Dangerous Corner

The only thing dangerous about this production of Dangerous Corner is the way it turns the play’s malevolent irony into a sarcastic joke, second-guessing the audience’s laughter at J.B. Priestley’s often improbably revelations by staging each pronouncement with arch body language punctuating stilted dialogue. David Mamet doesn’t just fall into this trap, he leaps in, director’s manual first. He spreads the cast out across the Atlantic Theater’s vast stage, robbing Priestley’s cocktail-party-turned-murder-mystery of its tension.

It is hard to say whether, played straight, Dangerous Corner wouldn’t turn into a parody on its own. But we just might be pulled along, as we were in the recent revival of An Inspector Calls, by the basic ingenuity of the plot’s unravelings. How a small box becomes a Pandora’s box, unleashing in the guests a host of truths from dinner party guests who, from the outside, appear not to have a care in the world.

Most of the cast play the material as if they’re in a nowhere land concocted by Noel Coward after reading too much Eugene Ionesco. Felicity Huffman, so powerful in Mamet’s own Cryptogram, carries some of that brittle strength here, but Mary McCann should stay away from period pieces, and the usually excellent Atlantic ensemble can do little but pose and fake various states of surprise and shame.

For all that, the final sequence, which repeats the opening scene verbatim except for one tiny but crucial difference, proves effective in creating a sense of wistfulness for innocence lost.