ARCHDUKE
by Rajiv Joseph
Directed by Darko Tresnjak
Laura Pels Theatre
Roundabout’s Archduke Website
This continues from my review of Gruesome Playground Injuries. If you haven’t read that one first, click here.
…which doesn’t “complete its mission” either but seems clearer about its purpose.
In it, three young Bosnian men have been lured to a warehouse by a man of some means and power—so it seems—to be recruited for a mission. What they have in common: they’re poverty-stricken and terminally ill. Hopeless and believing they have nothing much left to live for. But the mission will give them a final purpose, and they will be treated well as they prepare. Where they are led: an unidentified house/headquarters/hideout, characterized by a dingy opulence. They will live there while, under the tutelage of their benefactor, a “Black Hand” Serbian nationalist, they train in the forest nearby. Their mission: To kill Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the presumptive Austro-Hungarian empire, in the cause of political liberation and unification of South Slavic countries into one nation. The act which triggered World War I.
Despite its historical setting, Archduke is a rumination on radicalization, the tactics aimed at lonely young men to propel them into violent acts in the service of an agenda that validates their rage.
The theme is very worthwhile. As to the, ahem, execution…this is a mixed bag. Mr. Joseph has envisioned Archduke as a comedy (historically, the actual assassination was a dark comedy of errors), so the three young men are bumblers. Each has his own temperament and issues, but that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between their personae. There’s no mistaking, for example, one of the Three Stooges for another nor one of the Marx Brothers for another; the comedy need not be that broad, but the personalities, I think, need to be that distinct at a core level.
But of course, there’s a trap to that. Since their social isolation and dire futures are what bind them and make them malleable, they need to seem credibly molded into a dedicated unit. This contradiction takes its toll on the three actors (Jake Berne, Adrien Rolet and Jason Sanchez) who are restricted to variations on a theme.
Fortunately the personalities of their master and his housekeeper are larger than life roles performed with commensurate gusto. Deep voiced Patrick Page as Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijevic manages to amalgamize sinister intent, grandiosity and an undercurrent of inferiority complex; and Kristine Neilsen’s Sladjana is informed by her signature extravagant eccentricity. Guiding all this, the direction by Darko Tresnjak is up to his usual cleanly efficient, tone-attuned standard.
But once the boys are in training, story, or at any rate, plot, stops and we’re into vignettes that are, if not literally repetitive, likewise variations on a theme, which blunts suspense. And though in real life, the dramatized characters were in fact the young men who carried out the assassination (one in particular pulled the trigger), the play leaves credible will-they or won’t-they room for doubt. That the outcome can only be be one or the other is clear as soon as the mission is articulated, so we’re not really sweating the outcome, just waiting to see how it will arrive. Hich often seems like marking time.
And when it does, well…that would be a spoiler. But I will say that Mr. Joseph handles it cagily. Such that while we sortakinda know what the theme of the play is…we’re not entirely sure what he’s telling us about it. On the other hand, what can one say about radicalization other than “It’s bad”? I suppose one might argue that in delivering Archduke as a comedy, Mr Joseph means also to show that where there’s enough spirit to provoke laughter, there’s enough light to fall upon an escape hatch?