THEATER REVIEWS : ‘The Wood Demon’: A Tale of Two Casts at the Taper

A theatrical production is never truly frozen--it can change with each new performance, each new audience. Frank Dwyer’s staging of Chekhov’s “The Wood Demon” at the Mark Taper Forum takes advantage of this fact.

Each role has been learned by three actors. In some roles, two actors split the number of performances evenly, with the third serving as understudy. In other cases, one actor plays the role most of the time but another is guaranteed as many as eight performances. So the configuration of the cast is likely to change from each performance to the next.

In the initial Times review (April 8), comment on individual actors was postponed until another cast had also been seen. On Saturday night, another cast was seen. It’s time for a few notes:

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A couple of men who did the same role in both performances are the production’s comic spark plugs. Dakin Matthews’ crusty Prof. Serebryakov makes his second-act snit truly delicious--as long as you’re not related to him--and he has the flashing eyes of a man besieged by inferiors. One of those inferiors, Eric Allan Kramer’s Fedya, long-haired and exotically costumed (by Holly Poe Durbin), is as vital and virile as he is vulgar. His swagger is unforgettable.

The show’s soul is the title character, played in both reviewed casts by Mark Harelik with the requisite magnetism, yet with the proper dash of self-righteousness as well. It’s a role that could become unbearable in lesser hands.

Two other actors kept the same role at both performances. As the beaming father of the aforementioned Fedya, co-translator Nicholas Saunders takes irresistible delight in watching the younger generations. Anne Gee Byrd’s matriarch is temperamentally his opposite, but she has a great, passionate moment when she hears the fate of her son.

The most interesting casting experiment: Nike Doukas played girlish Sonya on opening night, then the older, more remote Yelena on Saturday. Too bad it didn’t work--Doukas is much better as Sonya. Her voice has a high but husky tone that sounds too juvenile for Yelena, who was better played by stately Lorraine Toussaint on opening night. Doukas’ Yelena also looks too much like her successor as Sonya, Rose Portillo, who is equally wonderful in the role.

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The two actors who play Zhorzh look quite a bit different. Lawrence Pressman is disheveled and desperate from the beginning, while Dan Kern has a natty quality that starts to come apart at the seams in the second act. Both approaches yield valuable results.

Big John Apicella and the smaller Jeremy Lawrence look like opposites, yet they swap the roles of the talkative Waffles and a silent luncheon guest to great comic effect. Finally, while both Raphael Sbarge and John Walcutt are funny and frantic as a rich young landowner, Janellen Steininger is better cast as his sister than Marsha Dietlein, who’s too tall to fit the script’s specifications.

* “The Wood Demon,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends May 21. $22-$35. (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-2000. Running time: 3 hours, 10 minutes.