Nina Arianda’s career went from zero to 60 in 10 seconds flat — with a Tony nod for her Broadway debut in 2011’s “Born Yesterday” followed the next year by the award itself, for the sexy and twisted “Venus in Fur.”
Now she’s back — off-Broadway — in the new “Tales from Red Vienna.” Set in 1920s Austria, this Douglas Sirk-style melodrama is a stark departure from Arianda’s earlier, darkly humorous outings.
And while it’s interesting to watch this smart, quicksilver-fast performer challenge herself, she doesn’t quite convince in David Grimm’s oddball story of a woman’s sexual and emotional emancipation.
Heléna Altman (Arianda) has faced tough times since her husband was killed in WWI, so she’s game when her frenemy, Mutzi von Fessendorf (Tina Benko), sets her up on a blind date with a lefty Hungarian journalist.
But a big city like Vienna is a small world: The journo, Béla Hoyos (Michael Esper), once had a close encounter of the paid kind with Heléna — who was turning tricks secretly to make ends meet.
Undeterred, Heléna and Béla launch into a passionate affair, and do adorable things like having frolicsome picnics by her husband’s grave.
Eyebrow-raising plot twists and literary affectations — the characters break into French and discuss Mahler — are par for the course for this playwright. Grimm’s best-known show, 2006’s “Measure for Pleasure,” was a bawdy sex farce done in the manner of a Restoration comedy. So deliberately old-fashioned is his approach that he’s given “Tales from Red Vienna” three acts and two intermissions.
It’s all so quaint and not always good, yet the show can be oddly satisfying — Grimm aims for the kind of big emotions that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford once embodied.
But this also requires embracing the play’s over-the-topness, and this Manhattan Theatre Club production, directed by Kate Whoriskey (“Ruined”), plays it too safe.
Arianda and Esper (“The Lyons”) have naturalistic, contained styles that don’t always fit the material. They also fail to generate any sexual sparks between them.
Kathleen Chalfant is her usual wonderful self as Heléna’s maid, but like the other two she’s on a different planet from Benko and her highly stylized mannerisms.
Mutzi is said to have “the irresistible charisma of true lunacy,” and the actress takes that line to heart. Waltzing onto John Lee Beatty’s period sets, Benko fires off passive-aggressive remarks with gleeful panache.
If only her colleagues had followed her lead.