In the end, an artist must follow the muse.
You
never know where it will come from and Daniel Goldfarb is not the first playwright to be
inspired by a news
item. But this one (described in two 1946 clippings distributed with
the play’s
press kit) is about a scheme to kill some 2500 German prisoners of war
with
bread that has been laced with arsenic. A scheme that resulted in many
getting
seriously ill—but none dying.
What
makes this significant is that, whatever Mr. Goldfarb does to dramatize
this,
he is perforce writing a drama about the futility of empty
gestures—about
impotence. Now this too can be a valid dramatic theme—but best, isn’t
it,
if it’s about real potential thwarted, as expressed by the denizens of
Harry
Hope’s saloon, or so many characters in Chekhov plays. Or if the
character at
the center has fallen from his or her version of grace and aggressively
seeks a
way back…like Willy Loman or Antonio Salieri or, in her way, Amanda
Wingfield.
But
the playwright’s very foundation is a scheme that came to naught, so
much so
that it is but a historical footnote, so in a sense our plotters—four
angry, vengeful young Jews in the immediate aftermath of WWII—are
impotent from the start and have nowhere to go beyond that. Well, the
one place
where they’re not exactly impotent is, by (I have to assume)
intentional irony,
the sack. The two men and two women have various and variable romantic
fixations on each other, and the sexual politics figure into the play
even more
than their nefarious plan, which makes everyone involved seem a little
demented—and some of them are. And these are people who’ve known no
prior
glory, who have no nobility to aspire to, who are essentially
self-centered,
and bereft of meaningful loyalty even among themselves.
And
this takes the notion of impotence as a dramatic theme beyond the tolerance point, because none
of the
characters is a universal touchstone for audience empathy, let alone
sympathy.
So all they can do is incur your impatience. Additionally, as an
intrigue, the
game isn’t worth the candle—the plan is so simple that there isn’t much
to discuss, or much to dramatize that we don’t see coming miles before
it’s
enacted, which results in an imbalance of elements: the unsavory
romantic
intrigues take over and the political/criminal intrigue is both
marginalized
and attenuated. As suspense storytelling goes, it’s a very inexpert
job, by a
very gifted (and often very funny) playwright who (dare I suggest)
might have
known better; and neither the direction by Leigh Silverman nor
the work of the cast can do much to rise above it or help it.
Of
course, it’s very easy for me to say Mr. Goldfarb might have known
better; when one is in the throes of following the muse, one often
doesn’t, or can’t, if one feels the path he's on is compelling enough.
The best we can do, if we’re vigilant
enough, is trace the path to where the muse is leading us, look
backward from
that point, and as clinically as possible, ask if an audience would
really want
to follow us there…