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September 10, 2015

Richard Maxwell looks at the world with X-ray eyes. Watching the plays of this rigorously inventive auteur, we are encouraged to see the plasterboard behind the wallpaper, the skin under the greasepaint and the skulls beneath the skin. Or, in the case of his smashing “Isolde,” the beams and blueprints — and light and air — that go into the imagining of something as substantial and transitory as a dream house. Or, come to think of it, a play. As a director and dramatist, Mr. Maxwell has applied his unnerving vision to many of the popular fictions with which we entertain and explain ourselves: the spy story, the medieval saga, the western. But with “Isolde,” he has touched down in a world where I somehow never expected to find him. This tale of a romantic triangle takes place, more or less, in a drawing room, the kind where well-heeled people of artistic temperament pursue discreetly dangerous love lives.

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