Daniil Shinyayev (Richard Hollis, left) is a Russian scientist whom Hillel (Roger Hendricks Simon, right) knew years ago.
The personal is political. This familiar adage is one of the points Deb Margolin makes in the awkwardly staged and often pretentious-sounding play This Is Not a Time of Peace. Other points: History repeats itself. We are the sum total of everything we’ve experienced. Beware despots. Professional ambition can clash with personal ethics. Time does not heal everything. Trumpism equals McCarthyism.
Margolin, an Obie winner for Sustained Excellence, is known for the repertoire of solo plays she has created—and this new multi-actor drama begins with a long monologue by its central character, Alina (Charlotte Cohn), addressing the audience in the present. The main action takes place years earlier, as Alina deals with two crises, one involving her elderly father and one related to her marriage.
Her father, Hillel (Roger Hendricks Simon), was a metallurgist whose security clearance to do government-funded research was revoked after he was targeted by Joseph McCarthy’s red scare in the early ’50s (also true of Margolin’s father). In his dotage, Hillel is tormented by memories of this time, although some of the incidents he relives may not have happened.
Before Hillel’s mind deteriorates further, Alina tries to learn the story of his ordeal, questioning him and searching online. This is kind of a shaky premise, however: It seems that someone who admires and adores her father as Alina does, and has always been close to him, would already know what happened.
Adolf Berle (Frank Licato, left), a real-life lawyer and diplomat, saves the career of Hillel (Simon, right) in This Is Not a Time of Peace. Photographs by Steven Pisano.
In her program note, Margolin writes: “I grew up hearing stories about the grace, brilliance, and heroism of Adolf Berle, who won my father’s security clearance back for him.” So why is it news to the Margolin stand-in Alina? Her quest for information leads to a lot of expository passages, particularly about Berle, the real-life lawyer and State Department official under FDR who’s a character in the play (as is McCarthy).
In a second story line, Alina is having an extramarital affair. Its thematic parallel with Hillel’s situation is not readily discernible, regardless of Alina’s pronouncements that “As I went deeper into what was haunting my father, there was a convergence of moralities that put me in equivalence with parts of history that were unforgivable” and “I think I’m probably as nasty and triumphant as the whole of history. I can’t feel the difference between the ways I wound and the ways I am wounded.”
Other unconvincing dialogue in This Is Not a Time of Peace occurs when characters go off on irrelevant, convoluted tangents while conversing with others. For example, when Alina’s husband, Moses (Simon Feil), says that having to stay home all day with their young daughter would be “cruel,” Alina responds, “The only cruelties are in April, according to the anti-Semite,” and Moses follows with “He just said that month is the cruelest month, which I think refers to how hopeful springtime is. You know how hope can suck.”
The attack that Alina (Charlotte Cohn) makes on Joseph McCarthy (Steven Rattazzi, right) sounds like it also could be directed at a current would-be despot holding some Americans in thrall.
In another scene, Alina tells her lover, Martin (Ken King), “I wanted to feel you and pretend you were what death feels like”—which is both incomprehensible and deeply unsexy—and then digresses to “Death looks like a cleared pathway. You know how sometimes you don’t see a way forward on a hike? … And then you see a sign with a colored spot on it that indicates a trail, that someone’s mapped out, and it’s such a relief.”
Later, Martin’s romantic overtures segue into a pedantic speech: “I’m thinking about you even when I’m not thinking,” he says to Alina. “It’s making me a little maternal. … the way mothers are always alive for the child. Mothers love in different ways from everyone else. I was reading an essay by a woman named Claudia Dey, called ‘Mothers as Creators of Death’ or something like that, that [said] mothers realize their children are going to die someday and have to live with having brought death into the world along with a life. It’s a terrible anguish. It reminds me of the way I love you—I can’t bear that you’ll leave.”
Beyond this improbable pillow talk, Cohn and King’s onstage chemistry does not match the fervor of Alina and Martin’s words. Cohn in general lacks the charisma to carry this story swirling with passion and weighty ideas. Under Jerry Heymann’s direction, the proceedings are also dulled by having the characters from the past just stand up or walk onstage when it’s their turn to speak. Instead of a bed flanked by chairs, the set could have represented the different milieus with a variety of furniture—perhaps a desk, a podium, a sofa—that was still minimalist. As is, the staging, like the script, has its awkward moments.
This Is Not a Time of Peace runs through March 16 at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd St.). Performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, with matinees at 3 p.m. Sunday; newlighttheaterproject.com.
Playwright: Deb Margolin
Director: Jerry Heymann
Sets: Jessica Parks
Costumes: Julia Squier
Lighting: Paul Hudson
Sound: Jennie Gorn
