A YOUNG woman has sought refuge and perhaps glory at the home of a glib, romantic novelist. She wants to be the heroine of a novel; he wants a romantic relationship.
Mira Sorvino plays the young lady, in a long dress and heavy shoes. She is a striking, pathetic, torn, wounded presence. She craves being imagined by the novelist, who is impersonated with a hysterical arrogance by Daniel Benzali.
The landlady, in an amusing performance by Rebecca Schull, is at first hostile to the woman, but later softens. Another good job is delivered by the funny maid, Tina Bruno.
A reporter (Bray Poor) visits the woman and says he’s had to expose her as being responsible for the death of an infant she was babysitting.
She faints.
A naval officer enters and declares she is his true love. She says she wants to die, having, you see, to choose between suicide and her only other fitting degradation, prostitution.
Now the baby’s father, a count, comes in and boasts of leaving his wife for her, though she’s accused of fatal neglect of his child.
This is the surface of the story in Luigi Pirandello’s “Naked,” at the Classic Stage Company.
This 1922 play, properly called “To Clothe the Naked” (a biblical reference), is about a woman using men to confect a story that will clear her of negligence in a child’s death.
This production, despite Sorvino’s angular and affecting brilliance, seems lost. The director, John Rando, should have deployed here some of the quirky smarts he used in stagings of David Ives.
He does, at moments, but mainly he moves his people clumsily around the dusty set contrived by Derek McLane. The version by Wright seems ickily contemporary.
The overall style never achieves that mad, dreamlike horror where even minor Pirandello like “Naked” can unsettle.
—–
NAKED
Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St., between Third and Fourth avenues, (212) 677-4210. Through April 30.