Theater has many objectives. It can be a source of instruction and amusement. It can serve as a catalyst for painful emotions. It can operate as a criticism of life and society. It can create a link between the individual and the world. It can build a temporary community among strangers. And, not least, it can provide great roles for strong actors. This season has begun with two examples of this last objective, which illustrates most of the previous ones: Al Pacino's Arturo Ui and Fiona Shaw's Medea.
Pacino first played the role of Arturo Ui about thirty years ago in a production by the Theater Company of Boston directed by David Wheeler. After capturing Hollywood's attention in a Public Theater production of The Indian Wants the Bronx, he did most of his later stage work with Wheeler's group. Pacino has always understood that it is an obligation of the serious-theater-trained movie star to return home periodically to sharpen his craft. He also has the good actor's understanding that you never finish working on a role. His obsession with the part of Richard Crookback, for example--which he also played first with Wheeler's company in the 1970s and was still examining as late as 1996 in his movie Looking for Richard--has proved valuable in preparing him for his work on Arturo Ui, a play partly based on a number of Shakespeare's works, Richard III included.
Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui as a cautionary tale in three weeks in 1941, possibly under the influence of Chaplin's The Great Dictator. He revised the play on and off for the next fifteen years, but he never really got it right. Structurally, Arturo Ui is a clumsy elephant that Brecht tries to pull around by its whiskers. The plot wanders aimlessly around imaginary Chicago streets according to the author's whims and his reading material at the time. Among his satiric plunders are the wooing scene from Richard III, Banquo's death scene from Macbeth, and Marc Antony's oration from Julius Caesar, as well as the garden scene from Goethe's Faust.
Brecht is overly infatuated with his basic gimmick: namely, how Hitler and his goons resemble Chicago gangsters, such as Al Capone, or their Hollywood equivalents. This leads him to interpret Nazism as a product of economic materialism--a protection racket manipulated by greedy thugs--rather than as an ideology of world domination driven by racialist criminals. (He also entirely ignores Hitler's anti-Semitic policies.) And the relentless parallels between Ui's methods in taking over the cauliflower cartel and Hitler's alliance with Hindenberg, the Reichstag fire, the murder of Ernst Rohm, the suppression of the Brownshirts, and the Anschluss grow a little tiresome.
Still, in the late 1950s and 1960s the play provided the Berliner Ensemble with one of its most enduring repertory staples and gave the company's leading actor, Ekkehard Schaal, one of his greatest roles. (In a typical acrobatic moment, Schaal leaped onto a chair, toppled over the back of it, and landed on his feet, giving the Nazi salute.) Although Pacino lacks the same athleticism, he is on his way to matching that legendary performance. So is the rest of this splendid cast. Next time, maybe. The production, when I saw it halfway through the run, was still a bit rough and unfocused, which may explain why critics were discouraged from reviewing it. (There was no official opening night, and press seats were at a minimum.)
Using a slightly gussied-up version of George Tabori's colloquial translation, the splendid Simon McBurney has conceived an unashamedly theatrical mise-en-scene for the National Actors Company production (in association with McBurney's Theatre de Complicite in London). It fixes the action in a 1930s no-man's-land between stylized agitprop theater and tough-guy Warner Brothers movies. Conspicuously footlighted and punctuated by ominous stings and visual aids, with a sound score of tinny Depression-era hits such as "We're in the Money," McBurney's staging alters the perspective of the action at every opportunity. ("Let's look at this thing another way," says Ui, a cue for the entire cast to get up and change positions.)
Although the poor acoustics of the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University force everyone to be a little shouty, the cast is a dazzling assembly of mostly male movie character actors (and the wondrous Linda Emond, star of last year's Homebody/Kabul, in one of the few female roles). To see Steve Buscemi, Chazz Palminteri, Billy Crudup, Paul Giamatti, Charles Durning, John Goodman, Robert Stanton, Jack Willis, Dominic Chianese, and Tony Randall all on stage together--often unidentifiable, some playing small supporting roles in Ui's rogue's gallery of scum--is to have one's confidence in the acting profession restored. A few of the older actors occasionally have some trouble remembering lines. That is one of the liabilities of too much time spent before the camera. But they all give gallant and sometimes penetrating performances.
Randall, the company's founder and artistic director, is especially memorable as an aging, lank-haired Shakespearean actor laddie in a decaying velvet smoking jacket who teaches Ui how to goosestep, cross his hands over his genitalia, and rant. This scene is always the highlight of the play because it reduces Hitler to a tenth-rate ham in the same pinpoint way that Chaplin nailed him as a self-besotted maniac bouncing a balloon globe off his buttocks. (It is only a short step from here to Mel Brooks and the show-biz Führer of The Producers.) Also very effective are Goodman as Giri (Göring), in an outsize striped suit and two-tone shoes, and Buscemi as Givola (Goebbels), with his gravelly voice and clumsy clubfoot. What is lacking in the acting is the feeling of cohesion that marks a true acting company. An all-star team is unlikely to defeat even a second-division club that has been together long enough to learn each other's moves.
Pacino, however, is a company in himself. His transformation from derelict hood into master criminal is virtually a lesson in the art of acting. On first appearance he is down at the heels and morbidly unhappy, his hair tousled, his teeth snaggled, his head stuck forward like a buzzard. No matter how this "simple son of the Bronx" prospers and dominates, he never loses that air of sallow melancholic penury, suggested by the way his ratty T-shirt continues to show beneath his expensive leather coat. When Ui finally wrestles the seat of power from Old Dogsborough (Hindenberg), Pacino slumps into the comfortable leather armchair that doubles as a throne like a disgruntled mutt on his master's furniture. In the extravagant style of some of his recent movie characters, Pacino's Ui can throw a good tantrum when the occasion warrants, climbing over other actors, shaking chairs, rolling on the floor. But he is generally more clownish than dangerous, even when wooing Mrs. Dullfeet with his wheedling tenor or when threatening his enemies ("Nobody yields to force--unless he's forced to") with his self-serving choplogic.
By the end, having warned that "Who is not for me is against me," Ui announces that everyone is free to vote. A citizen who declares against him is summarily shot, and Ui is elected by a reasonable majority--not quite as huge as Saddam Hussein's recent triumph, but driven by a similar contortion of democracy. Unctuous and oily in his victory, Pacino's Ui accepts the people's "gratitude with pride," then (in an epilogue that Brecht wrote later) removes his moustache to inform the audience that while Hitler may be dead, "the bitch that bore him is in heat again." She is indeed. And bearing litters everywhere.
Deborah Warner, who once set Brecht's Chinese fable The Good Woman of Setzuan in the East End of London, has transferred Euripides's Medea to the construction site of what looks like a potential health club--unfinished brick walls, bundles of wooden planking, loose cinder blocks, and a small swimming pool that reflects a shimmering light on translucent sliding-glass doors. Toys are strewn around the area, little boats float on the pool, a child's medical kit and stethoscope lie on the ground. The chorus speaks in a variety of provincial accents--Cockney, Midlands, Northern, Irish, Scottish. Medea's Nurse is a young au pair neatening up the kids' furry animals and toy soldiers. For all the talk of Crete and Athens, we are obviously in contemporary England, listening to women gossip at the laundromat.
Medea's two boys run around in toy helmets, brandishing wooden swords. The Messenger carries a walkie-talkie. Jason is a sleek stud in a T-shirt, Reeboks, and jeans, who dumps Medea in order to marry Kreon's daughter because he wants "security, prosperity." His treatment of his wife alternates between impatience with her jealousy ("Must you take seriously what helps us all?") and a residual sexual need that makes him grope her behind like Stanley Kowalski pawing Stella. Warner's purpose, in this Abbey Theatre production, is to remove the masks and the cothurni of classical characters so as to endow them with a less distancing form of heroism. This effort is only moderately successful. The endless nattering of the multi-regional Chorus can get on your nerves, and you are never certain whether the narcissism of Jonathan Cake's Jason belongs to the character or the actor.
But the idea works beautifully in the performance of Fiona Shaw, Warner's creative partner. Unlike past approaches to the part--Judith Anderson's brooding sorceress, Diana Rigg's insinuating vamp--Shaw plays Medea like a British housewife betrayed by a philandering husband, whom she calls "vomit." Angular, gaunt, intense (Shaw looks like a painting from Picasso's Blue period), she makes her first entrance in a flowered skirt and a cardigan sweater, wearing sunglasses over her tear-puffed eyes. Speaking the colloquial translation of Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael, she excavates the mordant comedy that comes from a pit of festering hatred, surgically slicing everything away from her character except the sinews, bones, and nerves.
It makes for an extremely naturalistic performance, but when this Medea finally shows her fury she is volcanic in the extreme, punching her stomach in rage and self-contempt. Shaw displays the bewilderment, the shock, and the anger of the abandoned wife and the displaced immigrant. She will take her revenge against the king who deported her, the husband who jilted her, and the woman who replaced her: "I've got one day to make all three chopped meat," she mutters between bites of a pie. Preparing to murder her children, she strips down to black undies and returns with a small suitcase, brandishing a kitchen knife and wearing a white smock. The Messenger arrives to describe how Kreon and his daughter have died from Medea's poisonous presents ("her body stuck to him, his flesh tore from aging bone"). And to the accompaniment of deafening noise and blinding light, Medea proceeds to chase down her children with that murderous knife.
It is one of the most harrowing scenes I have ever witnessed in the theater. The children run, screaming. She captures one and a splash of blood washes over the glass doors; she snares another and a stain of red dyes her white smock. Some members of the chorus retch; one does a demented jig. A broken Jason rushes in for vengeance. Medea lets him see his slaughtered children, one boy lying on her lap like a bloodied pieta. In Warner's most radical departure from Euripides's text, Medea does not triumphantly ascend in a chariot, leaving Jason alone to cope with his tragedy. She stays, like a scrupulous housekeeper, to wash the blood off her hands and her smock, while probing her husband's psychic wounds ("You thought you could kick me from your bed and laugh at me") with vindictive scorn. It is the only unconvincing moment in the production. If Medea were so physically accessible, surely Jason would have finished her off. Instead he holds his wife's head under the water of the pool for a few moments and then, unaccountably, lets her go. But the choice allows for a brilliant final moment--Medea flicking water at her prostrate husband, he dissolved in grief, she half-smiling, half-mad, almost flirtatious.
