The New Group, one of the more adventurous and ambitious of New York’s Theater Companies, is showing Clive. They do a limited number of plays each season, carefully chosen, well produced, directed and acted. The Artistic Director, Scott Elliot, is relentless in trying to bring interesting work to his audiences.
We see in Clive, Vincent D’Onofrio, a bravura actor. You’ll recognize him from TV’s, Criminal Intent. He brings the stage to life; we should see more of him on our stages. The ensemble is terrific and it’s like one big acting class with young actors trying to shine in their instant choices to realize a moment and then move on.
Ethan Hawke, a film star, rather than playing it safe, nestling into his prerogative of audience adulation and approval, has carved out a different path for himself. He wants to not only challenge himself, but also lead a meaningful, artistic and for him, healthy, and vigorous life in a very difficult and frustrating cultural environment. It all comes together in Clive. He is the reason for and the fulfillment of Clive. He gets an A for effort and a B for getting burned.
Not nearly all his fault. Jonathan Marc Sherman, says that Clive “is based on, inspired by, and stolen from the German version of Bertolt Brecht’s, Baal.” Mr. Sherman goes on to say that he used a literal translation to do his adaptation. It might have made a difference if the adapter understood German and breathed the nuance and texture of what meaning lay beneath the words in German so that he could adequately find the English understanding for the adaptation.
We all steal. The key is to steal from the best and then do your version, wonderfully. Brecht pinched from John Gay’s, Beggar’s Opera for his Three Penny Opera. He took what he wanted and then made magic with it.
Baal was Brecht’s first play, written when he was 20, in 1918. It is an angry young man’s play. A German young man, struggling with the society he was living in. Germany had lost the First World War. The country was in chaos. Brecht was furious with the theater and its taste for illusion and theatrical magic. He wanted to shake it up, rip it down and move his audiences with his vision of social conditions as they were. He wanted to provoke change by the challenge of his work on the stage. He was audacious, in your face, no holds barred, society, warts most of all. His was a theater of the despised, the depraved, and the despairing. It was harsh …brutish … guttural, like the German language itself. That was his, Baal. Brecht said, “You can have cake if you are prepared to pay for it; even if you aren’t. So long as you pay.” He would make his audiences pay. He’s talking about the down-trodden underclass, but he had a social concern. I don’t see that social concern transposed to our culture, in Clive.
Mr. Sherman has updated language, characterizations, locations, all to make it seem new and shiny today. For all of his changes, unless you find the right equivalents, things don’t remain the same, even if you intend them to equate. Mr. Sherman is talented … there are flashes … moments … some insights, crude but there is an honest attempt at relevance. There are integrated musical doors with strings hanging from them; sounds nuts, but they are woven into the production design and occasionally plucked by characters scratching out melodic sound (not overdone) to enhance and contribute to the dramatic moments. Surprised as I was …they work. Another attempt at style is when the characters break to the audience and speak their own stage directions … a device that added …what? It felt like an affectation of playwriting that was passed off for Brechtian style. More important though, Mr. Sherman doesn’t have to do the dirty. He doesn’t fulfill the potential of the production. He doesn’t show the ugliness in all of its larger than life frontal assault on our sensibilities. Naming rape, seduction, assault, brutality and death, is really not the same as seeing it up front and personal. We get shadows, whispers of grossness, callousness, the harshness of man’s inhumanity to woman, and man. We see versions of our culture’s underbelly, leaning heavily on sex, drugs and rock and roll for its own sake.
Up there on the stage something must be happening that touches me at some point, for some reason. You can’t just tell me that everything is terrible and so what. What does that say about me sitting in the dark nibbling my fear? I go to the theater for nourishment of some kind, not to just take up space and time. Nothing really happens in Clive’s story. He just is destructive to himself and everyone, women, men, virgins, babies, anyone near him, anyone who might care for him, and then, “a rat dies in the gutter … so what,” …and everyone shares the blame, including all of us.
