Teorema

"So you come to my house to knock it down," growls a fallen patriarch to the young man who has left his family in ruins. The older man might as well be Pentheus, defeated and quaking before Dionysus. Toneelgroep Amsterdam's stage adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film "Teorema," based on his own novel, anatomizes a structure of sexual liberation and destruction that even Euripides would recognize.

In the Pasolini plot, maintained by Toneelgroep's director Ivo van Hove and dramaturge Willem Bruls, each member of a wealthy Italian family—mother, father, son, daughter, housekeeper—is seduced by a mysterious, nameless visitor, who promptly abandons them to their newly released demons. As the unnamed guest, Chico Kenzari cuts a swaggering figure, with dark eyes and sideburns—a far cry from the doe-eyed nymph played by Terence Stamp in the film. But this gruffer lothario fits the tone of the adaptation, which replaces Pasolini's poetic classicism with a more muscular, gut-punching style familiar to von Hove's followers.

The production's lyrical first half occasionally drags as the characters, alienated from their inner desires, speak in third-person stage directions, and the parade of seductions can feel schematic. (Frieda Pittoors gives a tender performance here as the housekeeper.) But this pace permits the evening a stylistic arc; after the guest leaves, van Hove lets loose his sublime sense of theatricality. The massive set—a gray, low-ceilinged space presented to the audience like an overblown diorama—is filled with overturned chairs, tables, desks, and floor panels, like an office after an earthquake. The characters' breakdowns become virtuosic monodramas that together compose a sacrificial ritual of loss and turmoil. The wrenching screams of Chris Nietvelt, as the mother, will haunt Governors Island long after the production departs, just as von Hove, in a brilliant move, has Kenzari haunt the stage to mark the guest's felt absence.

Through it all, a small screen upstage continuously plays a documentary of small animals romping in the dirt, an ironic and cruel reminder of the sexual utopia that the characters, and those who empathize with them, have yet to find themselves.


Presented by Lincoln Center Festival 2010 at Governors Island, NYC. July 15–19. Remaining performances: Fri., July 16, 7 p.m.; Sat., July 17, 2 and 7 p.m.; Sun., July 18, 3 p.m.; Mon., July 19, 7 p.m. (212) 721-6500 or www.lincolncenterfestival.org.