Soon, at Playwrights Horizons, Alexandra Tatarsky will stage her solo performance about “a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree.” Last spring, Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees — about a brother and sister who calmly, miraculously take root in a public park — unfurled its tender, quizzical branches at the same venue. Now Renae Simone Jarrett brings her new play, Daphne — which dances with an Ovidian transformation myth where a woman becomes a tree — to Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater (ending the Playwrights monopoly on surreal arboreal drama). There seems to be something in the soil; perhaps a yearning for stillness and solitude and dirt, for deep roots, sun-reaching limbs, and protective, time-weathering armor — a desire, in the mad, terrifying rush of it all, to pause for a while and simply … photosynthesize.
Under Sarah Hughes’s unrushed direction, Daphne is a tiptoeing, dreamlike affair, too committed to being disquieting to be described as gentle but consistently soft. Too soft, in fact. There’s a muted, teasing quality to the play, a feeling of climbing very gradually up a foggy hill, with the promise of something — possibly shocking or awful or amazing — at the top, only to find that you’ve actually been trekking across fairly flat ground. Not only is there not much to see from the summit; there’s not really much of a summit to see from.
That’s partly because Jarrett wants to have her myth and eat it too. The play has a lot invested in its own sinister surreality — which makes sense, given the source material — but it also wants for everything to be okay, for its murky, uncanny journey to be, ultimately, a healing one. And yes, healing is nice, but there’s no real psychological setup for such warm fuzziness in the structure Daphne builds from its myth. In Ovid’s tale, the love/lust-struck god Apollo relentlessly pursues the nymph Daphne until she cries out to her father, a river god, for help, and he transforms her into a laurel tree. The story is already, at best, bittersweet — the only way to avoid rape is to become an inanimate object — but its epilogue is downright unfair: Apollo kisses the tree’s bark and vows to use its wood to make his bow and lyre, and its leaves as his crown, forevermore. Daphne’s body is violated after all. Girl just wanted to listen to her music.
These currents of menace, pursuit, and physical violation flow heavy through Jarrett’s play. Her Daphne (Jasmine Batchelor) is a young woman who’s just moved into an isolated country house inherited by her girlfriend, Winona (Keilly McQuail). Soon after she arrives, Winona slams her finger in a door and, from the wound, a strange, bark-like scarring begins to spread across her body. She’s treeifying — though, perhaps it’s only a symbol? People look at her weird but not nearly weird enough for what’s happening, if it’s what’s happening.
That veil of vagueness is drawn across Daphne as a whole. The setting is contemporary and the clothes, by Oana Botez, are slouchily hip, but the rest of the details of the world outside Winona’s spooky old house, and sometimes even inside it, are wrapped in haze. What Winona and Daphne do, or did, back in the implied city from which Daphne came, is a mystery. What Daphne’s doing here, other than making tea, wandering through the woods, and — like Psyche and Belle and Jane Eyre and the second Mrs. de Winter before her — generally becoming more and more unnerved by her seemingly beautiful but increasingly oppressive and ominous partner-owned living situation? Also unclear.
As Winona, McQuail twists her tall, lean body into hunched, uncomfortable shapes and speaks in a flat, scratchy drawl — vocal fry as both defensive maneuver and intimidation tactic. She lowers her sharp chin and stares out from under her eyelids at Batchelor’s open-faced Daphne with huge, hard, unblinking eyes. She doesn’t like Daphne to have friends over, or to leave the door unlocked, or to go to the small nearby town (“The walk isn’t safe”). She believes their nearest neighbor (Denise Burse) is a witch who is invading her dreams. Winona is lonely, paranoid, possessive, and full of clawing need. She’s also got an apparently huge and frightening bird named Phoebus, whom she keeps hidden in a cage under a cloth and feeds dead mice. Phoebus as in Apollo — if we didn’t already get it.
Jarrett is trying to complicate her villain, to create, with Winona, an Apollo who isn’t actually a villain at all, but who’s hurt and frightened and running from her own pursuers, even if they’re imaginary ones. It’s an admirable impulse, but it doesn’t quite work. Even if we pity Winona, and she is pitiable, she remains opaque, and we’re still inclined to think Daphne would be better off packing her bags. The play’s preference for the odd and obscure is partly responsible for this empathy gap: Winona and Daphne talk about dead animals (“Do they die on the sidewalk and then somebody comes to get them? … Where are all their bodies?”) or whether or not human beings have eggs (“Winona you literally have eggs in you right now … Didn’t you take a class in middle school?”) or, at their most extreme, Winona’s nightmares. Their conversations are pastless, futureless, suspended in an eternal, creepy-quirky present. How did they find each other? Why did they come here? What is the foundation of their love and why should we root (oof, sorry) for it? A tome’s worth of backstory isn’t required, but a little sense of fleshed out humanity is.
We’re supposed to stick with Daphne and Winona, but their blurry outlines make them difficult to grasp. Meanwhile, the story’s two visitors from the outside world are sharper, brighter, and thus — it can’t be helped — more appealing. Daphne is friends with a couple, Piper and Wendy, who each sneak out to see her when Winona isn’t home, and their visits are some of the highlights of the show. Naomi Lorrain’s expansive, good-humored Wendy, striding about in a particularly fashionable rainbow-decked coat, feels like a healthy gust of clean air; and Jeena Yi is excellent as Piper — funny, grounded, and just the right amount of wacky as she bounces the rolled up blanket that stands for her new baby around and grouses cheerfully about how, “I preferred her in.” (In a pair of enjoyably weird entrances and exits, Piper arrives by emerging from a cupboard and departs by falling out a window.)
There’s a level of flesh-and-blood tangibility to these scenes that the rest of Daphne lacks, not to mention a set of circumstances that allows Jarrett to ground her play’s body horror in something solid. “I could never,” Daphne whispers when Piper talks about “everyone looking at my vagina open up in the hospital bed.” Piper is sanguine about having given birth, but Wendy’s less convinced: “We are these animals, you know,” she says to Daphne later, “walking around in these animal bodies. And [Piper’s body has] completely been ravaged by this parasite and now she’s this ravaged walking carcass.”
Daphne is suffused with, and is about, specifically female kinds of fear. Too often, though, that fear diffuses into a gestural fog — a fluttering curtain, a secret door in the wall, the sound of a falling tree. Even the bark that slowly creeps across Daphne’s body feels underexplored, a symbol that evaporates when it should crystalize. But when Piper and Wendy blow into Daphne and Winona’s isolated world, they momentarily clear the fog away. They bring along with them the rich psychological earth that’s required to plant even the most surreal of trees.
Daphne is at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater through November 19.