'Ondine,' longing for a larger life

An enchanting play about enchantment. With Aaron Cromie working his theatrical magic, Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's production of Ondine, by the French modernist Jean Giraudoux, is a charmer.

The tiny stage at the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5 is the perfect venue. Lisi Stoessel's set looks like an illustration from an old book of fairy tales, a little house in the midst of a dark forest. This, combined with Matt Sharp's evocative lighting and Adriano Shaplin's sensational sound design in which storms rage and the air is filled with voices, creates a world where Hans (Andrew Carroll), a handsome knight in shining armor, and Ondine (Ama Bollinger), a beautiful water nymph, can fall dangerously in love.

Carroll finds a high style of delivery that is both dashing and self-mocking, while Bollinger's lithe physicality and French accent set her apart from the other actors (some of whose Philadelphia accents seem leaden in this otherworldly world). She and Carroll are two young talents to watch.

The play seems to be about the longing for a life larger than the practical and the domestic, although the grass, as Giraudoux was not the first to point out, always looks greener on the other side. This longing, it says, is the essence of the human dilemma and also the essence of theater.

The superb Susan Giddings plays both the Old One, ruler of the spirit world, and the Illusionist, who offers theatrical entertainments for the pleasure of the royal court, where the Lord Chamberlain (the excellent Robb Hutter) wryly oversees the fussy protocol. The result of the Illusionist's illusions is a demonstration of the way theater creates life before our eyes: Ondine is meta before the fact.

Cromie adds his own puppets and silhouettes and talking cutouts to rein in the whimsy that could make this show cloying and instead makes it fun. The second act stretched the argument beyond my interest, since the debate between the real and the imaginary, the natural and the artificial was already firmly established.

Finally, I think the play is about falling in love; Hans, who sees himself as a minor character in a story called "Ondine," knows he "strayed from the appointed path, and I was caught between nature and destiny. I was trapped."

It is unnerving to remember that the play was written in 1939, and that Giraudoux, a greatly admired intellectual who headed the French Ministry of Propaganda, believed "There is no theater which is not prophecy."

Ondine

Presented by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at the Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5, Ninth and Walnut Streets, through March 2.

Tickets $22-$25. Information: 245-285-0472 or http://ondine.brownpapertickets.com

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