Frank Wood and Kelley Curran appear onstage and onscreen in The Meeting: The Interpreter (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE MEETING: THE INTERPRETER
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through August 25, $39-$135
meetinginterpreterplay.com
www.stclementsnyc.org

Frank Wood and Kelley Curran are terrific in the world premiere of The Meeting: The Interpreter. However, I’m completely flummoxed by the play, which explores the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting from multiple angles, literally and figuratively.

On that day, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, publicist Rob Goldstone, and Russian-American businessman Ike Kaveladze met at the Fifth Ave. building to discuss the Magnitsky Act, gathering dirt on Hillary Clinton, and/or the adoption of Russian children by Americans; the meeting figured prominently in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on possible Russian interference and collusion in the 2016 presidential election.

Also present was a Russian-born interpreter (Wood) who had worked for the UN, the US government, and private individuals for more than twenty years and had what is known as public trust clearance. The name of the interpreter is never revealed in the play and critics have been asked not to use it in any articles about the show, even though it is listed in the Wikipedia entry about the meeting and the interpreter has his own LinkedIn page.

In the program, it points out, “This is a work of dramatic interpretation, and any resemblance to actual people and events is strictly coincidental”; however, nearly every other character is mentioned by name, including Congressman Mike Quigley, Congressman Eric Swalwell, Congressman Mike Conaway, Sen. Charles Grassley aide Samantha Brennan, Sen. Dianne Feinstein general counsel Heather Sawyer, and the interpreter’s lawyer, Larry H. Krantz, who take part in a Senate Judiciary Committee interview of the interpreter on November 8, 2017, with dialogue taken directly from the transcripts. In a tour de force with numerous comic moments, Curran plays every role other than the interpreter.

Writer Catherine Gropper, who met the interpreter by chance in the winter of 2020, and director Brian Mertes seem to go out of their way to make every scene unnecessarily complicated; although some work, most are head-scratchingly bizarre. The play begins with the credits rolling on a screen at the front of the stage, as if we are watching a movie, followed by a shot of Wood and Curran sitting at a long desk like newscasters. Brennan begins the November 8 hearing, but after a few minutes, the screen shifts over to stage left — where it remains the entire time — and the two actors, seated with their backs to us, look behind them, acknowledging the audience as the cluttered desk they are sitting at is turned around.

Throughout the ninety-minute show, a camera operated by three people slowly circles the stage. Live projections from that camera appear on the screen, giving the audience different perspectives on the actors, each wearing a white shirt, dark pants, and a blazer. One of the camera operators wears an Awolnation T-shirt, for the LA band that has released such albums as Back from Earth, Megalithic Symphony, and The Phantom Five and whose name refers to a country that has gone “absent without leave.” There’s confusion about where to look as the actors move from the main table, to small seats, to a recording booth, and to a makeup cabinet. Wood sifts through a bucket of sand. Curran staples a tie to a box. The actors break out into a dance. They snap their fingers and drum on the table. The video feed turns to abstract animation. Wood peels a plastic sheet off the studio glass. Part of the meeting is re-created with creepy dolls. (The cramped set is by Jim Findlay, with costumes by Olivera Gajic, lighting by Barbara Samuels, sound and music by Dan Baker & Co., projections by Yana Biryukova, puppets and animation by Julian Crouch, and camera by Tatiana Stolporskaya.)

World premiere production uses unique ways to tell its story (photo by Carol Rosegg)

It’s as if Gropper (Embers, Miss Crandall’s Classes) and Mertes (The Myopia, Massacre) approached each scene with the question: What can we do to complicate the action and confuse the audience this time? If that were their intention, they have succeeded marvelously.

The Meeting: The Interpreter might have worked much better at a small, experimental theater like La MaMa, the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage, or BAM’s Fishman Space. It gets lost at Theatre at St. Clement’s, where it is playing to a more traditional crowd. For me, it’s a cursed venue; of the dozen or so shows I’ve seen there, I’ve only been able to recommend two.

Tony winner Wood (Toros, The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood, The Iceman Cometh) once again reveals himself to be New York City’s best deadpan actor; he commits to his underwritten character in a way that makes the interpreter endearing even when doing something utterly nonsensical. Curran (Mother of the Maid, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, BAD NEWS! I was there . . .) delivers another fine performance, fully investing herself in her responsibilities as a political shape shifter. It’s a shame there isn’t more cohesiveness to the narrative; the plot doesn’t have to be spelled out to the letter, but then it is, in a text-only finale that tells us what we already knew about the Trump Tower meeting, the Mueller Report, and the presidential election of 2016 before we entered the theater.

“I left part of myself there, at Trump Tower. Normally, I wouldn’t care. Unless something shakes me to my core,” the interpreter says in a rare moment of poignant insight. “I don’t open up so easily. Maybe it’s why I interpret for others. Actually, I’m a private man.”

The play itself could use an interpreter, but maybe that’s the point?

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]