The Fundamentalist

Anyone with a last name such as mine has to give a warm welcome to the first Scandinavian play ever to grace the New York International Fringe Festival. The fact that it is about one of the most important topics of our day, fundamentalism, is an added bonus. But though Juha Jokela's two-hander comes with the imprimatur of the 2008 Nordic Drama Award for best play, what's on stage at the IATI Theater is definitely a mixed bag.

Liberal middle-aged priest Father Markus (it's never identified if he is Roman Catholic or Episcopalian) is visited out of the blue by Heidi, who once was an 18-year-old favorite student of his at religious summer camp. Now Heidi is a born-again evangelical Christian and has decided that she must convert Markus, whom she hasn't seen since camp 15 years ago, before his scandalous book of revisionist theology, "Purging the Cathedral," can be published. Instead, it's Markus who causes the married Heidi to doubt her faith, and the two are soon engaged in a sexual affair. It doesn't end well, of course, and Heidi ends up in a mental institution while Markus is seriously chastened, to the point that he tells Heidi that it's just by chance that she ended up there instead of him.

In Eva Buchwald's English translation, the relentlessly talky script too often fails to engage. Jokela has some intelligent insights into the psychological makeup that predisposes people to absolutist beliefs, but his characters seem curiously remote. He also errs in setting up a false equivalency between Markus and Heidi by having the priest commit an act of sexual molestation on the teenage girl that has arrested her development and thus made her vulnerable to fundamentalism. That act makes any honest comparison of the characters' different ways of thinking impossible.

Under Sebastian Nyman Agdur's somewhat studied direction, Adam Smith Jr. commits fully to this thin-blooded, overintellectualized theologian, but he can't do much to make us sympathize with him. Anette Norgaard is more successful as Heidi, particularly in delineating the differences in physicality and vocal patterns among the young girl, the brainwashed woman, and the passionate adulterous lover.

Presented by Scandinavian American Theater Company as part of the New York International Fringe Festival at the IATI Theater, 64 E. Fourth St., NYC. Aug. 15–25. Remaining performances: Sat., Aug. 20, 2:15 p.m.; Mon., Aug. 22, 8:30 p.m.; Wed., Aug. 24, 3 p.m.; Thu., Aug. 25, 6 p.m. (866) 468-7619 or www.fringenyc.org.