Daniel Fish's Dark Take on “Oklahoma!”

In 1943, when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s first collaboration, “Oklahoma!,” made its Broadway début, soaring with airy pastoralism and paeans to statehood, it not only reinvented the musical (“Oklahoma!” was the first show to thoroughly integrate songs, story, and dance); it brought joy and a sense of American identity to the citizens of an anxious nation at war. Daniel Fish’s vivid, stripped-down revival, at St. Ann’s Warehouse (first developed at Bard’s Fisher Center, in 2015), similarly offers audiences a vision of themselves. Seventy-five years ago, we were at war with foreign powers; now the enemy is within.

Fish told the Times, in 2015, that his production—which, in everything from its staging to its casting to its musical arrangements, emphasizes realism—wasn’t “about trying to push the show” but “about trying to really hear it.” Like David Cromer’s brilliant 2009 production of “Our Town,” Fish’s “Oklahoma!” is staged plainly, with the audience seated around the actors, who wear modern dress—in this case, trucker hats, knotted T-shirts, statement denim—in an almost startlingly bright room. A riot of colorful metallic fringe hangs from the ceiling. On one wall is a grayish mural of a distant farm, on another a near-arsenal of rifles. As the show begins, the actors sit at long tables, like locals at a community-center potluck, beside piles of corn and pots of chili. Immersive theatre, sometimes involving food, has become relatively commonplace. (This chili is served, with corn bread, at intermission.) But, in an iconic work like this one, the immersion can be powerful, altering our instinctive reactions to what we see and hear.

“Oklahoma!,” which Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted from Lynn Riggs’s 1931 play, “Green Grow the Lilacs,” has a simple plot: at the turn of the century, in the Oklahoma Territory, a cowboy named Curly wants to take Laurey, a farm girl, to a box social, as does Jud Fry, her family’s menacing hired hand. By the end, Curly and Laurey are married, Jud is dead, and the settlers are all singing, “Everythin’s goin’ my way.”

Damon Daunno, who plays Curly in this production, struts onstage, singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” He’s rangy and stubbled, pleased with himself in weathered chaps. Fish’s staging emphasizes the community—the townspeople, still seated, occasionally sing along. At the other end of the stage, Laurey’s Aunt Eller (the pitch-perfect Mary Testa) roughly tears open a series of Jiffy boxes and begins to make corn bread. Curly strums an acoustic guitar, with the half-smiling expression of the handsome guy who’s a bit too eager to pick up a guitar at a party, though his manner can suggest a slightly embarrassed distance from the lyrics he’s singing. Like the staging, the orchestral music, arranged by Daniel Kluger, is pared down and shaken up; a seven-piece band incorporates banjo, pedal steel guitar, and mandolin, but retains bass, cello, and violin, keeping Rodgers’s lush harmonies intact.

One of “Oklahoma!” ’s charms is the way it alternates expansive songs about places and desires with clever, teasing conversational numbers. The first of these, “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” establishes that Laurey and Curly are in love and too proud to admit it. (Her first line, to him, is “Oh, I thought you was somebody.”) Curly is traditionally played as a competent, reliable sort of cowboy, a gently funny character who needles the people he loves, like Laurey (Rebecca Naomi Jones) and Aunt Eller, as well as the ones he doesn’t, like Jud Fry (Patrick Vaill). Daunno’s Curly, however, is amiable but diffuse, his affections and his sense of humor unclear. (In recent roles as diverse as a troubled teen-age musician in “The Lucky Ones,” Rasputin in “Beardo,” and Orpheus in “Hadestown,” Daunno often projected a similar blasé contentment.) Testa and Jones, on the other hand, couldn’t be more on target. Jones has a gorgeous singing voice, and her Laurey is arresting, determined, and smart. She is presented unvainly, in jeans and a plaid shirt, but she radiates confidence and beauty, a notable contrast to Curly’s ambling peacock. As he sings about “the stars gittin’ blurry,” Daunno ventures a few moments of welcome earnestness. The lighting turns green, the music quiets to a hush, and we can begin to imagine that these two truly like each other.

“Oklahoma!” has always had shadows in its cornfields and a gun in its smokehouse, but, as the plot unfolds, unexpected hints of menace start to poke through the rollicking spectacle. Some of these involve the young men at the center of the show. Jud Fry, who has often been characterized not just as a shifty, isolated drifter but as a cultural outsider—in the 1955 film adaptation, Rod Steiger’s Jud was a meaty brute with an unplaceable accent—is played with great sensitivity and quaking instability by the lean, fair Vaill. This complicates him; he could be your high-school crush, with a frisson of Kurt Cobain. James Davis plays the wide-eyed cowboy Will Parker, the erstwhile beau of Laurey’s friend Ado Annie, as a few degrees dopier than the average Will Parker, lovable but with flashes of creepiness—sometimes he’s a little dead behind the eyes. In his wonderful showcase number, “Kansas City,” Will dances on tables and leaps through the air, but when he announces to Ado Annie that he’s back in town he’s sprawled on a table, waving the lid of a chili pot between his legs, looking horny and a little nuts. It’s easy to imagine him roping a cow, but he’d make an exasperating husband.

Other characterizations feel similarly contemporary, if more respectful. Ado Annie (Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair) has pink streaks in her blond hair and red bra straps revealed by her tank top. Stroker goes to town on the zesty “I Cain’t Say No,” a mock-chagrined ode to the joys of lust. “Ev’ry time I lose a wrestlin’ match / I have a funny feelin’ that I won!” she sings, whirling around in her chair. (It was gratifying to hear the audience laugh at these and other ancient lyrics.) Ado Annie is torn between Will and the Persian peddler Ali Hakim (Michael Nathanson). Ali Hakim has often been played broadly, with an exaggerated accent, but in the sly and dignified Nathanson’s hands his humor is more intentional, and less an ethnic joke. You suspect that he’s one of the more intelligent men in town.

Until this production, I had never given much thought to the use of guns in “Oklahoma!”; they tend to be drowned out by the show’s overwhelming good cheer. In Fish’s staging, though, their presence complicates the cheer. Near the midpoint of the show, during the wry “Pore Jud Is Daid,” when Curly visits Jud in his dingy smokehouse and jovially encourages him to kill himself, Fish plunges the theatre into darkness, obscuring the stage, and projects video of Jud’s face on the wall. The image is gigantic: we see his twitching humanity in stark relief, his longing for acceptance and love. (The use of video in theatre can be a too pointed reminder of the world we live in, but here it enhances our empathy.) At the end of the scene, Curly fires a bullet through a knothole—a sharpshooter’s veiled threat—Jud responds in kind, and the loud blasts jolt us. During the moody dream ballet (John Heginbotham’s daring choreography pays tribute to Agnes de Mille’s original), cowboy boots fall from the rafters, one by one, and the sound they make as they hit the stage is as explosive as those gunshots. When Aunt Eller fires a pistol during a scuffle in “The Farmer and the Cowman,” the moment—which traditionally plays as feisty—keeps the townsfolk from grabbing the rifles off the wall and is genuinely scary.

The foreboding intensifies during the box-social scene, where Jud horrifies everyone by bidding aggressively on Laurey’s picnic basket. Fish stages the moment, bizarrely, with Curly lying on the floor, a hat over his face; he comes alive just in time to bid against Jud. The scene, in which Curly sells his saddle, his horse, and his gun, usually emphasizes his brawny maturity, but here he comes off as a bit desperate. Fish doubles down on the darkness in the following scene, where Jud paws at Laurey; the lights go out again, and we hear kissing, breathing, the clink of a belt buckle. When Laurey runs to Curly afterward, looking for comfort, he barely registers her terror and kisses her so greedily that we recoil. (Jones’s Laurey is a powerhouse, who projects such emotional acuity that it’s hard to imagine she’s attracted to either of these guys.)

But soon our uncertainty about Curly begins to work in the show’s favor, because Fish turns him into a murderer. In the original, Jud shows up at Laurey and Curly’s wedding and falls on his knife after starting a fight; his death is caused by his own fumbling. Here, he kisses Laurey and starts to advance on Curly, who shoots him with shocking swiftness from several feet away, blood splattering all over the bride and groom’s white clothes. The kangaroo-court scene that follows usually plays as a grave but forgivable dispatching of justice. Here, and now, it doesn’t. (The night I saw the show, the Senate had just voted to advance Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, which added to a mood of judicial unease.) The townspeople are static and seated. Aunt Eller, who’s had moral authority throughout, now coldly eschews the rule of law for a ruthless frontier efficiency. A federal marshal (Anthony Cason), who tries to insist on a courthouse trial, is brushed off—everybody else wants to let Curly go and enjoy his honeymoon. Then, the newlyweds’ clothes still drenched with blood, the company sings a hearty reprise of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” impressing on us their collective desire to move on. Rodgers’s triumphant music feels like both an ideal we want to believe we fulfill and a distraction from who we really are. It’s deeply damning and deeply accurate—and the audience eagerly claps in time. ♦

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