
Zuzanna Szadkowski, Susannah Millonzi, Jamie Smithson, Tony Torn, and Deb Knox in Fall River Fishing. Photo: Ashley Garrett
On style alone, Fall River Fishing is a delight, reveling in the deliberate mismatch between timeworn stories (Lizzie Borden, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the murder of Sharon Tate–and yes, you may well ask how those three things fit together, but we’ll get there) and the arch, self-aware characters with intensely modern consciousnesses that Deb Knox and Zuzanna Szadkowski have populated those stories with. The production elements are sound: director Eric Tucker builds an ensemble of sharp, stylized performances ranging from Szadkowski’s expert command of Lizzie’s disaffection to Tony Torn’s completely gonzo turn as a Norwegian libertine; set designer Cate McCrea brings us two completely different environments, one sprawling and shabbily Victorian and one compact and mid-century modern. But the style here isn’t enough to hold the disparate narrative elements together, and I’m not sure the underlying themes do the trick, either. It’s a wild, often manically entertaining ride, but it doesn’t entirely add up.
Bedlam and director Tucker are best known for their small-cast, creative interpretations of classic texts; here, the classics are in there (a nod to Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, alongside Ibsen and the historical Borden tale), but pushed a little farther under the surface. That surface, in the first act, is a high-gloss, brittlely funny set of character tropes that could be drawn from modern pop culture: Lizzie Borden (Szadkowski) as a sex-hungry, self-absorbed mean girl wannabe with a lot of roiling psychodrama (she’d be right at home on Gossip Girl, where Szadkowski had a recurring role); her stepmother, Abby (Susannah Millonzi), as a Real Housewife type, neglected by her husband, drinking away her resentment, and getting enormous character mileage out of a pair of sunglasses; Andrew Borden (Tony Torn) as a bombastic set of Fox News talking points; the Borden family maid, Bridget (Knox) as the true-crime trope (spoiler alert) of the besotted lover willing to kill for her beloved; and Lizzie’s uncle Nathan (Jamie Smithson) as a Nice Guy ™ hipster.
So for all of Act 1, we know, more or less, what we’re getting: the familiar story of Lizzie Borden, her ax, her father, the forty whacks, with Lizzie refigured as an aspiring actress with a lust for both fame and sex and the whole done with twenty-first-century sensibilities and referents. Her relationship with both her father and her stepmother is filled with eye rolls so intense you can almost hear them in the audience, and she’s dangling the affections of both Bridget and her uncle Nathan, the much younger brother of her late mother. (Szadkowski and Smithson match each other note for note with besotted obliviousness to the needs of others, but Lizzie is canny and strategic where Nathan is cringy.) Something even darker and weirder than murder burbles up in the sex/theater games that Lizzie and Bridget play, and in the gleeful bloodiness of those murders, but we’re still in a playworld with a certain solidity.
But when the curtain rises on Act 2, we’ve gone somewhere else entirely: a spin on A Doll’s House that’s only slightly less perverse than Lizzie’s earlier imagination of it. Here it’s a stylish mid-century modern living room, and Szadkowski and Smithson are a more-than-usually disaffected Nora and Torvald Helmer. When Kristine (Millonzi) and Krogstad (Torn) show up as a pair of no-filter recovering addicts, things only get weirder from there, with Torn and Millonzi running with ridiculous characters and bringing each other to new heights. It’s increasingly absurd–starting with Krogstad’s accent, bringing in a very pregnant Sharon Tate, and culminating in a dinner party so silly that the actors couldn’t keep straight faces through it–but also makes a late ploy to inject some real emotions and some more serious themes, with mixed results.
There are threads weaving the sections together: A certain kind of thwarted female yearning, Lizzie for success and sexual power, Sharon Tate for her baby, Nora for happiness. A dog named Candy Apple. Nora Helmer, Christmas shopping. The fractured and dysfunctional bonds of family. Murder. But the more the piece tries to tap into emotions beneath its polish, the less it succeeds.
What stands out in the end is the gonzo performances. Bedlam’s classical work can feel a little too enamored of its own cleverness, but here, the actors step into Knox and Szadkowski’s stylized language and over-the-top characterizations with gusto and enormous skill. They’re all thoroughly delightful to watch, but that only gets you so far.