Reviewed
by Will Stackman
The
final offering for the season from the A.R.T. is another dismal reconception of
a minor classic, this time one of Pierre Marivaux's philosophical comedies from
pre-Revolutionary France. While their joint production with the SITI company of
his "La Dispute" had some amusement value, in part from its evocative
setting, this distorted version of "L'Ile des Esclaves" is set in grungy
theatrical locale, this time by David Zinn, using ideas left over from "Orpheus
X," which ran last month. Instead of an island off Greece ruled by escaped
slaves, director Robert Woodruff has designated the locale to be a rundown basement club
featuring drag queens, presided over by Trivelin, a moralist played byThomas
Derrah in a
blond wig. This M.C. with a suggestive name is the one of the five original
speaking characters in Marivaux's 11 scene dissertation on overbearing masters
and long-suffering servants, and their mutual dependence.
The
first pairing of master and slave washed up on this mythical shore is John
Campion, whose
most notable part at the ART in the past few seasons was Oedipus, as irasible
Iphicrate with ART veteran, Remo Airaldi as Arlequin, his downtrodden smart-aleck slave.
Next comes ART original member Karen MacDonald as Euphrosine, a hard
taskmistress and her sullen maid, Cleanthis, played by newcomer Fiona
Gallagher.
MacDonald will be reprising her award-winning performance in Sartre's "No
Exit" later in the month, along with Will Lebow and Paula Plum on the
teeter-totter set. The premise of Marivaux's comedy. blown much out of
proportion in this production, is that under the rule of this island's
inhabitants, masters must become slaves and vice versa. Indeed, we first see
MacDonald in sort of a home movie, which Trivelin watches as sort of a
prologue, hurrying to the theatre in costume followed by Gallagher. The
impression is of a madwoman and her keeper, given the elaborate get-up Zinn has
devised for her. Her finery however is nothing compared the showgirl outfits on
the five professional drag queens representing the inhabitants.
Using
carnival logic, this chorus (Freddy Franklin, Ryan Carpenter, Adam Shanahan, Airline Inthyrath, and Santio C. Cupon) is supposed to highlight the
reversal of the castaway's fortunes . Instead their high-volume intrusions manage
to overshadow the arguments of the play, try as the experienced cast might to
get through translated versions of the original confrontations. By the time the
situation is reconciled, with mutual apologies, the audience is just glad the
90 minutes of high-volume antics are over, though some might find such
over-the-top camping "fun." It should be noted that the
"insulaires" are seen only briefly in the original script when the
four shipwrecked principals are introduced. Here they intimidate them, and at
one point, having taken her clothes and given her a pig mask, strap MacDonald
to a knife throwers target, spinning her head over heels while throwing paint
at her. One gets the feeling that the director feels the need to drive whatever
point he's trying to make home, or perhaps keep the audience paying attention
more to his physical images than Marivaux's intellectual content.
While
Campion and Airaldi manage to establish a layered conflict in scene one, the
rest of the evening lurches from strident argument to outlandish lip-syncing by
the chorus.. The original show played 127 times between 1725-1768 in the
repertory of the Theatre-Italien, an evolved commedia troupe, despite the
French court's lack of enthusiasm for its preaching against the mistreatment of
servants. The play was revived in the repertory of the Comedie-Francaise in
1930 and has had success recently in English language productions even here in
the States. But ramping up the stakes of "L'Ile des Esclaves" rather
timid morality to the level of this outlandish effort, as in the ART's previous
excursion with "La Dispute," results in another exercise of blatant
theatricality, this time tinged with the theatre of cruelty accomplishing
little more than titillation. If there's a lesson about man's inhumanity to man
being taught, it's more typified by the artistic license exercised onstage than
by anything in this ill-served text. Admittedly, the original is short--the
ART's production runs 90 minutes continuous with interpolations--but Marivaux's
drama is well-constructed and deserves to be heard for itself. It would be
interesting to see "Island of Slaves" presented in conjunction with
an actual commedia piece from the period, for example, rather than inflated by
spectacle. Reminding the audience of the premises underlying the play would be
more instructive, and probably more entertaining, than all the "booty
shaking" and faux humiliation currently being presented.