On the play “Prima Facie,” which opened Sunday night on Broadway, the audience is hit by two wildly different sensations.
First, as we turn into fully absorbed by the harrowing story of Tessa, a superb young barrister whose life is horribly upended, there’s great pain and sadness in watching her undergo a trauma no person should ever must experience. Some viewers will likely be understandably overwhelmed by all of it.
One hour and 40 minutes with no intermission. On the John Golden Theatre, 252 W. forty fifth St.
Then, at curtain call, as we step outside of the drama and back into our seats on the John Golden Theatre, pure exhilaration washes over us — because we now have just witnessed the emergence of a unprecedented recent stage talent.
That may be the sensational Jodie Comer, who won an Emmy Award for enjoying the Russian assassin Villanelle on TV’s “Killing Eve,” and is every bit pretty much as good — nay, even higher — live and in-person.
“Prima Facie,” which played London’s West End last yr, someway marks Comer’s skilled stage debut. In the perfect of circumstances, when a movie or TV star often first treads the boards, they’re lauded for being surprisingly assured and assured — they hold their very own, and also you’re relieved you possibly can actually hear them.
But Comer goes far beyond our basic expectations and into the upper echelons of greatness. The 30-year-old actress is remarkably alive with each the nuclear energy of newness and the sturdy force of somebody who’s been at it for a long time.
And “Prima Facie,” the one-woman play by Suzie Miller, is an excellent canvas for Comer’s prodigious skills.
Her Tessa is a London lawyer who makes a speciality of sexual-assault cases, and is very adept at poking holes — sympathetically, she believes — within the plaintiffs’ fuzzy recollections. She sees herself as a master of “the sport of law” and bats away suggestions that accused men hire her to defend them simply because she’s a lady.
But when she is raped at her apartment by a colleague who she’s been casually seeing, Tessa finds herself resenting after which opposing the exact same system she has played an element in propping up.
The plot, which spans greater than two years, allows us to fulfill a mess of Tessas: the swaggering lawyer firstly, the daughter who fights for her working-class mom’s approval, the fun-loving partier and, finally, the victim who battles against all odds.
Most astonishing throughout are Comer’s quick shifts in posture, voice, pace and body language that immediately and impactfully reveal Tessa’s way of thinking. The actress shoves heavy tables and chairs across the stage in director Justin Martin’s production, and appears drastically different by the top. I used to be in awe that I’d been within the room with the identical person for an uninterrupted 100 minutes.
Comer becomes many other characters, too — Tessa’s mother, her assailant, friends, professors, policemen — but this just isn’t the type of play by which we’re meant to marvel at an actor convincingly playing 30 different parts like this season’s one-man “A Christmas Carol.” It’s Tessa’s journey that’s gripping, and Comer makes it more so.
Miller’s play itself just isn’t all the time as sterling because the actress inhabiting it. At times, the piece invokes old tropes and cliches of one-person shows and veers into beat poetry territory.
And a few will find Tessa’s final direct-address monologue to be more of an on-message essay than an in-character speech. But once you reframe it as a lawyer delivering her closing remarks, the words make sense. Miller’s play works well in the long run.
At my performance, Comer took two quick, gracious bows because the audience kept on clapping. Why milk it? Surely she knows this won’t be her last standing ovation on Broadway.
