Stunning

An ostentatiously cultivated, emotionally damaged, sexually assertive woman named Blanche moves in and disrupts the household of a brutish man and his innocent bride: Sound familiar? Well, it’s not. Nearly everything about David Adjmi’s Stunning has an original ring to it, from the setting—Brooklyn’s insular Syrian-Jewish community—to the brassy bleat of the dialogue. And in this play, Blanche has no interest in the beast: Her eyes are on the beauty.

As Lily, the 16-year-old bride of a considerably older businessman, the gifted Cristin Milioti gives a performance of startling feeling, at once ingenuous and brash; in a genius stroke of casting, Jeanine Serralles, one of the city’s most exciting actors, plays her hard-nosed older sister. Lily hardly examines the weirdness of her life with the unlikable Ike (Danny Mastrogiorgio) until the arrival of their African-American live-in maid, the ironically named Blanche (the amazingly youthful Woodard), who introduces her to the pleasures of wine, women and postmodern cultural studies.

Directing the play for Lincoln Center’s fledgling LCT3 wing, Anne Kauffman explores the material with her usual exceptional eye for detail. All of the production details are beautifully well-judged—especially David Korins’s mod modular set, a gorgeous analogue for the way the characters get boxed in by whiteness. Toward the end of Stunning, Adjmi slides into conventionality himself in his treatment of Blanche. But Milioti’s Lily is a striking creation: adrift in a sea of gleam and struggling to make sense of the daze of her life.—Adam Feldman

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