The Retreat from Moscow

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

They’ve been married for almost 34 years. She wants to know if they will be celebrating their anniversary on Thursday by going out to dinner. He wants to do whatever she wants. She doesn’t want him to take her because she wants to go. She wants him to take her because he wants to. He can’t win no matter what he does or doesn’t do. She has set the scene so he can’t.

Ed Cord, Martha Harmon Pardee and Jim Hunt in The Retreat from Moscow by William Nicholson and directed by Chip Walton at the Aurora Fox.

On a magnificent set designed by Michael Duran, the stage provides three playing areas with a large chasm in the middle depicting the broken relationship between Alice (Martha Harmon Pardee) and Edward (Jim Hunt). Their only son, Jamie (Ed Cord), has come home for a short visit. He had to. A mediator is definitely needed, and he’s the logical one.

Directed by Chip Walton, artistic director for the Curious Theatre Company at the Acoma Center, the William Nicholson play explores the intricacies of the emotionally tied but broken relationship. He has settled into a stoic silence while her mouth has become uncorked and she can’t stop talking.

Nicholson equates the relationship with Edward’s obsession with Napoleon’s 1812 devastating retreat from Moscow. They left with 40,000 troops and returned with 20,000, leaving the dead where they fell. Was it easier to give up and die than to face further deploring circumstances? Edward wrestles with this question.

Alice needles him constantly. She wants a real marriage, but she doesn’t know what that means. She wants him to know. He doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. Her incessant behavior has driven him into the arms of another woman, and he chooses this weekend to announce he’s leaving. Alice comes unglued. Jamie finds himself muddled in the middle.

While Edward remembers when he first met Alice, on a train, he puzzles over their getting on the wrong train, and never got off. He wants to retreat. He wants silence. He wants calm, and he’s found it with the other woman. Alice’s bucket is empty, and she thinks he can fill it. She just wants him to say what she wants him to say, even though she doesn’t always know what that is.

The Retreat From Moscow is brilliantly written, with zingers that would play cutthroat into any relationship. However, the performances of Pardee and Hunt leave much to be desired. The characters don’t cover the actors. There are times when it seems they are reading lines and one is watching a dress rehearsal. Rather than seeing and feeling the verbal and emotional pain of Alice as her life as she knows it comes apart at the seams, her incessant babbling becomes annoying, almost missing some of the juicy lines. His stoic silence becomes a coward’s act of retreat into himself, stirring frustration because in the almost 34 years, he never tried to develop the art of communication.

Although Cord tries to give definition to Jamie by becoming whatever his parents want him to become, he looks uncomfortable as an actor, slouching much of the time, in resignation rather than as an active participant in the dialogue. He frequently doesn’t know what to do with his arms, and it shows.

None of the characters solicits empathy for their situation. It is difficult to care about a whining, complaining, scheming, woman who has made her bed and doesn’t want to lie in it. She thinks her husband adores her. She wants to be heard and seen but doesn’t want to listen. He just wants to retreat leaving the victims to fend for themselves. Rather than a complex relationship the lines tell us about, Pardee and Hunt provides two superficial wounded personalities, and Cord gives us a body on stage without any emotional attachment. The words point in that direction, but he doesn’t deliver.

The Retreat From Moscow earned Nicholson a Tony nomination in 2004 for Best New Play, but this production skims the top of the iceberg ignoring the depth the frigid ice flows. Aside from the spectacular set design, one of the most intriguing aspects is the unique and magnificent lighting design by Shannon McKinney with its changing colors announcing mood swings, time and place changes. It takes on its own personality from hot to cool to tepid.