A New Twist to ‘Revengers’

“Everyone in the play is completely evil,” announced British director Stuart Wood. “There’s not one good character--apart from the sister, and I’ve changed the ending of the play to make her fairly evil.”

The play is Cyril Tourneur’s “The Revengers,” a Jacobean thriller of immorality, infidelity and retribution, opening Friday at the Callboard Theatre in West Hollywood. The 26-year-old Wood freely admits to tampering with the 382-year-old work.

“I’ve rewritten the ending,” he said. “It’s a masked sequence, a stylized killing ritual. There’s normally a lot of dialogue that accompanies that: ‘I’m going to kill you/I am dying/I am gone/Oh God, I’m dead.’ I decided to make it more of a dance, a ballet. No words, but there’s an original score. And there are lots of surprises in store at the end. It’s fairly spectacular.”

Looking at the plain black stage--with its steep pitch and one-dimensional “cloud” panels dangling overhead--the word that comes to mind is minimalist.

“The production style is a combination of Brechtian and film noir,” Wood said. “On the Brecht side, it means the actors have to be able to comment on what they’re doing. There has to be a distance between them and the material. So they’ll break the fourth wall and say to the audience, ‘This is what I really want.’ Then the audience is compelled to make a judgment about each character--not if they’re good or bad, because we know they’re all bad--but if they’re right to be bad.”

As for the film noir aspect, “the visual image I have for this is that it’s in the recesses, the shadows. It’s shady. And it has sort of a sleek veneer to it. I see the whole play as taking place in the mind of the central character. He sets things up as he thinks they should be. So it has a sort of careful look about it.”

But not a 1607 look.

“I didn’t want to do it in period,” Wood said. “I think that sets a barrier between the audience and the play. There are certain classical plays one can’t do out of period because they’re so socially rooted in that time. This is not like that. It’s not a play that has an outside world to it. It’s set in Italy because that was a convention of the time. Italians were thought of as sort of rascally and roguish people murdering each other. But we never really get a reference here. It’s a very private, enclosed world.”

Nineteenth-Century-influenced fashions will outfit a cast of 11. For the men, it’s jackets and riding boots. The female look is “more extreme, rather vampy. Tight skirts, hair piled up, long gloves. It’s what the 19th Century did to the body--how it drew everything in, made it tighter. That’s the feeling we wanted to get: that enclosure. Everything compressed. All those terrible things waiting to happen, people releasing the black worm inside them bit by bit.”

The play has been a collaboration between Wood and Joshua Rosenzweig, artistic director of the 15-member Strike Theatre, which makes its debut with this production. (On June 23, the company introduces “3 for 1,” made up of the one-acts “The Fairy Garden,” “To Live and Die Like a Cactus” and “Attack of the Moral Fuzzies,” which will run in repertory with “The Revengers.”)

“I wanted to do a Jacobean tragedy a year ago in New York, so when I met Stuart, it all fell into place,” Rosenzweig said. “It was like, ‘Wow, another person who thinks like us.’ ”

Wood’s projects can be eclectic. Last summer, he directed Woody Allen’s tourist comedy, “Don’t Drink the Water,” in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore. At home, his credits include “Buskers” and “Food for Thought” at the Edinburgh Festival, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “Playboy of the Western World” with his Irish company Claddagh, and the world premiere of Ionesco’s “Journey Among the Dead” at Riverside Studios.

With the encouragement of a drama teacher (“He’s still my guru”), Wood made his school directing debut at age 14. The following year, he took on Pinter’s “The Birthday Party.” “That was the best thing I did for the next four years,” he said bemusedly. What resources he drew on remain a mystery: “I can’t imagine that I knew anything. I’m quite sure I didn’t. It was purely instinct--without judgment or forethought or planning. It was like an explosion.”

Since his graduation from the University of London, Wood has worked almost nonstop. Three days after “The Revengers” opens, he’ll back in England, directing a series of Noel Coward plays for BBC Radio--the first to star Judi Dench. Also upcoming: a West End production of Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windemere’s Fan,” a directing debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the premiere of a new Ionesco play--under the supervision of the playwright.

Successes aside, Wood is uneasy when asked to assess his directorial strengths. “The way I work with actors,” he said slowly, reaching for a cigarette, “is, I hope, in a very respectful way. Directing for me is more of a journey than a pouring-out. It’s like having a photo album with everything out of order, in the wrong place. So you work it through--with a team of people.

“Also, I don’t believe you have to have one line of attack: ‘This is the point of the play; therefore this the way I’m going to do it.’ I think a good play has many points. So it’s not about my point of view. My presence, yes. I’ve organized what it looks like, how it all fits. I’ve made choices. But I try to expose them and present some sort of genuine ambiguity--because I think in classical theater, that’s the root of dealing with these plays. I think we want to see something that has an interpretive line.”