No New York production this season is likely to test your ability to suspend disbelief more than the Jamie Lloyd Company’s staging of a blazingly reimagined “Cyrano de Bergerac.” For starters, audience members at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater are peddled the premise that poetry slams were all the rage in 17th century France.Even more laughingly, we’re expected to believe that the Scottish actor James McAvoy — who plays the title role without the prosthetic nose that far less attractive performers have used to reduce their allure — is the ugliest person on stage.Granted, the director, Mr. Lloyd, and the playwright, Martin Crimp, who translated and adapted Edmond Rostand’s original text for this transformed and utterly riveting “Cyrano,” did not have naturalism in mind. Although it’s ostensibly still set during the Thirty Years’ War, after Spanish forces had invaded French territory, the mic is mightier than the sword here, with actors rapping Mr. Crimp’s distinctly contemporary rhymed verse. There’s beatboxing as well, adding to the hip-hop-based musicality of the new writing. Mr. Lloyd, who helmed a more conventional “Cyrano” that appeared on Broadway in 2012, rose to prominence as a precocious interpreter of another playwright, and director, noted for his intuitive rhythms: Harold Pinter. In this rendering, the alienation suffered by Rostand’s hero is meant to embody the existential loneliness that, as Pinter repeatedly reminded us, is part of the human condition.How do we all seek to diminish that loneliness, or at least distract ourselves from it? Through communion with others. So it doesn’t matter that Mr. McAvoy’s Cyrano, unlike the figure we’ve come to know through history and literature, looks every bit the dashing duelist he was; what’s paramount is his struggle to express himself — to express his love — to his cousin Roxane, even if he needs to hide behind a relatively dimwitted fellow admirer in order to do so.Mr. McAvoy has a most amusing foil in Eben Figueiredo’s perpetually addled Christian, whose lissome prettiness suggests a boy band member. He’s no competition, one would think, for the leading man’s searing masculinity, enhanced here by a buzz cut and the series of form-fitting, occasionally torso-bearing costumes provided by the costume and set designer, Soutra Gilmour, who in keeping with the driving conceit leans toward modern-day street garb.Of course, Roxane doesn’t get a chance to connect the words that Cyrano pens for Christian — infused here, by Mr. Crimp, with a strikingly straightforward eroticism — with the writer until it’s too late. That’s a particular shame, because the chemistry between this Cyrano and the magnetic, fiercely intelligent, adorable Roxane of Evelyn Miller — one of this production’s happier revelations — is so electric that you’ll find yourself wishing against logic that Mr. Crimp’s revisions include a happy ending.The scene in which Christian unwisely tries to improvise his own romantic appeals to Roxane, only to be saved by the selfless protagonist, is by turns hilarious, poignant, and steamy. As Cyrano and Roxane sit facing opposite directions, after a game of rotating chairs that also includes the villainous De Guiche (Tom Edden, at once dry and slimy), he pretends to be Christian and makes love to her verbally, his speech soft and plain. Little wonder that, rather than dump the innocuous dope, she consents to marry him. If this “Cyrano” proves especially successful in conveying the visceral and sensual power of words, it also pulses with physical energy. The fight movement, provided by Kate Waters, is sharp and muscular, while Mr. Lloyd, incorporating Polly Bennett’s additional movement, keeps his company in constant motion, playing off the patterns established by Mr. Crimp’s rhymes.The cast is predictably diverse; the robustly witty Michele Austin is a standout as Cyrano’s friend and fellow poet Ragueneau — a gentleman pastry chef in Rostand’s original, reintroduced here as “Leila,” a gal with “an interest in literature and cookery.” Adam Best turns in a potent performance as Le Bret, making Cyrano’s confidant and comrade in arms worthy of his ally’s daunting strength as well as his beneficence.Meeting Monsieur de Bergerac anew, in fact, I couldn’t help but wonder what this paragon of stoicism and self-sacrifice would make of the myriad ways in which words are exploited by would-be pundits in our digital era. That’s a subject for another article, or perhaps another play; for now, it’s lovely to have him back, looking better than ever.
