The Violet Hour

Or: Stranger than Fiction

Twinklishly smart and darkly thrilling, The Violet Hour is an endlessly surprising comedy as Richard Greenberg (much caressed by me for his ravishing work The Dazzle) once again flaunts his mastery of the English tongue (even through his frequent repetitions. His frequent repetitions!), deft appreciation of those characters of the sepia toned ages, and a refined delight in suffering. Even better, this Violet Hour, produced by Renaissance Theaterworks is so adeptly handled that each of it’s snaking turns hovers at the threshold of revelation, it’s humor does not hide behind gentility nor stand nude in overt-goofiness, and the leaders of nuance in every speech shimmers iridescent.

On April First, 1919, amid the spires of Manhattan, fledging publisher John Pace Seavering (Neil Brookshire) faces a potentially momentous decision. Aided by his rather odd supernumerary Gidger (David Flores) he must decide wether to spend his first, limited printing run on the auto-biography of his illicit lover and jazz singer Jessie Brewster (Marti Gobel), or the two million Joycean offering of his brilliant but feckless and penniless friend Denis McCleary (Nicholas Harazin), who needs the promise of publication to cement his star-crossed union with meat heiress Rosamund Plinth (Cara Johnston). This comedy of literary manners takes a veer for the strange when a mysterious machine is delivered to his office unannounced, a machine that begins printing books of quite a different sort.

As Noele Stollmack’s light spreads across the office we are treated to the blending of all these elements, the absurd and the sublime. While the play’s examination of history, literature, choice and consequence are eloquent, the show as presented takes its triumph by blending Greenberg’s exquisitely detailed characters together. Flores is somewhat lamed by Gidger’s demanded quirks, but keeps his explosions of thought and body clear and crisp. Harazin’s dynamo energy, racing around the office savoring his own prose (while John edits his speech). He captures more completely and sells more believably the passion and charm of a young early twentieth century protagonist, then anyone I’ve yet seen tackle that slippery, fickle fish. Gobel’s Jess, blowing out cool pronouncements with elegance and grace, also nimbly steps into warmth or plunges into pain, as the situation demands. Johnston in tight smiling Mid-Atlantic trill skates across the wonderfully Wildeian phrases the author has provided for her, while very carefully pointing out Tennessee Williams’s black waters waiting underneath.

But what’s all these performance together is Brookshire, whose ease with the play allows us to overcome John’s many mistakes. So inhabited in the scene and his partners that he turns each of the many monologues into a dialog, never snatching but providing counterpoint, truly Listening. This, the way he can match and answer all the quirks of his cast mates, and the stairway of unspoken distress he races down as the comedy winds up to its wicked finish, provoke a breathless anticipation, as wait to see what surprises us next, what eloquent and elegant turn we next will take.