The book (tellingly, a travel guide) was checked out by a mysterious ''A" who listed his address as Dingtao, China. Yet the tome contained a laundry ticket from London. Intrigued, the librarian investigates further. Another bit of evidence leads to Germany; another to a British country estate. Eventually our shabby protagonist has traced this mysterious figure, who by all accounts cannot stand still (or even sit down), across the globe, and, more unnervingly, across the centuries, first to 1873, then to 1754, and finally back two entire millennia.
But precisely who is this ageless, peripatetic specter? Through a series of inspired guesses, our narrator deduces his prey is none other than the Wandering Jew -- the common cobbler who is said to have denied Christ succor on the road to Golgotha and so, according to anti-Semitic myth, was cursed to wander the earth forever, or at least until the Second Coming. And with this realization, our narrator perceives his life's purpose -- to prove the existence of the Wandering Jew, and therefore of God himself.
Of course we can't help but notice that our host -- who has rented the hall, he tells us, to persuade us of his ''lovely evidences" -- can't seem to sit down, either, and that his endless pursuit has made him as itinerant as his prey. Other correspondences pile up (though never too overtly) until this engrossing tale has also become a subtle psychological and even spiritual portrait, perhaps not only of a single man but of an entire tragic history.
Playwright Berger never pushes such larger themes upon us, and never loses the thread of his story, either. What makes ''Underneath the Lintel" so refreshing is that it's a good, old-fashioned yarn, a fireside tale worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle (or Isaac Bashevis Singer), in which the commonplace suddenly brushes the uncanny. Berger expertly doles out his spooky chills in tandem with his spiritual concerns to produce a haunting amalgam that could prove a minor classic.
In the Mill 6 production, 20-something Jason Lambert is perhaps too young to truly tap into the heartbreak of age, and he seems to have dispensed with any attempt at accent (the librarian is Dutch). But his physical impersonation of feckless pedantry is skillful and funny (Lambert trained with the Theatre de la Jeune Lune), and he, too, knows just how to tell a story. He and director Barlow Adamson haven't quite found the hidden mania that our obsessive guide must in the end possess, but they have nevertheless delivered a thoughtful and compelling version of this startlingly good new play.
