In “Four Baboons” a married couple break through their mundane life through contact with the oldest and newest energies-those of the ancient past and of their own children. Penny and Philip McKenzie (Channing and Naughton) are archeologists who’ve come to a dig in Sicily. They’ve brought along their nine children by previous (disastrous) marriages, hoping to enlarge the horizons of these Yuppie kids. Instead everyone’s horizons are obliterated in a series of volcanic (literally) events.
In a startling climax Penny’s 13-year-old daughter Halcy (Angela Goethals) and Philip’s 13-year-old son Wayne (Wil Hornef) break away to become lovers, leading to Wayne’s death in a fall that may be suicide. “I want life to be sane,” laments the anguished Philip. But Penny, who has seen the children mystically transformed by their passion, has a new vision of the transcendent potential of life and love.
To his usual blend of the harrowing and the hilarious, Guare has added a vivid dimension of myth. The entire play is stage-managed by the figure of Eros (Eugene Perry), a nearly naked spirit who sings his part in a fine baritone. There’s something crazily magnificent about this play, despite its problems. Its chief problem may be that there’s not enough play. Like so many American playwrights Guare has gravitated to the one-act, 90-minute form-perhaps not trusting audiences to stay awake through a full-length nonmusical. This worked brilliantly in his previous “Six Degrees of Separation.” But in “Baboons” Guare takes on so much that both play and audience have trouble breathing. A child’s death, the most wrenching of tragedies, has little time or space to be fully absorbed.
Nevertheless this is a courageous and mind-stretching work, not least in its compassionate addressing of children’s sexuality. Hall’s staging, Tony Walton’s sets and Stephen Edwards’s electronic score create a luscious, operatic ambience. Guare’s rapid-fire stream of nuance is a challenge for actors-especially nine kids who range from bratty to captivating. Despite a pothole here and there, the challenge is met.
The challenge of “Death and the Maiden” is to fuse the most public and private themes into a whole. Ariel Dorfman, the noted Chilean writer who was exiled during the Pinochet dictatorship, has fashioned his play so that it applies not just to Chile but to all recently liberated societies still traumatized by repression. This trauma is embodied by Paulina (Close), who was tortured and raped by the secret police 15 years ago. Her husband, Gerardo (Dreyfuss), a lawyer, has been appointed to a commission to investigate human-rights abuses during the dictatorship. A chance encounter brings to their home Roberto (Hackman), a doctor whom Paulina recognizes as her chief torturer. In a seizure of violent vengeance, Paulina overcomes Roberto, tying him to a chair, gagging him (with her panties) and at gunpoint ordering the horrified Gerardo to conduct a mock trial in their living room.
Roberto protests his innocence, and the problem becomes: has Paulina’s mind become so unsettled that she has fingered the wrong man? But by turning the play into a whodunit, Dorfman undercuts what should be its most agonizing question: how could a civilized human being become an evil monster in an oppressive regime? This is the great moral question of a century marked by political terror. Shifting the play’s focus to the lesser mystery of whether Roberto is the right man dilutes the play and distinguishes it from the work of writers like Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, who faced this quandary head-on.
Dorfman’s choice of focus opens the door for Mike Nichols to stage the play as a domestic imbroglio, a kind of exotic variation on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Nichols was recently quoted as saying, “I cant see this as a political play in any way, and I consider that a plus. God preserve us all from a true political play.” This is a statement to ponder by all concerned with the maturity of the arts in America–and the state of the theater in particular. It’s hard to imagine a more politically oriented artist than Dorfman, a writer who’s analyzed Donald Duck as an expression of American imperialism, a man who spent days personally delivering copies of his novel about dictatorship to every senator and congressperson in Washington.
No, “Death and the Maiden” is a fiercely political play. For Dorfman, the political is inseparable from the dynamics of private life-love, sex, loyalty and betrayal. Still, he has hurt his own cause: if Roberto had been forced to analyze, justify or exorcise his own guilt, the audience would have been forced to examine the terrifying question of how they might behave in the same circumstances. That might have produced the masterwork that many critics have called “Death and the Maiden.” It might have helped the three gifted actors to reach an emotional focus that they only glancingly hit in this production. And it might have forced Nichols, kicking and screaming, into a demonstration of his own best nature as an artist.
title: “Broadway Mind Stretchers” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-11” author: “Mary Hunter”
In “Four Baboons” a married couple break through their mundane life through contact with the oldest and newest energies-those of the ancient past and of their own children. Penny and Philip McKenzie (Channing and Naughton) are archeologists who’ve come to a dig in Sicily. They’ve brought along their nine children by previous (disastrous) marriages, hoping to enlarge the horizons of these Yuppie kids. Instead everyone’s horizons are obliterated in a series of volcanic (literally) events.
In a startling climax Penny’s 13-year-old daughter Halcy (Angela Goethals) and Philip’s 13-year-old son Wayne (Wil Hornef) break away to become lovers, leading to Wayne’s death in a fall that may be suicide. “I want life to be sane,” laments the anguished Philip. But Penny, who has seen the children mystically transformed by their passion, has a new vision of the transcendent potential of life and love.
To his usual blend of the harrowing and the hilarious, Guare has added a vivid dimension of myth. The entire play is stage-managed by the figure of Eros (Eugene Perry), a nearly naked spirit who sings his part in a fine baritone. There’s something crazily magnificent about this play, despite its problems. Its chief problem may be that there’s not enough play. Like so many American playwrights Guare has gravitated to the one-act, 90-minute form-perhaps not trusting audiences to stay awake through a full-length nonmusical. This worked brilliantly in his previous “Six Degrees of Separation.” But in “Baboons” Guare takes on so much that both play and audience have trouble breathing. A child’s death, the most wrenching of tragedies, has little time or space to be fully absorbed.
Nevertheless this is a courageous and mind-stretching work, not least in its compassionate addressing of children’s sexuality. Hall’s staging, Tony Walton’s sets and Stephen Edwards’s electronic score create a luscious, operatic ambience. Guare’s rapid-fire stream of nuance is a challenge for actors-especially nine kids who range from bratty to captivating. Despite a pothole here and there, the challenge is met.
The challenge of “Death and the Maiden” is to fuse the most public and private themes into a whole. Ariel Dorfman, the noted Chilean writer who was exiled during the Pinochet dictatorship, has fashioned his play so that it applies not just to Chile but to all recently liberated societies still traumatized by repression. This trauma is embodied by Paulina (Close), who was tortured and raped by the secret police 15 years ago. Her husband, Gerardo (Dreyfuss), a lawyer, has been appointed to a commission to investigate human-rights abuses during the dictatorship. A chance encounter brings to their home Roberto (Hackman), a doctor whom Paulina recognizes as her chief torturer. In a seizure of violent vengeance, Paulina overcomes Roberto, tying him to a chair, gagging him (with her panties) and at gunpoint ordering the horrified Gerardo to conduct a mock trial in their living room.
Roberto protests his innocence, and the problem becomes: has Paulina’s mind become so unsettled that she has fingered the wrong man? But by turning the play into a whodunit, Dorfman undercuts what should be its most agonizing question: how could a civilized human being become an evil monster in an oppressive regime? This is the great moral question of a century marked by political terror. Shifting the play’s focus to the lesser mystery of whether Roberto is the right man dilutes the play and distinguishes it from the work of writers like Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, who faced this quandary head-on.
Dorfman’s choice of focus opens the door for Mike Nichols to stage the play as a domestic imbroglio, a kind of exotic variation on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Nichols was recently quoted as saying, “I cant see this as a political play in any way, and I consider that a plus. God preserve us all from a true political play.” This is a statement to ponder by all concerned with the maturity of the arts in America–and the state of the theater in particular. It’s hard to imagine a more politically oriented artist than Dorfman, a writer who’s analyzed Donald Duck as an expression of American imperialism, a man who spent days personally delivering copies of his novel about dictatorship to every senator and congressperson in Washington.
No, “Death and the Maiden” is a fiercely political play. For Dorfman, the political is inseparable from the dynamics of private life-love, sex, loyalty and betrayal. Still, he has hurt his own cause: if Roberto had been forced to analyze, justify or exorcise his own guilt, the audience would have been forced to examine the terrifying question of how they might behave in the same circumstances. That might have produced the masterwork that many critics have called “Death and the Maiden.” It might have helped the three gifted actors to reach an emotional focus that they only glancingly hit in this production. And it might have forced Nichols, kicking and screaming, into a demonstration of his own best nature as an artist.
