Well, that was unexpected.
Pretty much everything, as it turns out. The show was embarrassingly sloppy on opening night, with weirdly negligent blocking, loads (loads!) of dropped lines, pacing so far off that the performance went a half hour longer than expected, moments of downright inscrutability, and a rotating set by William Boles that looked cool but generated a distracting amount of noise. Raúl Castillo made a bewildering mess of Geraldo, Paulina’s successful, supposedly sophisticated husband, turning him into a slow-witted naif. Worst of all, Oh played Paulina, unrelentingly, as a kind of mopey Medea, her face frozen in a slack version of the tragedy mask. While the approach is bold in its way and capable of imparting a sense of dangerous, possibly crazed implacability every now and then, its very purity became tedious over time. Oh’s Paulina is a woman without irony or ambiguity, tenderness or even modulations in her rage. Ultimately, she’s a foregone conclusion—and therefore uninteresting.
