacious as the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall with its 55,000 square-feet floor. After directing Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape to monumental dark beauty in the space two years ago, Richard Jones returns with Ödön von Horváth’s Judgment Day (Der jüngste Tag), written in 1937 and clearly from the fear of mob rule burgeoning under Hitler’s Nazi influence.
Establishing his own fearlessness, Jones gathers a 17-strong cast and outsized light-wood set pieces (Paul Steinberg is the also-fearless set designer) slowly moved around the high-ceilinged playing area to tell a cautionary tale—skillfully adapted by Christopher Shinn—of conscientious stationmaster Thomas Hudetz (Luke Kirby).
The unlucky man fails to give the correct signal to an oncoming express train, the result of which is an accident causing 18 deaths. Hudetz has his momentary lapse when Anna (Susannah Perkins), the innkeeper’s daughter and a town flirt, unexpectedly kisses him at the very instant the train is swiftly passing through.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★★ review here.]
The only witness to the stationmaster’s unfortunate distraction is his wife, Frau Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan), gazing from the Hudetz apartment above the station office. Thirteen years older than her husband and inveterately outspoken, Frau Hudetz is widely disliked in the out-of-the-way community. The feeling is mutual—“For all I care, this whole town could drop dead,” she exclaims at one frustrated point.
In the investigation following the horrific (unseen) pile-up, Anna insists on stating that as the lone witness to the event—she’s unaware of Frau Hudetz’s vigil—she definitely saw Hudetz properly pull the switch. Frau Hudetz, believing she must report what she watched, does just that. Her well-known attitude towards the town, however, and the seeming betrayal of her husband works against her testimony. The townspeople rapidly turn on her.
What she says puts in motion a series of aggregate responses, at first directed not only against Frau Hudetz but also against her reclusive pharmacist brother Alfons (Henry Stram). Simultaneously, stationmaster Hudetz is declared a local hero. But when Hudetz, experiencing mounting guilt, decides he must confess, the swarming crowd—led prominently by indigenous gossip Frau Liemgruber (Harriet Harris in tweeds and fedora)—does a collective about-face.
Now hunted, Hudetz and the also-guilt-ridden Anna don’t meet the happiest of ends. Von Horváth carries on with his unwavering indictment of destructive mass behavior. In addition, he splashes in ironic comments—with, at one moment, the words “I welcome the truth” emerging. The perhaps mendacious boast is surely cogent today when truth is so constantly under siege.
(Incidentally, neither von Horváth nor Jones incorporate any “Sieg Heils,” but the prevailing influence of that time in the Austro-Hungarian Empire must have registered with the playwright’s audiences.)
Throughout, von Horváth keeps his parable speeding ahead at the velocity achieved by the express train that heads through town just after a local train has pulled out to its now inevitable end. The locomotive pace holds Judgment Day to a parable’s effectiveness. That’s to say, it keeps to its surface, to its aim at condemning a madding population rather than to delve beneath the skin of the distressed focal figures.
To some extent, the drama is as efficient, yet as narrow, as an arrow hitting a target’s center. Likely, Judgment Day has and would reach its mark in any arena, but Jones’ staging gives it an enormous size and scope. He asks his players to give over-the-top performances, which is no problem for Harris, who’s made a wonderful career of that acting idiom. All those gladly complying include the players with smaller assignments as, outfitted in Antony McDonald’s 1930s costumes, they sometimes run wildly, sometimes parade slowly, sometimes stand still while wielding aimed rifles.
The hulking sets includes one with an arch under which marauding bunches frequently travel. There’s the high-walled unit serving as the train station platform and the Wild Man Inn. (Wild Man—and Woman—indeed!) Large doors open to reveal a two-story home. Lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound designers Daniel Kluger and Drew Levy proudly strut their stuff, too. When the express trains roar through, the fleeting lights and the deafening rush of air make thoroughly believable the force of air that has bystanders pressed against the station walls.
By the way, with Judgment Day von Horváth—who died in Paris in 1938 when a falling tree branch hit him during a thunderstorm—harks back in terms of negative crowd psychology to the Marc Antony-Brutus funeral orations in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when those Roman friends and countrymen hastily switch alliances. He foreshadows Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, in which again a town stalks a man unforgivingly. It looks as if human nature never changes, does it?
There’s no denying that in his momentous Judgment Day production, director Jones knocks patrons over the heads. It’s an alert from a sober decade in which a fascist leader was blowing heavy clouds over the Continent and the globe. When ostensible autocratic leaders appear to be emerging in growing numbers today, it seems as if von Horváth’s work has a potent relevance to a swelling contemporary plight.
Judgment Day opened December 10, 2019, at the Park Avenue Armory and runs through January 10, 2020. Tickets and information: armoryonpark.org
