The Revisionist could very well have been called “The Ugly American.” Jesse Eisenberg’s three-character play (which debuted in 2013 at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater) focuses on David, a young American writer (Seamus Mulcahy) who arrives in Szczecin, Poland to stay with his second cousin Maria (Deanna Dunagan), an elderly Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by converting to Catholicism. Ilia Volok plays Zenon, a local taxi driver whose heart brims over with affection for Maria (who reminds him of his late mother). David is deficient in that kind of simple, basic humanity. In fact, he’s deficient in just about every human quality there is, a rude, crude, boorish punk whose eyes you’d like to gouge out with a rusty knife. He’s such an awful person that he overwhelms The Revisionist, turns what could have been a believable and maybe even touching drama into a caricature, a cartoon. The essence of the play is a collision of opposites, the conflict of cultures and worlds. Maria has confronted evil at a young age; she was four when the Nazis invaded Szczecin and took her family off to the camps where they all were murdered. Given over to the care of the family maid, Maria was baptized and given a non-Jewish name and identity. David, though he’s supposed to be a smart guy, a novelist who came to Poland to revise his latest book, gives it more humor (even though he’s utterly humorless himself). David not only knows nothing of Maria’s story but evinces little interest in it when she gets around to telling it. His innocence, lack of empathy and understanding, the result of total immersion in American pop culture and education, prevent him from changing and growing when Maria opens up to him and reveals some of her secrets. But the woman’s pain and guilt—and love of family—mean nothing to this callow, self-centered, pot-smoking youth. It comes as a relief when Maria finally wises up and kicks him out. What took you so long? was all I could think. That said, Mulcahy does a hell of an acting job with David, making him come fully and repulsively alive as a villain. Dunagan invests Maria with a stature and dignity that are quite affecting, and Volok is solid and likable as the non-English-speaking cabbie. Credit must also go to director Robin Larsen and set designer Tom Buderwitz, who try their valiant best to make this over-weighted, annoying drama work.
