'Yellow Moon': Boy Meets Girl, and Soon They're on the Lam

Theater | Review of: Yellow Moon (The Ballad of Leila and Lee)

By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
May 1, 2008

Stag Lee Macalinden is 17 and a lowlife in training: a sullen petty thief, a source of pain to his depressive single mum. His schoolmate, Leila Suleiman, a quiet, college-bound daughter of immigrants, secretly cuts herself with razor blades.

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Tim Morozzo

Keith Macpherson, Nalini Chetty, and Andrew Scott Ramsay in 'Yellow Moon,' part of Brits Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters.

In "Yellow Moon (The Ballad of Leila and Lee)," by the prolific Scottish playwright David Greig, the two meet not at all cute one January night at the local superstore, when Lee (Andrew Scott-Ramsay) unzips his fly and leers at Leila (Nalini Chetty). She cringes and turns away, but within minutes she leaves with him. After he kills a man that night, she runs off with him, heading north to the Scottish Highlands.

"I'm like you," an older woman tells Leila later. "I like the bad boys."

That character may be among the few to fathom the allure of the charmless, willfully self-destructive youth at the center of "Yellow Moon," the inauspicious first entry in this year's Brits Off Broadway series at 59E59 Theaters.

The play was well-received at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, and something has been lost, evidently, in the trip across the pond. Directed by Guy Hollands and produced by TAG Theatre Company, which makes drama for young people, and Citizens' Theatre, both of Glasgow, Scotland, "Yellow Moon" feels cramped and confused, holding the viewer at emotional arm's length even in its tiny black-box space, where the audience surrounds the stage on all sides.

On that stage, which is bare but for four chairs, a quartet of actors tells the tale — and a tale it is, seemingly better suited to being read aloud, or set to music, than performed as theater. With Mr. Scott-Ramsay and Ms. Chetty, Keith Macpherson and Beth Marshall (each strong in multiple roles, though Mr. Macpherson's accent is occasionally impenetrable to the American ear) form a chorus of sorts, narrating the action, stepping in and out of character to do so. The rhythmic verse of Mr. Greig's ballad, and sometimes its meaning as well, are flattened somehow in the process.

The elements of the story — screwed-up boy, fleeing trouble, goes in search of the father who abandoned him; alienated girl, yearning to escape her own feelings of worthlessness, follows along — give off a certain after-school-special quality that the play doesn't manage to transcend. The smoldering class resentment aimed at Leila and her prosperous parents is promising but quickly extinguished; that they are Muslims seems tacked on for cultural currency.

"Yellow Moon" is pointedly about the intersection of storytelling and life, about the notion of life as a narrative played out before spectators. It fully grasps the adolescent feeling of being always watched or never watched, the romantic longing to be worth watching in the first place. Leila cuts herself because the pain — the ecstasy of which spreads across Ms. Chetty's expressive face — makes her feel real, albeit the kind of real that she imagines she glimpses in celebrity magazines: "Like she's real like she's in a story. Like she's real like there's someone somewhere who wants to take a picture of her without her permission."

Lee, however, is a poor protagonist for such a story, and while Mr. Scott-Ramsay's dull-eyed, soft-bodied, swaggerless portrayal doesn't do much to ameliorate that, the problem is not of his making. As written, Lee is a narcissistic young everythug, thoroughly undistinguished and for the most part unsympathetic. Mr. Greig gives us no reason to care about him, and so we don't.

Until May 18 (59 E. 59th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-279-4200).