“Blitzkrieg over Off Broadway”
In case you haven’t noticed, Off Broadway is currently being
bombed by a mini-blitz of Nazi-oriented plays. Of the last four shows I visited,
three labor under the sign of the swastika: The
Winning Side, a biodrama about Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; Hitler’s Tasters, concerning young women
testing Hitler’s food for poison; and the current one, Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, an adaptation of the eponymous author’s
1962 novel about an American double agent, simultaneously working for the Nazis
and us. Only the first of these wasn’t a disappointing dud.
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| Gabriel Grilli. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
He was then recruited during World War II by Paul Joseph Goebbels’s
(Dave Sikula) propaganda machine to broadcast pro-Nazi, antisemitic diatribes to
the Americans, programs that also served as inspiration to their Nazi listeners.
What makes this already unusual situation even more intriguing is that he was
actually serving the Americans, transmitting information of which he himself
was ignorant through coded coughs and stumbles in his delivery.
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| Eric Rice, Matthew Van Oss, Dared Wright. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Brian Katz has directed his own adaptation
of the novel for the Custom Made Theatre Company, at 59E59 Theaters. It’s a
mostly faithful, heavily expository, ploddingly undramatic version that turns
Vonnegut’s metafictional narrative into a metatheatrical play. The premise shows
Campbell writing his memoirs, both narrating via direct address and enacting the
events, while waiting in an Israeli prison to be tried for his Nazi activities.
A fellow inmate awaiting his own judgment is Adolf Eichmann (Matthew Van Oss).
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| Dared Wright, Gabriel Grilli, Eric Rice, Trish Lindstrom, Andrea Gallo. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
The story encompasses Campbell’s connection to a CIA
operative named Francis Wirtanen (Andrea Gallo), who always shows up to get Campbell
out of serious difficulties. Oddly, Wirtanen, a man, is portrayed by an actress
with no pretense she’s anything but a woman. Perhaps this unconvincing gender
shift derives—as per the novel—from Campbell’s code name for Wirtanen, his Blue
Fairy Godmother.
Other principals—played by six actors juggling multiple
roles—include Campbell’s beautiful, actress wife, Helga Noth (Trish Lindstrom),
and her younger sister, Resi. After Helga is presumed dead, Resi finds Campbell
in his crummy Greenwich Village attic, where he accepts her story that she’s
Helga herself. It’s one of several plot twists you have to buy as part of Vonnegut’s
semi-realistic method.
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| Gabriel Grilli, Andrea Gallo. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Among the many others we meet are Karl Kraft (Sikula), an
alcoholic Russian agent with a passion for painting who’s in cahoots with Resi
to transport Campbell to Moscow; Bernard O’Hare (Dared Wright), the American soldier
who captured Campbell in 1945 and seeks to wreak vengeance on him; and Dr. Lionel
Jason David Jones (Eric Rice), a dentist who heads a fascistic, white supremacist
organization seeking to use Campbell for its own racist purposes.
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| Gabriel Grilli, Trish Lindstrom. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
While there’s a lot here that makes Night Mother reflective of today’s aggravated political and social concerns—think
Russian espionage, white nationalism, racial hatred and antisemitism, hatred of
foreigners, and media manipulation—relevance alone is insufficient to maintain
dramatic interest. Katz has stuffed so much incident into his plot it
eventually becomes hard to follow, especially when accompanied by thought-provoking,
if pontificating speeches that need the leisure of reading to fully assimilate but
get buried in the onstage hurly-burly. It’s another reminder of the dictum that
individual dramatic incidents don’t necessarily add up to a dramatic play.
Vonnegut offers various interesting questions regarding
Campbell’s moral dilemma; there’s even a coda with several of the author’s deliberately
innocuous answers. But Campbell is such a cipher, even he doesn’t seem to know
where he stands, or whether or not he was himself a Nazi.
He argues, at one point, that the reason he undertook to spew
such vile garbage was because he’s such a ham he couldn’t resist the temptation
of showing how convincing he could be. When he’s forced to wonder what he would
have done had the Nazis, who considered him an ally, won the war, he’s uncertain.
Even the act he takes to resolve his guilt is clouded in moral ambiguity.
A more concise, verbally trimmed, and dramatically sharpened
script would have helped, just as would a better production. Katz occasionally makes
flailing attempts at stylized business but he generally sticks with realism when
what’s required throughout is creatively innovative theatricality. (And a wordy
script running less than two hours and 20 minutes.)
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| Trish Lindstrom, Gabriel Grilli. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Nor does the design team do much to heighten things, with a neutral
set by Daniel Bilodeau showing a room with rough, irregular planking that doesn’t
correspond to any of the play’s locales. Adam Gearhart’s lighting, even in the
more theatricalized moments, is little more than ordinary, and Zöe Allen’s costumes make little
impression.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother
Night will soon be joined by another Vonnegut work, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, in a return engagement of a recent production
in which this blog found
little to celebrate. Hopefully, it will be improved enough to overcome the
perception that Vonnegut and the theatre make weak bedfellows. Thus far, though,
Vonnegut seems better suited to film, including the dramatically potent 1996 version
of the book, from which this preview clip shows a fiery Nick Nolte as Howard Campbell. There's more passion in the clip's disturbing opening than anything on view at 59E59's Theater B.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
59E59 Theaters/Theater B
59 E. 59th St., NYC
Through November 3