Phil (Enrico Colantoni, left) interrogating Jamie (Alexander Garfin, center), with his neighbor Ethan (Obi Abili, right), in Matt Williams’s Fear.
Matt Williams’s Fear, presented by Cherry Lane Theatre and running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, begins with Phil (Enrico Colantoni) dragging 15-year-old Jamie (Alexander Garfin) on stage in a stranglehold. “Why were you at the lake?” Phil demands, in the abandoned tool shed where he takes his prisoner (scenic design by Andrew Boyce). At its best, Fear, soundly directed by Tea Alagić, is propelled by mystery and frayed nerves, with the potential for violence looming. The confrontation is not just between Phil and Jamie, but soon Ethan (Obi Abili) stumbles upon the unusual scene—with Jamie now tied to a chair—and the story of a missing girl in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood becomes about class and cultural conflict.
Phil looms over Jamie after he has been untied. Photos by Jeremy Daniel.
Phil is a plumber, and as president of the block association seems to take his job a bit too seriously. Ethan is a comparative literature professor at Princeton who is not so involved in the neighborhood: Phil charges him with being reclusive and nonconformist (he lets weeds grow high his yard), with the implication that he thinks himself superior. “Not even a wave as you zip through the cul-de-sac in your little blue Prius,” Phil says. Phil enjoys taunting Ethan—calling him “professor” but then asking, “You tenured?”—which only brings out Ethan’s superciliousness: “I received a Mellon Foundation Award in the humanities and previously held a Guggenheim Fellowship.”
Phil claims that Jamie is troubled—that he murdered a neighborhood cat and set his son’s locker on fire at school. Phil also notes that the missing 8-year-old girl’s bike was found in the woods behind Jamie’s house and that Jamie was seen with her. Jamie has an explanation for everything, but all claims in the play by all three characters are subject to skepticism, and it’s not long before the audience is lost in a maze of uncertainty, not knowing if even the simplest statements can be trusted.
The young girl’s disappearance creates the web of suspicion and recrimination among the characters but becomes ancillary to the cultural clash between Phil and Ethan. Phil is Catholic and goes overboard on Christmas decorations to his house, while Ethan is agnostic and puts up no decorations; Phil believes in an “eye for an eye” system of revenge and punishment (“If anyone threatens you … hunt them down and annihilate them, wipe them out, eliminate the fear”), while Ethan points out that this conflicts with the Christianity Phil claims to believe and quotes Gandhi on the evil of violence; and so on. Each character’s purported beliefs will be tested as events unfold and lies are unearthed.
“[A]ll claims in the play by all three characters are subject to skepticism, and it’s not long before the audience is lost in a maze of uncertainty.... ”
While Abili and Colantoni imbue their characters with humanity, they can’t prevent them from sometimes feeling like mouthpieces. The play relies on overly broad cultural markers and too schematic a rendering of cultural and class difference. The detours into philosophy and current events slacken the tension. With a teenage boy taken prisoner and a frantic search underway for a missing girl, why is Ethan correcting Phil’s grammar or discoursing on Diderot and agnosticism, and why is Phil lecturing about ISIS and the evil in the world? And even some of the supposed subversions of stereotype can feel clichéd: the plumber who understands the professor’s reference to The Tempest and then discourses on Shakespeare himself, for example.
There are riveting sequences in Fear, but Williams seemingly doesn’t trust the audience to figure out his themes and ideas, instead telegraphing them with a heavy hand.
Fear runs through Dec. 8 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher St.) on an irregular schedule. For more information and tickets, call (212) 352-3101 or visit feartheplay.com.
