This mammoth production executed by Hungarian film and theatre director Jànos Szàsz may be the penulitimate swan song for the ART's international style after a year of over-produced disappointments, which began with this director's cluttered "Mother Courage" last spring, As the new director of their Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, Szàsz puts his crew of student inmates through an experience which should discourage them from future participation in such experimental meanderings, though that probably wasn't his instructional intent. All the hoopla about timelessness and breaking down the distance between the audience and stage belongs to the 1960's when this script was first used by Peter Brook and his Artaud-inspired "Theatre of Cruelty" in an attempt to shake up the theatre establishment. Forty years later, the point has been taken. In this millennium, perhaps it's time to see if Peter Weiss's text actually has some current relevance.
Of course, the show being presented in the Loeb is based not so much of Weiss's sprawling vaguely Brechtian collage in German, but on the Brook/ Skelton/ Mitchell/Peaslee English-language entertainment immortalized on the screen after productions in London and New York. The director seems to be trying to recreate a production previously presented in Budapest three years ago, probably from the Hungarian text also done in the '60s. Still surely more could be done with this material, given the various political, cultural , and religious revolutions and dissolutions which have plagued mankind since the show premiered, rather than to hark back to Nazi death camps while muddling through Richard Peaslee 's dated music hall tunes. And what we are to make of the changed ending which has an almost nude Marquis commit suicide by having Corday stab him rather than attack her enemy, while all three are in the bathtub, is anyone's guess.
The major parts are cast from the resident company. Thomas Derrah starts off playing an effete Marquis De Sade, but falls back on his collection of previously-seen behaviors and vocal tricks. He can carry any scene, but there's no where to go and his death scene seems more a comment on this actual production. Will Le Bow, as Jean-Paul Marat, is not especially convincing as either a paranoid inmate nor as a historical character. Le Bow too relies on his considerable vocal power, but never comes alive, and doesn't even wind up dead. The third party in the political debate at the heart of the text, Abbe Coulmier, is played as an anachronism suggesting Dr. Strangelove by Jeremy Geidt wearing a Nehru jacket. The enlightened doctor spends most of the play driving an electric wheelchair back and forth in front of the stage emoting his lines over a headset mike. Coulmie-toting guards, in an obligatory and unconvincing manner, just before the mildly rampaging cast gets hosed down by two more keepers. Of the old guard, only veteran Brechtian Alvin Epstein as the ingratiating Herald maintains any through line. His part is more removed from the production than usual, relating to little else on stage.
The love interest in the script, such as it is, between Charlotte Corday and Duperett - from Caen - descends on Stephanie Roth-Haberle last seen as the Marquessa in "Enrico IV" and John Douglas Thompson who recently closed as "Othello". Roth-Haberle as an inmate with narcolepsy seems unclear about her symptoms - she does nap alot - and as Corday often substitutes volume for expression. Thompson is athletic as usual, and plays "Duperett"'s satyrisis with some restraint. However, casting the only African-American in the show as a sex fiend, and then having him perform ape-like gymnastics on monkey bars in a cage might strike some as tasteless racism. By their final scenes, as with most of the cast, the pair's focus is all performing, with little sense of character, just action.
As Simonne Evard, Marat's female companion, Karen McDonald, last year's Mother Courage, plays a consistent if distracting character. Her inmate is slow-witted and obsessive, appropriately overprotective and really seems to be trying to play a part in De Sade's charade. This effort would be more meaningful if other players bothered to react to her. Company member Benjamin Evett as the firebrand ex-priest Jaques Roux literally gets to hang around until his first speech; he's suspended from the opening six feet off the floor on a swing. When he's let down, the character's presence is diminished, however. Roux's tattered monk's robe is one of the few overtly religious elements retained in this production. Weiss's nun-keepers, supposed to be played by large men in habits, have been eliminated, and the potentially devastating "Our Satan" speech is delivered by an anonymous ensemble member. These days when religion and politics are once more becoming dangerously entwined, eliminating such elements from the text seems timidity to say the least, though it may be neccessary in Hungary.
The four musicians who serve as a comic chorus have no unity of style and merely adequate musical ability. Music director Michael Friedman gets good results from his band parked in a corner out of the action, but the ensemble, costumed by Hungarian Edit Szücs in a rag-tag suggestion of the period, is plainly amateur, perhaps intentionally so. Most of the Institute students, and one veteran actress, Paula Plum, go through their paces and perform Peaslee's numbers about as well as the typical college cast. Csaba Horvàth, the director's Hungarian choreographer friend, has given them energetic but unimaginative routines, suggestive perhaps of regimentation, but actually simply boring. The fact that these exercises are performed on a sheet metal stage with a plank covered drain down the middle limits possibilities, of course. Add designer Riccardo Hernandez's rolling cubic cage in Act I, and a set of movable stainless steel tables in Act II - for a big-budget Grotowski effect - and the challenge increases. That the management has been publicizing the result as a musical - not a play with music - concludes the puzzle. The major question the audience leaves with is "What were they thinking?" At least there's hope that Andrei Serban's upcoming "Lysistrata" with Cherry Jones may salvage the ART's reputation.