31. 3 KINDS OF EXILE (June 15, 2013)
Seeing
the half-filled auditorium at the Atlantic Theatre Company’s for a Saturday
matinee performance of John Guare’s intermissionless bill of three one-acts,
titled 3 KINDS OF EXILE, whose theme is announced in the title, was unsettling.
Did it hint that the production had inspired spectators to choose a kind of
self-exile and stay away? Although the work is problematic, especially the
tiresome third piece, it has its redeeming features. Still, it’s not easy to encourage people to
rush to W. 20th Street to catch what can only be described as a very
mixed bag.
Atlantic Theatre Company
The Atlantic, which can usually be
counted on to invest in interesting scenic surroundings, has gone minimalist
here, with designer Takeshi Kata providing only a set of simple curtains
surrounding the acting space for the first two plays, “Karel” and “Elzbieta
Erased,” and with the curtain suddenly dropped to reveal the bare brick walls
for play number three, “Funiage.” Donald Holder’s lighting does a good job in
heightening the shadows and offering appropriate coloration, but the focus in
these plays, the first two at any rate, is primarily verbal and there is really
no need for visual elaboration. Director Neil Pepe has taken each of these
stylistically disparate plays and given it its own theatrical character, but
the overall effect is flat.
I read somewhere that “Karel” was inspired
by the life of Czech film director Karel Reisz, a fact nowhere mentioned in the
program but certainly likely, considering Reisz’s life. Martin Moran, who last
season was very effective in his one-man play ALL THE RAGE, is the only
performer present. His role is simply that of “Actor,” and his job is to
narrate the story of a friend, Karel, who, when he was twelve, was sent by his
mother to England from Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s to escape the storm
clouds gathering over Europe (the mother, we learn, died at Auschwitz). After
overcoming his lack of English and other hardships to become very successful,
Karel found himself suffering from a horrible rash, covering his entire body
except his hands from the wrist down and his head from the neck up. When it grew
progressively worse and no physician could cure it, the Actor tells us, he saw
a psychiatrist who helped him recognize the ailment’s psychosomatic basis
stemming from his experience with another boy, one he met while traveling to
England, who ridiculed him for his dependence on his mother. The piece is
essentially an anecdote, told by Karel’s friend, and therefore one step removed
from the agony of the original experience. Mr. Moran is skillful at holding the
stage, and varying his physical and vocal attitudes, but his affect is that of
an “actor” performing a story, and I constantly felt the need for a more
relaxed and sincere delivery and one less overtly dramatic.
The second piece, “Elzbieta Erased,”
is the most memorable. Two actors, A (John Guare) and B (Omar Sangare), stand
at podiums as if engaged in a political debate but that premise is soon
abandoned as they rove about the stage, and from podium to podium, in carefully
staged moves in order to tell the story of a famous Polish stage star, Elzbieta
Czyzewska, whose marriage to American journalist David Halberstam, a Jew, made her an outcast and caused
serious damage to her career. A projected image of a large painting of her, in
which she looks remarkably like Helen Mirren, forms the background much of the
time (the original painting hangs in Andre Bishop’s office at Lincoln Center). Her
move with Halberstam to America was followed by many obstacles to her success,
largely because of her accent, and she experienced various setbacks, some of
them quite fascinating, before she died at 72 in 2010. Guare crossed paths with her several times,
and the links between his work and hers are fascinatingly spelled out, as they
are with stories involving William Styron and his novel, SOPHIE’S CHOICE, and
the actress who played the part of Sophie in the movie of that book, Meryl
Streep.
Dressed in formal black, Guare, tall and gaunt, with
his high-cheekboned face set off by a crop of pure white hair, makes a creditable
debut as a professional actor, although he plays not so much a character as a
storyteller. When his own name crops up in the dialogue he speaks it as if it
is someone other than himself. He works in well-timed counterpoint with another
interesting actor, also dressed in black, the smooth-pated, coffee-colored Omar
Sangare, son of a Polish mother and Somali father, who moves with silken grace
and speaks in a thick Polish accent that is only occasionally impenetrable. He,
too, had a personal connection with Czyzewska, with whom he costarred in a
Polish production of Guare’s SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION.
The final, and weakest, play is “Funiage,”
a word that mashes together funeral and marriage. It tells the story of Polish
playwright and novelist Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), who sailed to Buenos
Aires in 1939 as a sort of cultural ambassador to Argentina on the maiden
voyage of the cruise ship Chrobry
only for war to break out soon after. Gombrowicz (David Pittu) found himself
stuck in Argentina for the duration of the war and ended up living there until
1963. What might have been a fascinating exposition of this talented man’s
tragic dilemma of being uprooted by history from his national origins is
presented in a much too busy, pseudo-Brechtian cabaret style, with a chorus
often dressed in bowler hats and tails, an abundance of piano music, and lots
of choreographic movement (credited to Christopher Bayes). Despite Pepe’s
theatricalist staging, it remains lusterless, repetitive, and dull; Pittu is
unable to bring the piece to life, nor is Peter Maloney, as both Gombrowicz’s
father and the ship’s captain.
THREE KINDS OF EXILE has moments of
excellence but it fails to cohere as a total package. Even having to sit
through a play you don’t care for can be a kind of exile, and in that regard I
appreciated the feeling of freedom that came over me when I made my way again into
the streets of New York.
