Arthur Schnitzler’s controversial La Ronde gets a new adaptation at the IRT Theater (photo by Adrian Viruet)
ROUND DANCE
IRT Theater
154 Christopher St. between Washington & Greenwich Sts.
Thursday – Sunday through March 27, $30
irttheater.org
Arthur Schnitzler’s controversial 1897 play, Reigen, better known as La Ronde, took more than two decades to reach the stage in a professional production, then was banned. The Vienna-born writer was brought up on immorality charges, laced with anti-Semitism, in Berlin and, though cleared, refused to allow the play to be performed in German-speaking countries; it wasn’t until 1982 that his son gave permission for productions in Germany and Austria.
La Ronde is a circular tale of five men and five women rotating in scenes of sex and love in 1890s Vienna; in each episode, one of the characters moves on to another person in the next scene, then that second person continues to a third person, and so on until the story revolves back to the first. The play has been adapted into a glorious 1950 film by Max Ophüls, narrated by Anton Walbrook and featuring a lively merry-go-round; Roger Vadim made a raunchier version in 1964 set in 1914 Paris, the script adapted by Jean Anouilh.
Oldest Boys Productions and Accidental Repertory Theater are now presenting the play, with the English title Round Dance, at the IRT Theater on Christopher St., directed by H. Clark Kee from his own translation. Part of the 3B Development Series, the show takes place in a small, intimate space. All ten actors — who portray men and women from different classes, from a hooker, a count, a poet, and a young wife to a soldier, a sweet girl, a gentleman, and a chambermaid — are always onstage. The eight actors who aren’t in the scene are lined up on the right and left, sitting in folding chairs, and they leap up to rearrange the set (tables, chairs, beds) in between each encounter. The success of the play depends on the subtle chemistry among the cast and the smooth transition between scenes, but Kee can’t quite reach those goals.
The acting is uneven, and the pace is unsteady, particularly over the course of two hours without an intermission. It has its moments but cannot sustain enough intensity, and the attempts to make the tale more relevant in the #metoo era amid the much-needed reevaluation of sexual consent, power dynamics, and conventional gender roles don’t ring true, nor does the incidental and interstitial music, which includes Haddaway’s “What Is Love (Baby Don’t Hurt Me).”
In the twenty-first century, Round Dance, which is set in an unidentified recent past, should look more forward; for example, in 2019, Cutting Ball Theater staged a version of La Ronde performed by two women, one Black, one white, that challenged old-fashioned perceptions and stereotypes from multiple perspectives, and Canada’s Soulpepper Theatre Company went all-out in a bold, sexy adaptation by Jason Sherman in 2013.
At the end of the play the night I went, the cast beckoned to Kee (Yellow Sound, Leonce and Lena) to join them onstage and accept a bouquet of roses; he declined, perhaps out of shyness, or maybe because he knew that the play still could use some further development.