You have to hand it to Karen Allen: The once-heroine of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” made a brave choice for her return to the stage after an 11-year absence. Instead of a familiar vehicle by ol’ reliables Miller, Williams or Chekhov, she picked Jon Fosse’s “A Summer Day.”
Say who?
Fosse, a Norwegian, is currently the most-produced living playwright in Europe. Yet few people, if any, have heard of him over here. Fosse pens sparse, poetic plays in which very little happens, and his style doesn’t jibe with the English and American taste for plot-driven realism.
Written in 1999 and only now making its New York debut, “A Summer Day” is typical Fosse: an austere, melancholy story told in deceptively plain language.
In other words, it’s exactly how you’d picture a bleak Scandi play.
Even in a floral-print summer dress and sandals, Allen cuts a forlorn figure, fragile but also strong. It’s a bright day, and her unnamed character recalls a much darker, stormier one years before, when her boyfriend, Asle, got lost at sea. When she stares into the distance — which she does a lot in Sarah Cameron Sunde’s staging — you feel pools of pain and regret behind her wide-set eyes.
The woman looks on as her younger self (Samantha Soule) bickers with Asle (McCaleb Burnett) about the time he spends on his small boat. This never heats up to a full-blown argument — he’s unsettled, she’s frustrated, they go back and forth without anything being resolved.
Eventually, Asle puts on his rubber boots and windbreaker and takes off for the bay. Or, in this minimalist production, whose main set element is a single bench, he strides down the aisle.
The younger woman and a visiting friend (Maren Bush) wait for him. They wait, and wait some more.
Throughout, the characters rehash the same stuff over and over: Asle and the woman left the city for an isolated old house. He doesn’t care for her friend. Later, the younger self and her pal repeat variations on “He’ll come back” and “Don’t be scared.” But he doesn’t, and they are.
And we see how Allen’s character wonders if Asle was suicidal or if he had an accident, and whether she’s responsible. None of this, by the way, is said out loud.
Little by little, the tension grows, and the playwright, seemingly effortlessly, creates a sense of anxiety. The repetitive dialogue casts a hypnotic spell, an effect visually echoed in a storm scene during which heaving black waves are projected onto three walls.
It’s the showiest moment in an otherwise unadorned staging — Sunde, who also translated the play, doesn’t make things easy for us. “A Summer Day” succeeds in touching the audience without making any effort to seduce it.