Portrait of the Artist.(Persephone)(Theater review)

To show brilliance, you have to have shadow; but to show shadow you also have to have brilliance. With the new comedy "Persephone" (crisply directed by Nicholas Martin at the Calder-wood Pavilion, in Boston), the playwright Noah Haidle has taken on one of the Greeks' bleakest myths as a kind of test of his play-making chops--the theatrical equivalent of extreme sports. Haidle, who is twenty-eight, is precocious and formidably talented, with a sort of freewheeling intuitive daring. He has the confidence not to try to appeal to the audience's notion of entertainment, and, as his earlier plays, "Mr. Marmalade" and "Vigils," demonstrated, he has a firm command of the theatrical idiom to back up his ambition for originality.

Here, in the first act, Giuseppe (Seth Fisher), a Florentine sculptor in 1507, chisels away at a block of marble that is slowly taking shape as a statue of the forlorn Demeter, mourning for her daughter Persephone, who has been abducted to the underworld. "Today we might make a great work of art or a complete failure," Giuseppe says. "No time for blocks. Everything hangs in the balance." This being a Haidle fantasia, the statue (Melinda Lopez) reacts. "I am ready, Giu-seppe. Do with me what you will," she says. (We hear her, but Giuseppe doesn't.) The unfinished and immobile Demeter turns out to be the play's narrator: a charming, competitive chatterbox who reciprocates the passion that the artist lavishes on her extremities. "Please rub me like this forever," she coos. "Don't let anything come between us." However, more or less everything comes between Giuseppe and his creation: his Philistine patron, his louche model, and his own priapic preoccupations. Even the sour mouse (Jeremiah Kissel) who lives in Giuseppe's studio gets a word in. "Talking about how he can't represent reality with his hands," the mouse rails. " 'Why can't I have eyes in my hands?' Boo-fucking-hoo." Nonetheless, Giuseppe does finally overcome his block and breathe life into the inanimate; Demeter becomes his masterpiece.

At once a romp and a rumination about creativity, "Persephone" insists on seeing life from the artifact's point of view. As Giuseppe works away, David Korins's adroitly designed pedestal slowly collapses to reveal Demeter's definition and completion. "I take my shape. I come to life," she says. She is realized, but Giuseppe is not. ("He cannot fulfill the potential the world declares for him," Demeter says, adding portentously, "He will not speak for the final twenty years of his life.") The great paradox of creativity, Haidle seems to suggest, is that the artist, in the act of expression, sees deeper into the nature of existence and, at the same time, moves farther away from it.

Still, despite the many storytelling opportunities Haidle takes here--opportunities for surreal wit, visual surprise, and downright silliness--he misses one strategic one: the opportunity to get lucky, narratively speaking. His heroine, who never moves, limits his imagination, as well as the dynamic possibilities of the stage. Demeter is the focus of the play, but because her words mostly go unheard by the characters around her, she has no agency. The corner into which Haidle has painted himself is almost immediately apparent in Act II, which takes place in the present, with Demeter occupying what seems to be a corner of Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. She is now missing her arms--they were amputated by Giuseppe, who destroyed all his other sculptures before he died. She is crippled, and so is the playwright.

Demeter's name means Mother Earth; her bipolar mood swings account for the seasons. Act II begins as a wintry urban spectacle; the usual suspects of contemporary barbarity--flashers, prostitutes, anti-Semites, corrupt cops, graffiti louts, the homeless, the suicidal, rapists, and thieves, as well as pigeons--all leave little dollops of degradation in front of her. The parade of human misery turns quickly into thematic and visual monotony. "I would give anything to look away," she says. "But I am an eternal witness to the world." Haidle's subtitle for the play is "Slow Time." When Persephone does finally ...