Review: APT's 'The Moors' is thrilling, inventive

By Gwendolyn Rice, Isthmus

Fans of the Brontë sisters and desolate English country manors will feel a familiar chill when the lights come up on American Players Theatre’s current production of The Moors. The slightly absurd, comically dark, sort-of period piece by Jen Silverman is a disorienting mix of gothic tropes turned sideways, the patriarchy turned upside-down, talking animals turned to romance, and a chiming clock that marks time in the 1840s, the present, and no time at all. Directed with icy precision by Keira Fromm, this startling play runs in the Touchstone Theatre through October 9.

As the lights come up, a brisk wind buffets an imposing grand house in the north of England occupied by largely monochromatic women — two spinster sisters and an ashen-faced maid clad in beautifully detailed gowns of black and gray. (The stunning costume design is by Mieka van der Ploeg.) In the sparsely furnished room that has been absorbed by the surrounding moors, there is a sense of both bleak monotony and heavy foreboding.

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