The Washington Post - 12.11.2019

C2 eZ re the washington post.tuesday, november 12 , 2019

We Happy few has mounted

other notable productions — an

ingeniously condensed “The Win-

ter’s Tale” s till lingers in memory

— but rescuing “Lovers’ Vows”

from near oblivion is surely the

company’s greatest achievement

to date. While imperfect, this

production is a must-see for Jane

Austen fans. And anyone with a

sense of humor will exult in the

poetically minded butler.

[email protected]

Lovers’ vows by elizabeth inchbald.

directed and adapted by kerry

mcGee; scenic designer, Jon

reynolds; sound designer, Tosin

olufolabi; movement director, raven

Bonniwell; fight choreography,

andrew keller. 90 minutes. $ 20.

Through nov. 23 at capitol hill arts

workshop, 545 seventh st. se.

wehappyfewdc.com.

understandable choice, the ap-

proach becomes wearying: A few

more notes of sincerity would

have better served the play. oth-

er problems include sequences

of interpolated expressionistic

movement that don’t add value

and a labored quality in some

stage business (the butler’s habit

of startling people, for instance).

But ordeman brings poise, and

even poignancy, to the morally

weak Baron; Novak displays fine

comic timing as frederick; and

Turner’s confident channeling of

the bemused Anhalt enhances

the character’s romantic jousting

with Amelia, who is always in

control. (“Such a forward young

lady,” a “mansfield Park” charac-

ter says disparagingly of Amelia,

who will strike 2019 audiences as

an enchanting nevertheless-she-

persisted precursor.)

Heather Lockard has designed

piquant period costumes, and Ja-

son Aufdem-Brinke’s deft light-

ing turns simple backdrops into

tapestries for the castle scenes,

complementing the set’s few fur-

nishings. (The backdrops also en-

able some effective shadow play.)

The incidental music, by local

band the North Country, rein-

states some of the emotion that

the arch directing strips away.

ing all 15 years of that sentence;

he was released in 2003 and

wound up back in prison in 2008

for selling drugs, where, accord-

ing to the film, he will remain

until at least 2024.

Linda fairstein, the former

manhattan prosecutor who was

vilified in all the recent interest

over the conviction of innocent

teenagers in the Central Park

jogger case, regains perhaps a bit

of her stature here, recalling in

great detail the frustration of

reminding the world that this

was always about the killing of a

young woman, not the fate of a

dashing criminal.

“This is why we’re all here,

right?” asks Jessica Doyle, who

was Levin’s best friend. remem-

bering that her friend “was on

trial for wanting to have sex,”

Doyle’s disgust is raw and rele-

vant. “This is honestly what we

need to deal with here,” s he says.

There’s a lesson, too, for the

makers and consumers of the

true-crime industrial complex: If

you only replay the headline

horror of it all, then you’re simply

reviving and compounding the

emotional damage. If, however,

you lead with empathy rather

than just forensic curiosity, you

can let in some l ight a nd discover

so much more.

[email protected]

the Preppy Murder: death in

Central Park (five hours) three-

night documentary miniseries

premieres wednesday at 9 p.m. on

amc and sundance TV.

how she was just some girl he

met earlier that year who repeat-

edly came on to him; he said they

had sex three times before.

The case soon caught fire well

beyond New Yo rk, captivating

some of us who happened to be in

college at the time. Viewers who

vividly remember these details

will already know how much of

the story revolved around Cham-

bers’s good looks: the blue eyes,

the chiseled jaw, the hair. on his

first perp walk, recalls local TV

reporter rosanna Scotto, “Every-

one in the newsroom stopped in

their tracks.”

It’s astonishing now to think

how an alleged killer’s hand-

someness could shift public per-

ception, but it did. Chambers’s

aggressive defense attorney, the

late Jack Litman, encouraged

reporters to blame Levin for her

own v iolent death by insinuating

that she kept a personal sex diary

and was upset that Chambers

didn’t want to be her boyfriend.

In T V coverage at t he time, young

women are seen deploring

Levin’s behavior. Catholic church

officials, according to the film,

helped the Chambers family with

robert’s bail; the film also ex-

plores c onnections between

Chambers and Theodore mcCa-

rrick, the defrocked cardinal ac-

cused of sexually abusing minors

and seminarians.

Through all this, Levin’s f amily

and friends could only watch in

despair as the trial dragged on

and ended in a plea deal in April

1988. Chambers wound up serv-

to tell us who Levin was, besides

a dead body with ghastly stran-

gulation bruises on her neck.

They restore some rightful de-

tails about what she was like and

how much she was loved and

admired.

Levin’s mother, Ellen, and old-

er sister, Danielle, provide a full-

er picture of a quirky, fun-loving,

stylish teenager who preferred

the excitement of the grittier,

’80s manhattan of proto-hipster

lore; she chose to live with her

father in his SoHo apartment

through high school, yet she was

socially drawn to the Upper East

Side, where she made a circle of

friends who all attended New

York’s elite prep schools.

The documentary probes

deeper into the lifestyles those

kids enjoyed, not unlike the ram-

bunctious teen movies of the day

— wealthy parents gone for the

weekend, leaving opportunities

for wild parties, drug use and

underage drinking. A restaurant

and pub on Second Avenue, Dor-

rian’s red Hand, was the preppy

kids’ hangout, serving them alco-

hol when presented with their

shoddy fake IDs.

“The Preppy murder” has a

deep and abiding interest in this

era and atmosphere: how the

kids looked, how they talked,

what they felt, what New York

was like. Levin’s best friends, still

grieving, reach for their old year-

books and calendars, as if they’ve

been desperate to tell her story

all these years. “It was like a 9/11

moment,” recalls Peter Davis,

charmed rather than irritated by

Aciman’s precious style.)

A certain preciousness has

some benefits. Aciman’s quiet, la-

bel-free presentation of bisexual

life represents a minor triumph,

respectfully embracing the mys-

tery of the desires of others. Like-

wise, his refusal to offer easy reso-

lution, which infuses the whole

romantic enterprise with a kind

of delicious melancholy. There

are moments, particularly in the

final chapter, that may have read-

ers gazing tearfully into their fire-

places, real or imaginary, just like

Timothée Chalamet at the end of

Luca Guadagnino’s superlative

film of “Call me by Your Name.” I t

can be hard to go home.

[email protected]

Charles arrowsmith is based in

new york and writes about books,

films and music.

imperative that mars many se-

quels. Its bittersweetness is wel-

come.

Unfortunately, the diffuseness

necessarily means it lacks the in-

tensity of “Call me b y Your Name,”

whose short-leased summer gave

that book its particular kind of

tragic suspense. In a ddition, what

was charmingly grandiloquent in

the adolescent Elio — a florid

style; an expansive frame of refer-

ence — is cloying and ostentatious

in a cast of adult narrators. After a

glimpse of “a small abstract paint-

ing in the style of Nicolas de Staël”

or a lake reminiscent of Corot, a

family who reads aloud to one

another from Chateaubriand’s

memoirs feels like too much cozy

refinement. (That said, farrar,

Straus and Giroux is launching a

perfume to accompany the book,

which suggests it’s banking on its

upmarket target readers to be

lows Aciman to reframe and de-

velop the themes he’s already es-

tablished. Is there such a thing as

fate? Can meaning be ascribed to

the random meetings of kindred

souls? michel certainly thinks so:

“fate,” he says, “if it exists at all,

has strange ways of teasing us

with patterns that may not be

patterns at all but that hint at a

vestigial meaning still being

worked out.”

The last two chapters are short-

er. In “Capriccio,” we catch up

with oliver and discover he hasn’t

moved on from Elio any more

than Elio has from him (though

both have exercised a healthy in-

terest in others, male and female,

over the years). Then in “Da Capo”

— musically, going back to the

beginning — Aciman effects his

own brand of return: a reunion,

yes, but with an altered cast list, in

a place haunted by the past, veiled

The

Reliable

Source

Helena Andrews-Dyer and Emily Heil

have moved on to new assignments at

The Post. A search is underway for a

new Reliable Source columnist. The

column will return.

often obsessed with the creeps

who commit the crimes. The

victims (and their grieving survi-

vors) are useful mainly for their

tears.

Ye t even I admit that the Levin

case remains a fascinating, heart-

breaking a nd — as emphasized in

this series — infuriating tale. The

story still powerfully conjures

the perennial subtexts about

class and economic background

(uptown and downtown; Jewish

and Catholic; blue-collar resent-

ment of white-collar privilege;

female sexual desire weighed

against the entitled male libido),

and in many ways, it presaged

much of the narrative framework

of our modern crime shows and

podcasts, from “Law & order”

forward. Levin’s strangulation

also serves as an eerie prequel of

sorts to the attack on the Central

Park jogger in 1989 and the

murder of Nicole Brown Simpson

in 1994.

This documentary is more

than just a lurid retrospective,

however, and it benefits greatly

from the collective hindsight of

30-plus years. Stern and Sund-

berg, who have previously made

films about Roe v. Wade and the

latter-day career of Joan rivers,

treat seriously the first item of

overdue business here, which is

the news that a young woman in
a short skirt who stayed out too
late in a manhattan bar and left
with a charming monster wound
up half-naked and dead under a
tree in the city’s most public
place.
These themes lend a fresh and
necessary resonance to “The
Preppy murder: Death in Central
Park,” directors ricki Stern and
Annie Sundberg’s sharply told
and often riveting documentary
miniseries that reexamines the
August 1986 death of 18-year-old
Jennifer Levin and the subse-
quent, drawn-out media cover-
age and trial of her confessed
killer, robert Chambers, then 19,
who claimed he choked her while
defending himself from her ad-
vances.
Airing over three nights begin-
ning Wednesday on both AmC
and Sundance TV, “The Preppy
murder” (produced by robert
friedman) takes every advantage
of our present-day cravings for
meticulously paced tales of true
crime, an obsession I lately find
dispiriting and counterproduc-
tive, almost verging on repug-
nant. TV today is packed with
murder, murder, murder, with
storytellers who are still too

notebook from C1

‘Preppy Murder’ knows

looks can be deceiving

to Elio was an encouraging carpe

diem, boys. The first surprise in

“find me” is that it’s Samuel do-

ing the carpe-ing. on a train to

rome, he is besotted by young

photographer miranda. She’s half

his age but seems to prefer older

men, and in the following days the

two engage in mutual seduction.

She’s t he new beginning he hadn’t

known to hope for.

Elio, in the book’s second part,

also finds intergenerational love,

falling in with the dapper (older)

michel, whom he meets at a

chamber music recital and who

soon reveals a family secret con-

cerning a musical manuscript

that bears a suggestive inscrip-

tion. This chapter — like its musi-

cal precedent, the cadenza — al-

music, so important to Elio,
provides a metaphorical struc-
ture for the book, with Aciman
assigning musical directions to
each of its four chapter-move-
ments. The first, “Tempo,” estab-
lishes a new speed and voice;
while Elio narrated the whole of
the first book, this one begins
with his father, Samuel, before
reverting to Elio, and later, oliver.
We k now from wistful asides in
“Call me b y Your Name” t hat Sam-
uel somewhat regretted his own
life’s course: “some,” he had said,
“for fear of taking any turns, find
themselves leading the wrong life
all life long.” Not wishing to see
his errors repeated, his message

book world from C1

A bittersweet sequel

who had hosted Levin at his

parents’ Southampton summer

house the weekend before she

died. “It really shattered my vi-

sion of the world and life — and

safety.”

Still, when you Google Levin’s

name today, robert Chambers

comes up first instead. The docu-

mentary reexamines how quickly

police detectives zeroed in on

him the morning Levin’s body

was found. “This is the simplest

case in the world,” the lead

detective, mike Sheehan, recalls

thinking. “But I had no idea.”

We watch old videotape as an

assistant district attorney, inter-

viewing Chambers in custody,

teases out an implausible half-

confession. Chambers says he

acted in self-defense, grabbing

Levin by the neck after she

assaulted him. He talks about

sundance TV

Jennifer levin’s death became a

blame-the-victim bellwether.

by melancholy

and uncertain-

ty. As Samuel

had earlier,

readers may

think of the an-

cient Greek

verb “opsizo”:

“to arrive too

late to the feast,

or just before

last call, or to

feast today

with the weight

of all the wast-

ed yesteryears.”

Aciman, a fa-

mous Prous-

tian, is clearly interested in the

diffusive action of time and the

heartaches of temps perdu. His

keen sense of what’s lost or miss-

ing, even in a happy new relation-

ship, allows “find me” to dodge,

at least in part, the sentimental

Find Me

By andré

aciman

Farrar, straus

and Giroux. 272

pp. $27

BY CELIA WREN

Dear Jane Austen fans: run,

don’t p erambulate, to see “Lovers’

Vows.” This show will suit your

sense and sensibility.

Janeites will know Elizabeth

Inchbald’s once-popular 1798

play for its role in the plot of

Austen’s “mansfield Park.” But

what you probably don’t know,

because the play is rarely staged

today, is that “Lovers’ Vows” is

hilarious.

Ta ke, for example, the butler

who delivers many laughs in the

90-minute version directed and

adapted by Kerry mcGee, pre-

sented by the classics-oriented

company We Happy few. Played

by an aptly deadpan Jack Novak,

the egomaniacal yet decorum-

focused servant is employed at a

Baron’s c astle, where he insists on

communicating need-to-know in-

formation via self-composed jan-

gly rhymes. The results are

screamingly funny, even in a pro-

duction that overdoes its spoof-

ing of the play’s melodrama.

“Lovers’ Vows” was controver-

sial in its day (and hence scan-

dalized the more priggish char-

acters in “mansfield Park”) be-

cause of the proto-feminist, anti-

elitist behavior of its ingenue

character, Amelia, and because

the ultimately upbeat main plot

turns on an illegitimate birth.

The opening scene introduces us

to the sick, impoverished Agatha

(Jessica Lefkow), who raised her

now-adult son frederick ( Novak)

by herself, after she was seduced

and abandoned by Baron

Wildenhaim (Lee ordeman).

frederick’s solicitude for Agatha

puts him on a collision course

with his dad. meanwhile, Amelia

(Gabby Wolfe), the Baron’s

plucky legitimate daughter, pro-

poses marriage to Anhalt (Alex

Turner), the penniless clergy-

man she loves, even as she is

courted by Count Cassel

(Lefkow), a snobbish, philander-

ing idiot. The ensuing complica-

tions provide grist for the but-

ler’s hilariously bad poetry.

mcGee’s staging winks know-

ingly at the play’s potboiler nar-

rative and creaky dramaturgy:

Stylized sound and lighting cues

underscore soap-opera-style de-

velopments, and the characters

react to events in deliberately

exaggerated fashion. While an

theater review

A butler whose verses are punchlines

mark williams hoelscher/we happy Few

Jack novak as the butler in “lovers’ Vows,” a 1798 comedy that gets

a shout-out — well, more of a shout-down — in “Mansfield Park.”

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