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An ambitious look at Ethel Rosenberg's death row fantasies of rescue, comfort, and revenge, Frances Madeson's new play "The Candle Lit" at Cleveland Public Theatre is beautiful and flawed. While there is much to admire in Madeson's imaginative vision -- passages of great lyricism, humor, insight, and pathos aplenty -- there is also sufficient overwriting and melodramatic muddle to make you shift in your seat and silently pray for another rewrite.
The Public Theatre production, ably captained by director Jan Bruml, is still worth seeing: well-acted and beautifully designed, it's good enough that it manages to highlight the play's strengths and weaknesses all at once.
Awaiting her execution in solitary confinement, convicted "atom spy" and Jewish housewife Ethel Rosenberg has a surreal series of visitations from four women. Structurally the play is episodic, almost with the feel of three one-act plays, as nearly every scene is a one-on-one confrontation. However, Madeson's choice of visitors are intriguing and intensely theatrical.
Besides a brusque, scared prison guard (Susan Speers), Rosenberg entertains one comforting ghost-victim -- the young Margot Frank, Anne Frank's older sister -- and two brilliantly conceived sparring partners: her sister-in-law Ruth Greenglass, who betrayed her to the FBI, and Ethel Merman, the close personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover who is appearing on a TV special during Rosenberg's final week.
The exchanges between the two Ethels are juicy, surprising, and funny, among the best moments in the play, although its setup is overexplained and it trails off in an unconvincing sci-fi cliche. Yvonne Pilarczyk's Merman is wonderful -- fleshy, vulgar, and endearing, a brash foil for Annie Kitral's hyperneurasthenic intensity as the martyred Rosenberg.
The second act revelations with Greenglass are also devastating and powerful. Elaine Thomas is brilliant as the brittle, vindictive Ruth, hollow-eyed from mascara and valium, her upswept blonde chic barely masking her gut-gnawing guilt.
It is emblematic of the script's problems -- and the production's interest -- that its self-deluding antagonists are drawn with such precise, complex sensitivity that they engage the audience's sympathy more consistently than its victim-protagonist. Dark, haunted, and doomed, Kitral opens the play in a wrenching sense-memory of death panic, but her character's emotional development seems more repetitious loop than journey. The cycling between fear, loss, accusatory rage at betrayers, and righteous recollection ultimately becomes wearying: all are justifiable emotions, given the horrific circumstances, but by the end Rosenberg still feels more symbol than individual.
Nina Angeloff as Margot Frank has affecting moments, particularly in her search for her lost diary, but she is trapped onstage for long actionless stretches with little to do than peer mournfully from under her too-large headpiece (the one unfortunate costume choice; otherwise, dresses and hair by Corey E. Rothermel are excellent.)
Oliver Soehngen's impressively sinister set design is all angles and rakes, from a looming rusted metal guard tower with dangling wires to a surreal stage door lined by cyclone fencing. The environmental design includes a trompe l'oeil electric chair which seems to be encased in the floor, and excellent lobby displays about the Rosenberg trial. Even the props seem to sizzle radioactively -- from glowing neon food trays to soup bowls full of hissing sand. Dylan Fujimura's stark lighting includes a prison searchlight that Merman seems to confuse with her followspot, and Kyre Douglas' chilling sound design completes the atmosphere of terror and isolation.