In Alexander Zeldin’s “The Other Place,” a sleekly produced slice of horror that opened on Wednesday at the Shed, the sun is a flat box. A huge, glowing rectangular panel hangs suspended above a realistic kitchen-under-construction set, and between scenes, it pivots eerily, rising and setting, as if the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey” had just glided in from Jupiter.
Chris (Tobias Menzies) and his wife, Erica (Lorna Brown), are nearly finished renovating their kitchen, and they marvel at the light pouring through from the backyard, now that they’ve installed sliding glass doors. Their house, the one outside London that Chris inherited after his brother died, needed to be cracked open. “Game changing windows,” says Erica, assuming that the brother’s grown-up children, Annie (Emma D’Arcy) and Issy (Ruby Stokes), will agree.
But we’re confused. We can’t see the light Erica’s talking about. The monolith-sun only shines in the kitchen, and so, no matter the time of day, the backyard beyond the glass looks as black as a gullet.
This disjunction between what the audience sees and what the characters see is the core mechanism of Zeldin’s beautifully directed, if underwritten, play, which (sort of) adapts Sophocles’ “Antigone” to a contemporary household. Where we perceive darkness, the play insists it’s high noon; where we see impending doom, the fools onstage sense nothing.
Annie, the family’s wanderer, has returned to her childhood home, summoned after several years by her uncle Chris, who wants to scatter his brother’s ashes. Why today? There’s no answer beyond a need to “move on.” (We learn little about most of the characters; e.g., we know that Chris has money, but not why.)
Chris and Annie fight, sometimes physically, over the cremated remains, which are poured from an urn to a baggie and back again. The house’s energies grow hectic. The others try to corral the intense uncle-niece pair, including Erica’s child Leni (Lee Braithwaite) and Chris’s longtime friend Terry (Jerry Killick), but the ominous underscoring (by the composer Yannis Philippakis and the sound designer Josh Anio Grigg) warns us that the family is flying centrifugally apart.
Zeldin’s gift is not narrative detail but physical texture. That void-like backyard, for instance, establishes an air of dread that persists throughout. As Annie, D’Arcy speaks with a strange, swallowed intonation, as though they’re slowly remembering how to talk. And Menzies, too, thrums with destabilizing tension: His Chris seems just as “weird” as Annie says he is, even though Zeldin only invests him with a handful of particulars. More than either of these leads, Killick, as the creep-next-door Terry, slimes the whole show with a kind of contaminating oil. He turns his hungry grin on the young people, and you feel how quickly danger can infiltrate a home.
Zeldin, who brought this production over from London’s National Theater, joins a trend of director-playwrights writing psychosexual modernizations of ancient Greek classics. (The British Robert Icke’s “Oedipus” just closed on Broadway; the Australian Simon Stone’s “Medea” played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2020.) Here Zeldin’s references to Sophocles are indirect: the mentally fragile Annie corresponds to the rebel Antigone; Issy to Ismene, her pacifist sister; and Chris to Creon, the doomed uncle-king.
You can sometimes sense Zeldin treating these parallels like crutches. Around the hour mark, he lurches abruptly from a provocative disquiet to scenes of deep repulsion, and people behave in unlikely and terrible ways. Oddly, here the play turns predictable. If it weren’t for the Sophocles allegory, this 80-minute, speed-run tragedy might feel a little hasty, a little sensationalistic, a little thin.
OK, so it feels thin. As a director, Zeldin excels at working with designers (here, the set and costume designer Rosanna Vize and the lighting designer James Farncombe) to make an evocative space, a container for alienation and fear. As a writer, though, Zeldin has only two modes: downbeat naturalism (“what is he going to do … like go and stand there on his own and just scatter dad in a bush”); and bald indications that Things Are Bad (“Are you unwell again?”). Zeldin’s script lacks patience, so, after about an hour of bickering, it smash-cuts into the awful stuff, as though we’re changing channels to another play’s climax.
That bizarre narrative shift gives Zeldin trouble because shock, paradoxically, robs his play of forward movement. Once we know what’s gone wrong with these people, we just want everyone to go into therapy or, I guess, custody. Zeldin condenses his play so intensely that he seems to lose track of cause and effect. Still clinging to “Antigone,” he expects that he can maintain a tragic balance among his characters, but his own modern setting — and the sordidness of their situation — makes that too difficult.
The sun, at least, knows what to do. When things get really bad in Chris’s house, the big glowing panel folds itself up toward the ceiling and goes away. All this human misery! it seems to say. Probably none of my business.
The Other Place Through March 1 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
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