NEW YORK — Jodie Comer doesn’t just take the stage. She consumes it.
In “Prima Facie,” she is, well, everything you could ask for from an actor, alone on that stage for 100 minutes, telling a tale with the urgency of a report from the rim of an active volcano.
The production is just that compelling in the Golden Theatre, where Suzie Miller’s rocket-propelled play marked its official Broadway opening Sunday night. Comer and director Justin Martin (fresh from his co-direction of the new American engagement of the refugee play “The Jungle”) inject supersonic dramatic fuel into the play, and it’s the kind of evening from which you don’t instantly rebound. You slowly recover.
Here the subject is sexual assault, but don’t think that you’re walking into a morality play. This is a crime procedural from the inside out, the inside being the life and career of a brash London barrister, a working-class woman from England’s North, who’s reached the top of her profession by dint of her work ethic and her wits. The twist engineered by Miller, a lawyer herself, concerns Comer’s Cambridge-trained Tessa defending men accused of perpetrating sexual violence against women.
Her not-always-admirable superpower is a cutlass-sharp courtroom prowess and understanding that the criminal justice system works against the victim. The law is her accomplice. She cuts holes in women’s accounts with the skill of a Savile Row tailor.
Until, of course, the law is her adversary, after a night in which Tessa’s world collapses, and all of the codes she’s lived by come back to haunt her. The system now humiliates her, with skepticism and harrowing interrogations and threats to her livelihood, her safety, her pride. The contrast between the first and second halves of the play could not be starker. The fragile screen separating savvy high-flyer and bereft sufferer cracks, irrevocably.
I was captivated the first time I saw Comer perform this piece last year, in London’s West End. I was even more mesmerized the second time. The act is prodigious in every respect. Framed by set and costume designer Miriam Buether’s wall of case-filled binders — illuminated from time to time by Natasha Chivers as if they’re sacred manuscripts — Comer unspools Tessa’s nightmare at breakneck pace. A manic energy is apparent, a compulsion to relate the character’s experience with the precision of a member of London’s Inns of Court.
