A deadly virus is wiping out
humanity, promising slow, lingering death to everyone
over age 35. Only one man is capable of stopping the
pandemic. A poorhouse doctor named Galen has discovered
a miracle cure—a secret he refuses to share until the
governments of the world agree to end all wars.
This is the story of Karel Capek’s 1936 satire,
The White Plague, currently being updated and
produced by The Subjective Theatre Company. The show is
part of The UnConvention, a festival of six
politically-themed shows intended to spur dialogue and
encourage activism.
Sounds interesting, right?
Wrong. Way wrong.
There is a reason you do not
see lots of revivals of The White Plague—it is an
absolutely terrible play. Subjective tries valiantly to
transform it into a biting satire of the Bush
administration, but only demonstrates that you cannot
make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or a decent play
out of a disorganized polemic.
The show starts
out on a promising note, because Subjective’s designers
have transformed the Loft theater into a weird and
creepy alternate world reminiscent of a Jeunet film.
Anguished whispers echo through the darkness as plague
doctors in frightening, birdlike environment suits
shepherd crowds of the infected through a maze of
scaffolds and fences. But as the opening scenes drag on
and nothing interesting happens, the cracks start to
show.
The White Plague blends endless
exposition with bizarre satire of the political and
medical institutions of Eastern Europe in the 1930's.
Kapek seems determined to address every issue under the
sun including medical incompetence, privateering
doctors, warmongering governments, overpopulation,
joblessness and terrorism. Each line raises some new
hobgoblin, but the action neither delves into these
problems nor addresses them.
The tragedy of this
show is that both the directing and writing are full of
the seeds of interesting ideas, but neither director nor
writer demonstrates an ability to develop these ideas
into anything that makes sense. A clear vision of what
the play is about and an expert cutting of the text
might have salvaged this show, but the people at
Subjective do not seem to have either.
The
production aspires to satire, but its world of
blood-thirsty war leaders and psychotically evil weapons
manufacturers is so far over-the-top it loses the
ability to mirror the problems of the real world. Every
time the Marshal of the play's nameless fictional nation
screams "I'd rather see everybody dead than have peace,"
I found myself wondering what this raving lunatic has to
do with America. The implication that our leaders are
warmongers is obvious, but they are not so unsubtle.
The problem is, the characters and situations do
not have enough internal reality or continuity to create
a “world of the play” that could stand apart from
analogies to current politics. Neither is the show a
cautionary tale, because it tries to caution us against
everything at once. Even as a play of ideas White
Plague fails, because it does not explore the moral
or political ramifactions of the situations it creates.
The director seems clueless about how to use
staging, gestures and tempo to emphasize the elements
that are important in a scene. On top of not knowing
what to think, we frequently do not even know where on
stage to look. Scenes are loaded with unnecessary and
distracting stage business, but the dialogue stops for
every major physical action—even if it is just crossing
the stage. Because the audience is divided into
sections, actions that reveal major plot points are
frequently concealed from half the viewers.
Other “avant-garde” touches add nothing except
pretension. At one point, a portion of the audience is
hustled on stage and then made to stand there, doing
nothing, for several scenes.
The play is also
inexcusably slow. Twenty minutes could be cut simply by
encouraging the actors to pick up their cues, a
critique that ought to be reserved for high school
theatricals.
The performances are mixed. While
many of the actors seem helpless pawns to the general
confusion, shouting through their lines and stumbling
over their blocking; others are terrific. Johnny Co.
Green, as the raving Marshal, and Corey Peterson, as
Doctor Segalius, transform their unbelievable characters
into wild and wry vaudeville caricatures, giving
White Plague its few moments of genuine hilarity.
Darius Stone, as the toadlike munitions
manufacturer Baron Krug, has both skill as an actor and
the luck to play a character with identifiable feelings
and conflicts. When Krug, dying of the plague, confronts
Galen to beg for his life, we are transported for a
moment into a different play. Passions rise, powerful
motivations are thrown into conflict, and life and death
hang in the balance. For a moment, there is drama. Then
it ends.
The stated purpose of The UnConvention
is to use theater to inspire political dialogue, but
even at that, White Plague fails. At the end of
two-and-a-quarter hours in the theater watching this
incoherent political rant, I was bored, confused, and
tired of trying to figure out what was going on. I did
not want to talk about participatory democracy. I wanted
to go home to bed.
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The
Loft Theatre |
Category:
Drama
Written by: By Karel
Capek
Directed by: Directed by Zachary
R. Mannheimer
Produced by: THE
SUBJECTIVE THEATRE COMPANY
Opens: August
27
Closes: September 11
Running
Time: 2 hrs, 15
minutes
Theater: The Loft
Theatre
Address: 312 West 36th Street,
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10018
Mapquest Directions
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Tickets: $0.00
Discount
passes to the six mainstage shows of The UnConvention
are available at
www.theatermania.com.
Phone:
212-561-0636
Online Ticketing: Theatermania
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Creative TeamWritten
by: Carel Kapek
Directed by:
Zachary Mannheimer
Produced by: The
Subjective Theatre Company
Assistant
Director: Elisa Malona
Light
Designer: Joshua P. Hinden
Sound
Designer: Dan Aquisto
Set and Makeup
Designer: Taleen Jamgotchian
Costume
Designer: Kay Lee
Graphic
Designer: Brian
Corr
Dramaturg: Joanne
Hildebrand
CastJesse Alick, Isaac Byrne,
Steven Gillenwater, Johnny Co. Green, George Faya,
Frances Mercanti-Anthony, Amy Seale Moore, Cory
Peterson, Vanessa Sparling, Darius Stone, Andy
Waldschmidt, Kendra Ware
CrewProduction
Manager: Monica Freriks
Stage
Manager: Linda A.
Fessenden
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