OCR Text |
Show v . " .. 4. ' ! ... - .- 4 - IT t' f 7 V- " X W ft iV) Photo by Gallagher As the daughter Zenobia (Kinda Frye) views the proceedings with a stony feeling, the Schmurz (Bill Poore) gets a kick out of the Father (Michael Sharp) while the Mother (Colleen Plant) enters into the merriment of things in a new student-directed play at Pioneer Memorial Theatre's Babcock Theatre tonight and tomorrow. By the French playwright Vian, the play is an example of the "theatre of the absurd." Absurdist Anti-play Staged At Babcock Yet the play, being more lyrical, less violent and grotesque than some of Ionesco (who in one play has a green corpse and mushrooms grow to gargantuan proportions and crowd people out of the room), somewhat resembles the poetical avant-garde theatre of Ghelderode. Lyric passages of nostalgia and hope contrast with surreal elements and fantastical events: a half -human figure in mummy rags, called a Schmurz, is seen by only some of the actors, yet is brutally beaten by all, and dies two or three times during the course of the play; a mysterious force, activated when the Noise sounds, jams doors, cutting cut-ting family members off, relegating relegat-ing them to limbo. In Act II the daughter (Rinda Frye) asks her father what he is going to do; he replies, "The wind is rising. We must try to live." Boris Vian's vision of the possibilities possibili-ties of life together with its frustrations frus-trations is heated to white-hot in this production on the Babcock stage. By MARK WOODWORTH "The Empire Builders," a comic drama in the theatre of the absurd ab-surd tradition, played Thursday in Babcock Theatre. It will play again tonight at 8, as a graduate recital staged by David Dean, a student with unusual insight into and affinity for the avant-garde as well as ingenuity in creating exciting excit-ing theatrical experiments. The mystery of the week has been: Who is this playwright, Boris Vian? It seems he was a French engineer, pornographer, translator of Strindberg, prolific jazz critic, jazz trumpeter in existentialist caves of Saint-Germain-des-Pres frequented by Camus'and Sartre, as well as a novelist and dramatist. "The Empire Builders" premiered pre-miered in 1959, after his premature prema-ture death; it is in the mainstream of the absurdist anti-play, which has both comic and tragic elements and evokes the metaphysical side of experience, with terror as its recurring motif (Brustein's phrase) . The title is, I suppose, a comment com-ment on man's life illusion, which is that he is building empires (as Ibsen's Master Builder builds dream castles) though in reality he is constantly forsaking his spiritual and physical estates. In this play, the family of a retired French field marshal is in a perpetual per-petual state of crisis and on the run from a dread Noise, seeking shelter in decaying houses, moving to higher and higher floors. The father, Leon (played by Michael Mi-chael Sharp) remarks that he has lost the thread (of thought) . He and his family wander in a Kafkaesque labyrinth without a guiding thread to lead them back to the reality of historical present. Driven by voices, noises of the world in chaos and flames, they wander blindly between be-tween birth and death, as do characters char-acters in Beckett, yet they do not simply wait for death's approach but run from it, seek to escape its cold touch by climbing upward. More than much of Ionesco (to whom Vian is indebted), Empire Builders seems closer to reality though colored by a fractured vision vis-ion of mortality and obscene fear of the terrors of death. In it there is less of the "Alice in Wonderland" kind of absurdity, and even less of Vian's verbal nonsense and invented in-vented words and phrases than in some of his novels. |