From the PTP/NYC production of Howard Barker's Victory. Photo: Stan Barouh.

Victory: Choices in Reaction by Howard Barker. A PTP/NYC production directed by Richard Romagnoli. Scenic design: Hallie Zieselman. Lighting design: Mark Evancho. Costume design: Carlie Crawford and Jule Emerson. Sound design: Allison Rimmer. With Jan Maxwell (Bradshaw), Robert Emmet Lunney (Ball), Steven Dykes (Scrope), Michaela Lieberman (Devonshire), David Barlow (Charles Stuart) and others. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes (with one 10-minute intermission). At Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street, 5-31 July 2011. Tickets here.

It has taken nearly 30 years for Howard Barker’s 1983 play Victory: Choices in Reaction (written only eight years after his first major play, Claw) to receive its U.S. professional premiere. The production that began performances last night, offered by PTP/NYC and directed by long-time Barker enthusiast and Wrestling School associate Richard Romagnoli, is the most accomplished and winning of PTP/NYC’s series of Barker productions, which have been a staple of PTP/NYC’s own 23-year history. Romagnoli energetically directs Jan Maxwell, Robert Emmet Lunney and others in this most lavish play of Barker’s early career. It is an unmissable production, and like Soho Rep’s U.S. premiere of Blasted a few years ago, essential viewing for anyone with the slightest interest in the progress of an alternative school of contemporary English-language drama, a stream parallel to the more popular offerings of writers like Tom Stoppard and David Hare, but far more significant.

I won’t rehearse the details of Barker’s play here; I wrote about Victory: Choices in Reaction itself quite recently and focus instead, however briefly, on this fine production. PTP/NYC produces the Barker play uncut, which leads to a running time of slightly less than three hours with one intermission — but it moves. The 33 speaking roles are divided among a company of about a dozen actors, and Restoration England itself is a post-catastrophic world: Hallie Zieselman’s scenic design is a bare stage in disarray, mirrors affixed awkwardly to the walls, chairs and screens strewn about the arena in which the story of widow Bradshaw transpires. The costumes by Carlie Crawford and Jule Emerson are carefully anachronistic, the Puritan Bradshaw in plain textiles, the Cavalier Ball in black jeans and leather, the bankers and technocrats of the new English bureaucracy in staid Victorian dress. Though the play, like all of Barker’s work, is extraordinarily language-rich and even Shakespearean in its lyricism, Romagnoli keeps physical activity spinning through the larger ensemble scenes as well as the several scene changes: a stage itself, like the culture that it represents, in the midst of violent rapid transformation.

The cast gathered here features both long-time PTP/NYC stalwarts and student performers new to the company. Of the first, it must be said that Jan Maxwell and Robert Emmet Lunney (who with Romagnoli formed a loose confederation dedicated to the performance of Barker’s plays, The Barker Project, two decades ago) achieve something of an apotheosis in Victory. Maxwell, who over the past few years has appeared in productions of Scenes from an Execution (for which she received a Drama Desk nomination) and Judith for PTP/NYC and Barker’s more recent Gertrude – The Cry at the Red Bull Theater, simultaneously exhibits arrogance, viciousness, compassion and desire, first as the long-suffering wife of a Puritan leader and then during her course of reconstruction after the Restoration; Robert Emmet Lunney’s Ball, as fiercely loyal to the ideals of the monarchy as Bradshaw becomes fiercely disloyal to any ideology, is grossly crude and mawkishly romantic when he falls in love with the widow. Among other members of the standout cast are Steven Dykes as Scrope, Bradshaw’s former secretary; Robert Zuckerman as the opportunistic and mediocre poet laureate Clegg; an excellently smug Alex Cranmer as the banker responsible for the return of the monarch to England’s shores; and finally, David Barlow as Charles Stuart himself, who bears cynicism, lasciviousness and melancholy as a compound out of which the individual elements cannot be separated.

Victory, as I’ve written before, is a comedy, however much it takes a turn for bitter darkness in the second act, and Romagnoli handles the transition well (the lynchpin of this change being the “Interlude” with the bankers and technocrats that closes the first act). As the play ultimately descends into horror at the end, a wedding celebration careering inevitably towards bloody violence in the climax of the play, five or six characters experience their recognitions near-simultaneously. As needfully chaotic as this may be, they are rendered here with absolute clarity, especially the recognition between Bradshaw and her son McConochie (a delightfully feckless Willy McKay) — from extreme left and extreme right, framing a chaotic center stage, they draw remarkable attention just standing silently, looking at each other.

I have only a few quibbles with the production. Barker’s text appears to render Bradshaw a creature more capable of compassion for her former enemies than presented here; in that penultimate scene, a dialogue between Bradshaw and Charles Stuart ends with Bradshaw cradling the monarch’s head in her lap. When Charles is finally asleep, Bradshaw slips out from under him with disgust; but Barker’s stage directions “She strokes his head” and “covers the sleeping figure with a cloak” suggest pity, not revulsion — central clues as to what the widow Bradshaw has learned over the course of the play. Second, while the use of music from the period of the play’s writing is effective — punk rock from the Sex Pistols and other bands, played quite loudly — the pasty makeup and excessively glittery couture of the costumes suggest more of a resemblance to glam-rock of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane period.

This aside, PTP/NYC’s production of Victory confronts Barker’s language and vision with pitch-perfect precision, with performances and a staging that mark a new level of sublime accomplishment for the company’s dedication to the work of this dramatist. The production runs through 31 July. Tickets are available here.