Noble Widow Needs Cash. Nina Arianda Stars in ‘Tales From Red Vienna’
Ben BrantleyMarch 19, 2014: Though it is packed with fashionably dressed sentences and high-calorie bons mots, David Grimm’s Tales From Red Vienna achieves its greatest eloquence in an opening scene in which scarcely a word is spoken. There are only a few strangled monosyllables, like “please,” “no” and “so.” But the silence that enfolds those sounds is so dense with desire and disgust that only a few moments into this play, which opened on Tuesday night at City Center Stage 1, starring the Broadway It actress Nina Arianda, you feel that tantalizing hope induced by first chapters of novels that you just know are going to hook you but good. Sadly, the hook slips loose shortly thereafter, when the real dialogue starts up. But in the spirit of 1920 Vienna, where the play is set, and when Weltschmerz was the mood du jour, let me linger on that melancholy prologue and recall a time when we still had hope that what lay before us would be deliciously dark and enigmatic.
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