Debating Terrorism

The ethics of terrorism are on a lot of minds these days. With the constant media barrage of tragic news from the Middle East, questions of "what's it all for" come easily. Can the murders committed by Palestinian or Iraqi bombers be justified if their actions lead to greater peace and freedom for their children? And if we somehow found ourselves in their places, would we do the same, or do nothing? Bombings and assassinations are not unique to the post-Cold War world, of course, and the last few years have seen a rash of plays, both new and revivals, that approach terrorism from a historical perspective. Many of them draw on those most famous of 20th-century terrorists: the French Resistance fighters of 1940-44. Armand Salacrou's Nights of Wrath (1946), making its English-language premiere with the Horizon Theatre Rep., is such a play, putting the ethics of terrorism up for debate in harsh detail through the lens of Nazi-occupied France.

The story of Nights of Wrath revolves around a reluctant Resistance fighter named Jean (Rafael De Mussa) who is captured by the Gestapo after blowing up a gasoline train. His old friend Bernard (John Gilligan), who betrayed him to a collaborator, is murdered by Jean's Resistance group, who in the process are killed themselves. But the dead come back to life to tell their stories to each other, looking back at the events to reveal the truth behind Bernard's betrayal and each of their roles as collaborators or terrorists.

Salacrou wrote Nights of Wrath in 1946, only two years after the liberation of Paris from the Nazis. While that immediacy would have struck a chord with French audiences at the time, the writing and plot now feel uncomfortably dated, which mars the enjoyment of the philosophical questions at the center of the play. These debates are its strongest quality, examining with at times very personal detail the ethical paradoxes of terrorist action and the impossibility of staying truly neutral in a polarized "us versus them" world.

The play, however, takes far too long to develop these ideas (it's a two-hour-long one-act) and along the way smothers them under a story line that to modern audiences appears hopelessly, almost laughably, melodramatic, sexist, and didactic. Not even moments of intense violence and emotional anguish can wrench the play out of these ruts, and the cast and director offer little in the way of original acting moments to help out.

David Looseley's English translation does little to help either, suffering from the constraints of trying to be slavishly loyal to the original text while also trying to update the dialogue wherever possible. The play sounds stilted in the actors' mouths, and they often find themselves in the awkward position of having to use French idioms and speech patterns with colloquial English words like "sure," "OK," and "guy"

Tabloid Rabbitry

Blank verse: it's not just for Shakespeare classes anymore. That, at any rate, is the statement made by Todd Carlstrom's wickedly inventive new comedy Bunnies: Part I, presented by breedingground productions at its Spring Fever Festival. With more than a wink toward that most famous of theatrical versifiers, Carlstrom has worked up a rollicking ramble of a play that is at once unashamedly archaic and deliciously contemporary. Oh, and one more thing: it also features simulated bunny sex. The plot of Bunnies runs like something snatched from the dubious headlines of the Weekly World News, yet it's all based on historical (but still dubious) events that supposedly took place in England in 1726. Mary Toft (Laura Esposito) is a pregnant peasant woman who suddenly starts giving birth to deceased rabbits. Her bizarre births are verified by a small-town midwife named John Howard (Richard Bubbico), who, while skeptical at first, soon spreads Mary's story to an ever-growing number of onlookers and learned experts. The scandal gets out of hand and eventually reaches the ears of the King, whose curiosity about the "Preternatural Bunny Births" (P.B.B.'s) leads to fresh complications for everyone concerned.

That ridiculous 18th-century tabloid scandal of a story is, however, only the tip of the carrot in this quirky and high-spirited production. Director Tomi Tsunoda and her cast have done a phenomenal job in taking the already wild script and cramming it full of all manner of oddball humor. The resulting performance resembles a Shakespearean blank verse comedy invaded by a downtown sketch-comedy troupe that's been watching too many Monty Python reruns.

There seems to be no end to Tsunoda's inventiveness in propelling Bunnies along from one laugh to the next. Even the birthing scenes, which might otherwise have tread dangerously close to reality, become truly bizarre, as Mary's rabbity offspring are represented by small, reddish balls that shoot like projectiles out from between her legs. Anachronisms of all kinds abound in Tsunoda's version of the 18th century and provide an atmosphere of creative irreverence to the show. Other highlights include a ranting expert on unnatural births (Rory Sheridan) who berates the audience about the use of the word "vagina"; an audience with King George (Jay Gaussoin), who speaks in an unintelligible faux-German dialect while wolfing down handfuls of Swedish Fish; and a no holds barred showdown between two "personified abstract concepts." You get the picture.

What makes these moments of comic madness really shine is that they seem to emerge naturally from the plot (or about as naturally as anything that involves humans giving birth to rabbits can be). Carlstrom has chosen to write in a form that could hardly be more archaic, but his play about a 300-year-old scandal comes off like a play about a piece of juicy 21st-century gossip. The language and verse flow smoothly for the most part (a tribute to writer and cast), and the self-conscious theatricality of writing in an outdated style turns out to be well suited to the theatricality of the tabloid-pages subject. Writing in verse could easily have doomed this play to boredom, but instead it makes it funnier.

There are certainly some hiccups in the course of Bunnies, but that may be expected with a new work. The play takes a while to get going, as the audience has to get used to the language and conceit of the whole thing, and it's not until about a third of the way in that everything's firing on all cylinders. The acting also shows some rough spots between laughs, and there are lapses in concentration until the next bit gets going. More important, there are several times when the madcap antics of the production mask the play's underlying ideas a little too much. It's a ton of fun, but there are several good ideas and clever digs at contemporary scandals that get lost in the shuffle. When all is said and done, there is more depth to Bunnies than is necessarily on display in Tsunoda's production.

That said, Bunnies is a hoot and definitely not to be missed if you're a fan of zany humor, classic English plays, or, better yet, both. Carlstrom's highly unusual ideas seemingly could not have fallen into better hands than Tsunoda's, as the production and script play well into each other's strengths. A few new-play jitters aside, this irreverent romp is proof enough that you don't have to be Shakespeare to write a blank verse comedy. Bring your carrots and give this one a try: you may just find a new appreciation for the delightfully wicked world of tabloid scandal, which seems to have changed very little in 300 years.

War Profits and Perils

"You can expect this to be the last war, and then we'll absolutely have peace ever after...how can you reject such a monumental responsibility?" That's a rallying cry not so different from slogans tossed around in America today. In fact, it's just one of many promises offered by the fictional society in Kettle Dreams, a surrealistic new drama by Gerald Zipper now playing at the Impact Theatre in Brooklyn. The psychological effects of these promises, and of fighting a war to end all wars, are the theme of the play, which takes on this dark side of the industrialized world with somewhat cloudy results.

Kettle Dreams depicts a world where new wars are beginning all the time, resulting in continuing success for a small factory that makes chemicals used in bomb construction. Arthur (Chris Sorensen) begins work as a young man in the factory, where he quickly befriends its amiable and pragmatic owner, Charley (Ron Leir). When times are hard during his life, Arthur returns to work for Charley just as his father had before him, and eventually he gets drawn far deeper into the industry than he ever intended. Torn between his love for his wife and baby son and his compulsive desire to provide a better life for them, he works harder and harder from one war to the next, until the factory and its kettle of toxic chemicals come to define his existence.

From a political standpoint, this is a play determined to make a statement, but it is seemingly unsure how to go about it. Chronicling the many repercussions of an endless war that is aiming for an increasingly ephemeral peace, Zipper's script raises some major political and moral questions. In dealing with them, he alternately lays out answers with heavy-handed authority or allows them to dissolve away like another gas bubble in the menacing, ever-present chemical vat that dominates the stage. Kettle Dreams swings wildly between styles and moods to make its points but never settles on a single one long enough to reach a satisfying form of expression. With one minute hopelessly sentimental and the next almost Brechtian in its didacticism, the audience is left uncertain where to go with each new turn in conversation.

Faced with a sweeping vision but a text plagued with inconsistencies, director Nonso Christian Ugbode and his cast have a tough time connecting all the dots. There are times when they find the right mixture and produce powerful, surreal moments, such as a fevered meeting between Arthur and representatives of the government he has contracted with to deliver explosives (including a general played with vicious determination by Michael Flood). Then there are moments when the play swings into a new mood, and the actors grope around trying to get ahold of the material again. Clarity and confusion come in about equal amounts, leaving the play tipping up and down between peaks of intense expression and valleys where the action stumbles to a crawl.

Kettle Dreams has its greatest successes when the actors grapple with the unpleasant truths of their roles in the monstrous military-industrial complex depicted onstage. Leir is particularly effective as Charley, the sadly practical factory owner who can't help growing close to his employees, even as they slowly kill themselves stirring kettles of his toxic chemicals.

Beside him, Sorensen has a huge burden to carry as he takes Arthur from the idealistic youth with big dreams to the battered industrialist of his later years, who declares at one point, "This war is fantastic! There's never been another one like it." His performance is particularly plagued by the script's many changes in tone, but the constant humanity and earnestness he brings to the part are commendable. As Arthur's wife Cherise, Erin Cunningham winds up in the middle of many of the play's more saccharin moments, which she handles with sensitivity, though she rarely has a chance to do more than plead.

When all is said and done, this is a dark play of weighty thoughts and weightier conclusions that never quite pulls off what it sets out to do. It offers a whole lot to think about, including some downright sobering political contemplations ("Our customers were the losers in this war

Love Taking Wing

Love, commitment, marriage

Unfaithful Servants

Dim the lights, hide the evidence, and slip into someone else's best clothes: it's time for rituals. Jean Genet's dark tale of fantasy and paranoia, The Maids, peers behind closed doors into the tormented lives of servants on the verge of cracking, and the masters who unwittingly live alongside them. Escapist Productions's version of this 1947 absurdist classic takes on a work by one of the most unique and defiant voices of 20th-century theater, playing it out with great ambitions though somewhat mixed results. The Maids is the story of two sisters, Solange and Claire, who serve together in the same house. Their work has pushed them to the edge of their wits, so they dream up a desperate scheme to frame their master and murder their mistress. While the mistress is out, they play at the murder, enacting it themselves. When she returns, however, and it comes to the moment to act, they bungle their carefully laid plans and cannot accomplish their revenge. The mistress escapes, suspecting nothing, but the maids' plan is already unraveling at a dangerous pace, and the two sisters are left alone again, fearing for the worst.

The Escapist production at the Chocolate Factory

Shaw to the Core

Worries about the ethics of policing the rest of the world? Concerns about scandals in our leaders' personal lives? Discomfort with the growing role of money and big business in politics? Sounds like a laundry list for a modern American political critic, doesn't it? It might be surprising to learn that this airing of dirty political laundry (and prediction of the future) was done by George Bernard Shaw in The Apple Cart, first published over 75 years ago, in 1929. His "political extravaganza" is being produced by Theater Ten Ten, and if you're a fan of the intricate playing of "the great game" of politics, then this uncannily pertinent classic may be worth taking a look at. Of course, Shaw's vision of the future in The Apple Cart sometimes flies a little wide of the mark. His future world has its share of misconceived predictions and even has a few features that are downright laughable today, such as the economic and military clout wielded by the League of Nations. Beyond just amusement, though, it's fascinating to look back at our past as seen in an earlier era's sense of the future, both for the perhaps understandable mistakes and, even more so, for the odd moments of eerie accuracy.

Shaw's fictional future chronicles the delicate maneuverings of the British cabinet and monarchy during a day of "crisis" for the country. King Magnus (Nicholas Martin-Smith) has offended the government by bringing his charismatic personality into an active role in politics. The debate rages over who truly rules in this democracy: the king, the government, the businessmen, or perhaps even (gasp) the people. Led by the prime minister (Damian Buzzerio), the bizarrely eccentric cabinet issues an ultimatum to the king, demanding that he become a constitutional monarch who only rubber-stamps legislation and lets his cabinet run the country "in the best interests of the people." If he refuses, they threaten to expose details of his less than saintly personal life to the press.

The Apple Cart is pure Shaw, top to bottom: the ideas fly thick and fast, while the dialogue slows to a crawl, with speeches bulky enough to choke a hungry elephant. Call it a comedy of ideologies

The Sole of Love

Shoes. We all wear them, but few of us give them much daily thought. Of course, nowadays most of our shoes are fashioned by machines and sweatshop workers in faraway countries. The shoemaker's art is all but forgotten

Quintessential Shepard

"You know me

Sex, Drugs, and Too Much Privilege

What happens when people who have far too much money for their own good run out of things to do, but are desperate never to be bored? Young Minds Productions offers one tantalizing answer to this question in Sex and Hunger, a new play by Kyoung H. Park that presents one night in the lives of a group of tragically over-entitled young people in a Manhattan penthouse. Park