When the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, he joined the small circle of dramatists to have received that honor, including two men he is often compared to: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.
Unlike Beckett and Pinter, however, Fosse is largely unknown in the United States — outside of shows like “A Summer Day” in 2012 and “I Am the Wind” in 2014, productions in supposedly cosmopolitan New York are few and far between. This makes New Light Theater Project’s middling new take on Fosse’s “Night Sings Its Songs” at least noteworthy.
Like much of his stage work, “Night Sings Its Songs” — which premiered in Norway in 1997 and was staged in New York in 2004 by Sarah Cameron Sunde, a translator and Fosse evangelist — is simultaneously elliptical and brutally precise. The main characters in these scenes from a miserable marriage are the Young Man (Kyle Cameron) and the Young Woman (Susan Lynskey). They have been together since high school, and their new baby seems to have brought buried issues to the surface.
He spends his days and, apparently, nights reading on the couch, and fruitlessly submits manuscripts to publishers. She’s going stir crazy and eventually decides to head out on the town. At one point, she desultorily says of her husband: “He is nice. But he understands little about nothing.” For most of the play, the couple’s conversations revolve around variations on “you never want to go out” (she) and “who were you out with?” (he). They both suffer from a mutually soul-destroying postpartum funk, and it is grueling.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Fosse said that “in my drama the word pause is without a doubt the most important and the most used word — long pause, short pause, or just pause.” The script for “Night Sings Its Songs” includes stage directions and, yes, many, many requests for pauses, but no punctuation. Concretely, this means that a Fosse staging must hit an almost musical rhythm, inducing a kind of entranced fascination — the repeated motifs are like ostinatos in minimalist music.
And that is where Jerry Heymann’s production falls short. It struggles to settle into the particular groove the play requires, and leans into a fairly naturalistic approach that not only fails to sync up with the text, but often also tussles against it.
Cameron and Lynskey also present as a little more mature than the roles call for. Among other issues, this undermines a scene with the Young Man’s visiting parents, played by Steven Rattazzi (most recently Captain Andy in “Show/Boat: A River”) and Jenny Allen.
“Night Sings Its Songs” may look like a drama of domestic implosion, but it can’t be staged as a straightforward one. The main protagonists are consumed by their neuroses and their acrimony toward each other, and are powerless against those feelings. (The one named character, Baste, played by Ken King, is a third party who provides an external perspective on the unraveling.) So as the play moves toward its seemingly ineluctable conclusion via a loop-like aggregation of confrontations, we should watch in horror, or at least anxiety.
And yet the performance I attended was peppered by distractingly loud audience laughter. The reaction fits in with a larger phenomenon, observed at the movies as well, of snickering in the face of what is different or inscrutable, what breaks from commonly accepted aesthetic and narrative norms. With Fosse, you must be open to a pace and approach that are very different from those commonly found on U.S. stages, but that can deliver emotional payoffs. It seems that we are not quite there yet.
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