A play that’s a smash on one side of the Atlantic is sometimes a flop on the other, and the reasons can be hard to pin down. But when London threw its arms around Robert Ardrey’s Broadway reject “Thunder Rock” in 1940, timing had a lot to do with it — that and a cast led by a young Michael Redgrave.
Already at war, people there were in need of bucking up, and “Thunder Rock” provided that with its story of a wounded idealist who retreats from a world that is verging on self-destruction, only to have a band of ghosts reignite his spirit and send him back into the fray. Maybe Elia Kazan’s New York production, in late 1939, fizzled because Americans didn’t yet sense much danger.
Might the play feel more urgent now, in these fever-pitch times? That perfectly reasonable possibility seems to be the catalyst for Alex Roe’s revival at Metropolitan Playhouse — a regrettably fitful, stilted staging that muffles most of the humor and humanity of this creaky, peculiar play.
Ardrey’s themes are enduring enough, though: creeping nationalism, rising isolationism, the despair that descends when one is unable to see a way through current troubles to a better future, or any future at all.
Such is the predicament of David Charleston (Jed Peterson), the hero of “Thunder Rock.” A journalist who once bestrode the world, he lost not only his objectivity but also his hope when he covered the Spanish Civil War.
Back home, he has turned quasi-hermit, keeping a lighthouse on a tiny island in Lake Michigan, where he gets visitors once a month, when his pilot friend, Streeter (Jamahl Garrison-Lowe, in the role James Mason played in the movie), flies in supplies.
“It’s a privilege, my boy, living in the world today,” Streeter tells Charleston, sardonically. “It’s a storybook, sheer stark drama. How’s everything going to come out?”
Charleston wants not to care about the answer to that question, but his idealism isn’t dead, only dented. So he does what many of us do in dire times: He looks to history for solace, to see how humankind has survived thus far.
A plaque on the wall of the lighthouse (the set is by Vincent Gunn) describes a shipwreck off the island 90 years before, and Charleston has found the list of drowned passengers — European immigrants in search of a safer, more prosperous existence. These are the ghosts he conjures to keep him company, and talk him back into relishing life.
In a spotty cast that includes a fine Thomas Vorsteg as a disillusioned Spanish Civil War veteran, Peterson brings an appealing naturalness to Charleston, whose most vivid ghosts are the British women’s rights activist Miss Kirby (Teresa Kelsey) and the Viennese doctor Stefan Kurtz (Howard Pinhasik).
“There is a time, I presume,” Kurtz says, “in every man’s life when the lights grow dim and the battle seems lost, and he needs all the dead men of history to arise, and to assure him with a single united voice that battles can be won.”
That may be true, and certainly Ardrey meant his play to be a beacon in encroaching darkness. But the battle for “Thunder Rock” has been lost again this time around.
Thunder Rock
Through Feb. 9 at the Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 East 4th Street, Manhattan; 800-838-3006, metropolitanplayhouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
