‘Tonya and Nancy,’ a soap opera minus soap

The costumes, the choreography, the scripted outcomes — what’s the big difference, anyway, between opera and figure skating?

Verdi had his elephants; Al-Doory has Stant, the bodybuilder and Navy Seal reject hired to knee-club Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympic trials and clear Harding’s path to Lillehammer. Gillooly planned the attack to incapacitate his wife’s top rival, but it turned her into a pariah and made Kerrigan even more of an American sweetheart.

Armen Nercessian (Stant) played the knee-whacking as vaudevillian comedy, dancing a soft-shoe with the collapsible baton in the place of a white-tipped cane that Fred Astaire might have used. Then, to shock the scene back into tragedy, he slams it into the stage.

Once the audience sees the club is for real, Stant surreptitiously swaps it with a foam one that will allow him to whack Kerrigan without holding back. Hunter, like Kerrigan before her, was surprised at how much it hurt.

“We didn’t play the knee attack for laughs,” Searle said.

Banging pianos to represent the clattering typewriters of the newspapermen who flit from Tony and Nancy (and only briefly to Oksana Baiul, who actually won the gold medal in Lillehammer). The chorus stands in for the skating judges, who make Kerrigan’s 5.9’s and Harding’s 5.5’s into a Gregorian chant.

The story is “dark and gloomy and absurd, but at the same time I was kind of moved by it,” Searle said.

Skating around literal truth
Searle, who is Al-Doory’s aunt and already the author of one well-received novella about the skating scandal, was the Nancy and Tonya junkie back in ’94. She collected newspaper clips and took notes in the months before the Lillehammer Games.

About 80 percent of the libretto, or script, was taken from actual dialogue or newspaper headlines or the actual scores the skaters received in Lillehammer. Searle said she made the other 20 percent up to hold the plot together.

In the most obvious example, Kerrigan shrieks the apocryphal “Why me?” instead of her actual, “Why? Why?”

“It’s not entirely documentary truth,” director Meron Langsner. “I wouldn’t think that’s interesting.”

Al-Doory’s goal is to make the viewers rethink their impression of Harding and Kerrigan, maybe send them away with a tune in their heads.

If she fails, Nancy won’t be the only one wondering, “Why me?”

“Our adviser encouraged us to do a string quartet. I wanted to do something with voice and a story,” Al-Doory said, 72 hours before the performance. “I really should have done a string quartet.”

MORE FROM THEATER

Blanchett stars in a fierce ‘Streetcar’ revival

Blanchett stars in a fierce ‘Streetcar’ revival Midler announces end date for Las Vegas show Troubled Broderick play pushes back opening Andrew Lloyd Webber diagnosed with cancer Abigail Breslin to play Helen Keller on B’way   Add Theater headlines to your news reader: