ON STAGE: JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

The actor Richard Crawford offers an extraordinary solo performance in Journey to the End of the Night, which ends its brief downtown run at the (literally) underground Gene Frankel Theatre this weekend.

Named after the novel Voyage au bout de la nuit, authored by the notorious French writer-physician Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jason Lindner's play mashes up excerpts from the book and other writings by Céline in a kind of one-sided dialogue typical of one-person shows. Atypical are the content of the writings and Crawford's gift for transforming them into speech.

Céline's literary notoriety mainly derives from the misanthropic content of his writings. (A sample riff on New York City is here.) I've learned to enjoy their tawdry comedy immensely—especially in Céline's book Death on the Installment Plan/Mort à crédit—but I'd never imagined the words coming across as exquisitely fluid and funny as they did when they flowed out of Crawford's mouth, often in the chipper tones of an insouciant, amoral British chap, like someone out of a Graham Greene novel.

The most problematic of Céline's writings have got to be the over-the-top attacks on Jews that he unleashed during the Holocaust. There's some question over whether Céline's anti-Jewish rants were merely extreme extensions of his already extreme misanthropy, which he readily extended to just about everyone (including Nazi types, who reportedly tossed him out of a meeting) and perhaps summed up in a provocative remark ("I piss on you all from a considerable height") quoted by Henry Miller. But there's no question that his timing and choice of target were as bad could be imagined.

Like Céline himself, this play will not be to everyone's taste. (At least two people walked out of the intermissionless performance that I attended.) And Linder's mixing of material, while artful, leaves many questions unanswered (and, perhaps, unasked). But this production is still a golden opportunity to hear Crawford's revelatory readings from Céline's ouevre. He should definitely be considered for audiobook versions.