Like our current political climate, Daniel Fish’s sex-drenched nightmare version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! has polarized the theatergoing public. You either hate it or love it. After engagements at Bard College in 2015 and St. Ann’s Warehouse Off-Broadway earlier this season, the radical revival has forced audiences to examine their assumptions about this supposedly wholesome staple of high school and community theater. Naysayers moan that the director has distorted and ruined a beloved classic of Broadway’s Golden Age. But the sex, violence and discord Fish has mined beneath the sunny farmlands and corn as high as an elephant’s eye was always there; he’s just brought it to the surface.
Rather than presenting a 1943 musical comedy version of a loving and friendly prairie family, Fish delivers a modern, disturbing view of a divided country. The disorientation starts as you enter the Circle In the Square Theater which set designer Laura Jellinek has transformed into a huge Western community center, festooned with tinsel, colored lights, and gun racks. Some patrons are seated on stage at long tables with crockpots full of chili to be served at intermission. The house lights remain on as triangular libidinal tensions between jovial cowboy Curly, haughty but sexually curious farm owner Laurie, and brooding hired hand Jud play out. Occasionally we are plunged into darkness as the inner depths of the characters’ psyched are explored. The Freudian implications Agnes de Mille hinted at in her original rendition of the dream ballet are fully exposed in choreographer John Heginbotham’s disturbing fever vision of Laurie’s repressed urges, embodied by Gabrielle Hamilton’s visceral, sexy dancing.
Costume designer Terese Wadden outfits the cast in modern garb and music director Nathan Koci and orchestrator/arranger Daniel Kluger have given Richard Rodgers’s sweetly romantic score a country-western twang. The effect is that of a town meeting where “traditional” values of family and firearms are maintained and outsiders like the misfit Judd and the foreign peddler Ali Hakim are either tragically pushed out or comically taken into the fold.
Without altering the text of Oscar Hammerstein’s folksy adaptation of Lynn Riggs’s “Green Grow the Lilacs,” Fish transforms Oklahoma! into a modern examination of American contradictions about interpersonal and community connections. No, it’s not the expected feel-good evening, but it’s a startlingly fresh and dangerous take on a familiar favorite.
Damon Daunno and Rebecca Naomi Jones expose Curly and Laurie’s tentative, hidden attractions and deliver the beloved duets “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “The Surrey with the Fringe on the Top” with tenderly aching vocals. Ali Stroker nearly steals the show as an uninhibited Ado Annie, steering her wheelchair like a rodeo queen while James Davis and Will Brill provide laughs as her dueling beaus Will Parker and the peddler Hakim.
The reliable Mary Testa is a flinty, tough-as-nails Aunt Eller. Patrick Vaill’s open wound of a Judd is the twisted heart of this production, bursting to belong, but not knowing how. He is like the lone wolf gunmen/stalkers plaguing modern America. We can’t totally reject him, and we don’t know how to deal with him.
