Steven Scarpa
Edward is in a cushioned chair in the living room, recounting the horrors of the French army’s disastrous march across the wintry Russian countryside during the Napoleonic war. The drivers took to picking rutted roads, he says, so that the weaker soldiers might fall off the carts, making the load lighter for the stronger survivors. The weak were left to die in the snow.
Shortly after that, he says he’s leaving his wife.
William Nicholson’s The Retreat from Moscow — running at New Haven Theatre Company on Chapel Street through Nov. 9 — is a play about a divorce in all of its bloody emotional carnage. Edward (George Kulp) and Alice (Susan Kulp) have been married for three decades at the play’s beginning. In its opening scenes, Alice is quirky and charming, even as she harries her husband, a teacher who’s trying to absorb himself in a history book about the Napoleonic wars. Their conversation doesn’t seem any more pointed than any conversation between people who have been married for a long time. They squabble over small things, like clogged drains and crossword puzzles, a dropped bookmark, perhaps because there is nothing big to fight about.
Except that in Edward’s and Alice’s case, there is. Edward announces that he wants a divorce, that he has met another woman. But he first announces it not to Alice, but to his son Jamie (Kiel Stango). The opening scenes thus set up the play’s excoriating dynamic. The core problem of Edward’s and Alice’s relationship, that they have never really been able to communicate with each other, becomes the burden that Jamie has to bear. Jamie, a young adult struggling to create a life of his own, becomes the messenger between his parents, and he watches as the characteristics that seemed so innocent in his parents when they were married become possibly fatal flaws. Edward’s retiring nature is revealed as timidity, an unwillingness to really confront the problem if he can simply avoid it and move on. Alice’s quirkiness becomes emotional instability. Both become very needy toward Jamie, each in their own way. How is Jamie supposed to navigate all that and still be a good son to both his parents?
Co-directors Margaret Mann and John Watson make excellent use of the New Haven Theatre Company’s stage by leaving it open, one set, with the barest furnishings necessary to house the action of the play. The three characters rarely leave the stage; as Jamie ping-pongs between them, he moves from one side of the stage to the other, talking to one parent as the other sits in silence, often in darkness. Nobody ever really gets to leave the room. The claustrophobia works; we see how the fact that none of the three can really get away from each other until the divorce is final — one way or the other — is slowly wearing each of the characters down.
George Kulp masterfully maintains Edward’s stoicism while showing the audience his character’s inherent weaknesses, particularly in one brilliant scene in which Kulp shows us the cracks in Edward’s armor. Susan Kulp, meanwhile, gives us an all-too-real depiction of a woman coming almost completely undone by her abandonment. Stango nails the tense mixture of emotions that Jamie is feeling, as the intense sadness of his family’s disintegration wars with his keen irritation at being caught in the middle of it. Both of his parents are suddenly looking to him to be the adult in the room, the voice of reason, and denying him the ability to be upset himself at what his parents are doing; you can read the weight of what Jamie is carrying on Stango’s face.
It all makes for an emotionally raw night of theater, and one that is likely to provoke discussion about the fragility lurking within every family, and how quickly the bonds of relationships can fray under months of stress, touched off by a single conversation some random night. It’s not easy to watch, but that’s as it should be. Sometimes the truth hurts.
The Retreat from Moscow runs at the New Haven Theatre Company, 839 Chapel St., through Nov. 9. Click here for tickets and more information.