Review: COLD COUNTRY at ExPats Theatre (@ Atlas)

ExPats Theatre has assembled an excellent troupe of actors for Cold Country by contemporary Swiss playwright, Reto Finger. Director (and translator) Karin Rosnizeck ably guides them through an engrossing but difficult script which tries to integrate ancient rural Swiss myths with modern situations. The writer's efforts may be labored, but the acting is wonderful, as are the scenic projections. Cold Country does take an audience away from today; strong distractions help.

Tennessee Dixon's gorgeous wall of photos of the snowy Swiss Alps starts as just a background, greeting an arriving audience. But during the course of Cold Country, her montage of photographs becomes a documentary of the mountain landscape, valleys between, the weather, and the interiors of the rustic home and barn of the Hauser family whose story forms the plot of the play. Before their story begins, the audience hears the legend of the mythical Macolvi family whose interactions with the mythological character, the Toggel, somewhat reflects the Hauser family. (A Toggel seems to be a cousin of Rumpelstiltskin, a step-brother of Scrat the squirrel, and an ancestor of Gollum, all rolled into one; all these critters, of course, have manic obsessions which clash with human and acorn behavior; negative and supernatural events ensue.) Playwright Finger struggles to connect the Hausers to the Toggel; there's no question that the hills may be alive with the sound of music (splendid yodeling in Cold Country), but the isolated peasants keeping farms in their Alpine villages are trapped inside their rigid, patriarchal ways. Watching Hanna Hauser try to extricate herself from her environment is riveting.

All three Hausers are mourning the death of Hanna's brother. Their father, Jakob, seethes with anger and bullies daughter Hanna and wife Kathrin. Michael Crowley plays him with a fury that seems always about to get worse. Jakob will not call his daughter by her name—his son had obviously been his favorite. As Kathrin, Melissa B. Robinson has a magnificent silent energy which telegraphs the behavior of a woman long the victim of emotional abuse. And Sadie O'Conor (Hanna) portrays the young woman's serial victimization with a shell of calm and a soft center that shifts when she's not around her parents or the priest who buried her brother and reveals avid interests and a charming personality; O'Conor's Hanna becomes a different person when she meets tourists to the mountain in the village's railway station. She's yet another person when she obediently helps the creepy village priest (David Bryan Jackson: well and truly creepy) tend the graves in the cemetery. Her depiction of caring for a cow who struggles to calve is heart-wrenching. Whether or not Hanna remains in the village is Cold Country's central question.

The playwright does not satisfactorily explore or answer that question. In an 85 minute play, there's no reason why the play lacks a few additional pages to explicate the sudden turn of the tourists Hanna has befriended. The folk tale clarifies why the Macolvi girl must end as she does. To effectively fit Hanna's fate into an allegorical inevitability, Finger might have lengthened the play enough to adequately dramatize why and how Hanna's real world matched the mythical one. Because he doesn't, Cold Country turns out to be a distracting distraction.

ExPats continues to be a strong component of the DC theatre community's "off Broadway." The town is lucky to have all of them, and until October 5, most companies, large and small, offer discounts. Visit Theatreweek.org