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| Judgment Day, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. (Photo: Stephanie Berger) |
The British director Richard Jones has directed all over London, the
continent and New York, but he must take special pleasure in working at the
Park Avenue Armory, where he brought his production of Eugene O’Neill’s
The Hairy Ape (which premiered at the Old Vic), and where
I recently saw his
Judgment Day, a most rare revival of a
1937 play by the German expressionist Ödön von Horváth. Bobby Cannavale was
splendid as Yank in the first, and Luke Kirby gives a potent, focused
performance as the doomed small-town stationmaster, Thomas Hudetz, in the
second, though in both cases the real star of the show is Jones’s masterful
use of the massive Armory space. Jones’s staging of
Judgment Day evokes comparisons to both choreography and
painting: he manipulates his ensemble of seventeen like a corps de ballet
while approaching the visual elements – including Paul Steinberg’s
production design, Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting and Antony McDonald’s
costumes – as if they were tools in the painting of an enormous canvas. The
show, which comes in at a compact ninety minutes, is thrilling to look at.
