House of Joy

Cal Shakes' new world premiere "House of Joy" wants to be both a swashbuckling adventure story of daring escapes, exotic locales, and court intrigues, and also an impassioned drama confronting the gravity of real human evil.

Playwright Madhuri Shekhar's sets the show in "something like 17th century Delhi," but the grandiloquent introductory poem and shimmering costumery by Oana Botez (the cast look like figures stepped out of a tremendous music box) make it clear that this is as much fairy tale as anything else.

The House of Joy is the palace of the emperor, his all-important harem, and other royal insiders. Emma Van Lare plays dauntless heroine Hamida, a royal bodyguard who falls into danger after capturing a harem runaway and discovering it's the queen herself trying to skip out.

The queen warns that if anyone snitches on her escape attempt they'll be put to death. Of course, keeping this a secret could also mean execution. Tough break.

So within a few minutes "House of Joy" establishes daunting stakes, as the characters confront powers and institutions so far beyond their kin that they could end up quashed without even realizing how. Unfortunately, Shekhar only occasionally draws on the full ramifications of this.

Similarly, Lawrence Moten III's beautiful set accents some of the show's power themes, but doesn't go far enough.

The elegant latticework at centerstage both reveals and exposes what really lies beneath. But it should all be bigger; if the gates of the palace were at least as large as, say, the box-like set for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" earlier this year, it would underscore the looming power of the empire. As it stands, the current arrangement is just not overwhelming enough.

A lot of things in "House of Joy" labor under similar limitations – Lipica Shah gets a juicy role (and knockout costumes) as a brutally pragmatic princess securing power for herself, and it's a penetrating performance up to a point.

But she never becomes either a truly sympathetic antagonist or a villainess of actually mythic proportions, and Shah can only do so much while living in the (pardon the phrase in this context) no-man's land between them.

Why does the queen – Rinabeth Apostol – wants to escape? The predictable answer would be a standard fairy tale trope about personal freedom. But when the actual reveal comes it turns out to be shocking in its frankness, exposing the real ugliness behind systems of control.

"House of Joy" tries to be about a lot at once; the allure of myth and the profundity of history; the beauty of wealth and opulence and the cruelty that buys it; the headiness of an elevated station but the dangers that it invites, and so on.

Sometimes, this is successful. Rotimi Agbabiaka, playing a genderfluid court eunuch whose red-accented wardrobes express both danger and royal bravado, brings the show to a standstill with a spellbinding monologue about the contradictory, self-victimizing nature of power.

But the show doesn't carry off enough of these moments. Maybe director Megan Sandberg-Zakian can't extract enough of them from it, or maybe there's not enough there to work with.

The truth is, "House of Joy" is most successful when it's played more straightforward. For example, Hamida gets a meet/cute-style love interest in the form of a gawky but charming royal doctor (Raji Ahsan), and their relationship is entirely obvious and predictable.

But it's also extremely likable and easy to root for, and in general "House of Joy" does one-on-one relationships like this quite well.

The plot is pretty labored; everyone spends a lot of time talking about that emperor, but such a character never appears onstage. Nor do his two warring sons, who between them consume so much of the narrative energy.

That'd be fine if it meant "House of Joy" was instead a story about the lives and perspectives just of the women in the palace. But in truth, these invisible men still drive many tremendous mechanisms of the plot, often leaving our real heroes to merely describe or react to them.

The play is best when it just lets itself be carried away by spectacle and imagination, which it has in spades. When loses sight of those strengths, things start to break down.

"House of Joy" runs through September 1 at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater in Orinda. For tickets and information, call 510-548-9666 or visit https://calshakes.org