Bleak House
Michelle Hurst, center, plays a battle-weary French widow who takes a job with two sweet but solemn spinsters in a gloomy Norwegian village in "Babette's Feast." She is vastly overqualified.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT I expected from an Off Broadway production of “Babette’s Feast,” but it wasn’t a chorus of Norwegians identically dressed in Puritan black, faces framed by pouffy white ruffs, speaking and singing voices raised in unison. And I did not expect the set, which looks at first like little more than a bare stage. Then I noticed the long bench upstage and thought, "Oh, it's a giant sauna." Then the scenic design surprised me, asserting itself with a simplicity that would make the pious village residents in Berlevaag proud, establishing once and for all that way less can be way more.
Stand-Ins
Cutouts temporarily occupy the Theater at St. Clement's stage. (Set design, lighting design and photograph by Christopher Akerlind.)
The set design is by Christopher Akerlind, a two-time Tony Award winner ("Indecent" and "Light in the Piazza") for lighting design. Other Broadway shows of his that you may have seen include "Waitress," "Rocky," the Audra McDonald "Porgy and Bess" (2012), "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" and a string of August Wilson plays, beginning with "The Piano Lesson."
Winning
Christopher Akerlind, a two-time Tony Award recipient, for "Light in the Piazza" and "Indecent."
A bare stage was the first thought that came to Akerlind, who said he was “really developing an 'Our Town' idea” and had hoped to do a “more pure Wilder-like empty theater.” But practical needs intervened. The wings on either side of the stage, rough-cut pine from a lumberyard in Maine, make a striking statement, but they’re really there to mask props and lights. Akerlind followed those with overhead beams and then did the proscenium in a gray-washed wood.
Then there’s the upstage bench. A full 20 feet long and made from the same Maine pine, it turns into Babette’s impressive kitchen work space. The design is based on Akerlind’s research about rustic kitchen islands and butcher block counters. “I wanted it a bit more rough-looking,” he said, “but the action and potential damage to costumes kept us from going too far.”
As for firsthand research, Akerlind – whose paternal great-grandparents came to the United States from Sweden -- confesses that no, he has never visited an isolated Norwegian village. There is at least one in his future, though. His travel plans involve “a supply-ship excursion, which serves fjord villages up the coast and beyond the Arctic Circle,” as part of a two-month trip to Scandinavia and beyond.
Sparkly
The "icicles" are made of sea glass. Photograph by Christopher Thompson.
The set does offer one sparkling touch. A chandelier of icicles made of white, blue and green sea glass twinkles above the actors when they stand stage right. When “Babette’s Feast” was presented at Portland Stage in Maine, the icicles (which Akerlind also likes to refer to as a "dimensional aurora borealis") flew in under the beams, but St Clement’s doesn’t have the mechanics to do that, so in the New York production they remain in one place, lit from underneath. But Akerlind was pleased about one side effect: as he was composing the rest of the show, he noticed that “they caught indirect light in a wonderful way.”
As everyone who ever saw the 1987 screen version (it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film) starring Stéphane Audran – or read the Isak Dinesen story it was based on – knows that the feast of the title is a far cry from the villagers’ usual fare (bread soup and cod). Even though, as Dinesen wrote, “to them, luxurious fare was sinful,” the straitlaced Berlevaagers are about to sit down to the meal of their lives. (Spoiler alert: Babette wins 10,000 francs in the French lottery and decides to spend every sou on a once-in-a-lifetime meal. She hasn’t told these people the full truth about her past. She was a renowned chef in Paris.)
Bubbly
Gen. Lorens Loewenhielm (Jeorge Bennett Watson), an out-of-town visitor, is the only dinner guest who has a clue as to what haute cuisine they're being served. Or that Veuve Clicquot isn't some funny lemonade.
For the big meal, Akerlind brought in a 10-foot glass table, exactly half the length of the pine bench. "I think these geometric notions have vibes," he said. A few tall candles and a hint of crystal make for a seriously festive table.
Theater at St. Clement’s, 423 West 46th Street; 212-239-6200, www.babettesfeastonstage.com. 1 hour 30 minutes (no intermission). Opened on March 25, 2018.