Plenty

A jagged-edged world of sharp corners haunts the mind of Susan Traherne, the heroine on the brink of collapse in David Hare's Plenty, now being revived for the first time in New York at the Public Theater. A former British spy during World War II, Susan, played by Oscar winner Rachel Weisz, has been plunked down into mundane civilian life and is having a hard time adjusting. In the shape-shifting world of Hare's play, brought to the stage by director David Leveaux with the same disappointing ordinariness of Susan's newfound civilian life, we find it difficult, too.

Written in the late 1970s and first produced by the Public in 1982, the original production of Plenty was a fledgling playwright's dream come true. The work received sterling notices and quickly transferred to Broadway, where it earned Hare his first of several Tony nominations. According to a program note, he was moved to write the piece because he "felt very strongly that women's experience was missing from accounts of the official history of the period." Similarly, he had read that "marriages of 75% of the female agents for the Special Operations Executives" ended in divorce. "Their work in the war had left them either with memories or expectations which made it very hard for them to settle back into civilian life."

Plenty explores Susan's life as the unhappy partner of a Foreign Service officer named Raymond Brock (Corey Stoll). When we first encounter the pair, he's lying naked and bloody on the floor and she's about to end their marriage. Jumping back and forth through time, we discover that Susan once served as a messenger with the French resistance behind German lines. The excitement and danger that had colored her life, had never stopped affecting her. As she tries to move on, however, she finds herself trapped in a world that promised prosperity, but is only filled with dissatisfaction and isolation, especially for women.

The fragmented structure of Hare's script gives Plenty an impressionistic quality, a feeling that Leveaux seizes on but can't find particularly engaging ways to illuminate outside of broad strokes. In terms of design, Plenty has been created in various shades of charcoal, with a large shell of a rotating set (by Mike Britton) that looks threatening as it spins on a turntable. David Weiner's lighting is more evocative, following the characters from scene to scene, shading them as if they're in an old film noir. Jess Goldstein's costumes mostly blend with the set, save for a few wardrobe choices where we get a sense of Susan trying to stand out in her new reality. There are also handfuls of enviable, well-tailored business suits that get worn by the men.

Similarly, most of the performances are disappointingly one-note. Weisz and Stoll still seem to be finding their way into the minds of their characters. Susan is particularly a beast of a role, one that requires an entire arsenal of emotion to appropriately convey her internal torment and external tantrums that take place as a result. Weisz is a luminous actress — it's hard to take our eyes off her. But she hasn't really burrowed as deeply into Susan we need her to, opting to go big throughout instead of playing a gradual deterioration. More crucially, she and Stoll lack the sexual tension that needs to exist in order to keep the stakes of their relationship at a constant boiling point. In ensemble roles, Byron Jennings as a dignified diplomat brought down by the Suez Crisis, and Emily Bergl as Susan's bohemian artist friend, fare much better. Eleven other actors make small impressions in ancillary roles, nicely filling in the background.

Plenty becomes a distinctly hard play to follow when there's not much to latch onto. Perhaps with a firmer hand guiding the ship, this revival would produce a wallop of emotion that delivers on its title.