Monsters on Stage

God is dead, at least in theater. No longer do audiences go to the theater to see allegorical struggles between Good and Evil. No longer are actors trained to portray the superhuman.

One of the tools of good actors, and here I refer to Michael Shurtleff's Audition, is their ability to play opposites. According to Shurtleff, considering the opposite of your character's object to be as true as the objective itself helps to create dramatic tension. Michael Elich, who plays the titular Builder in Actors' Repertory Theatre world premiere of Amy Freed's The Monster-Builder this month, is fully capable of playing the duality of a character. He just did it in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's The Heart of Robin Hood last year. Freed is fully capable of writing devilishly charming villains with a core of pathos - see her Earl of Oxford in The Beard of Avon. And that pathos is crucial. Monster-Builder lacks it, all we get is the Monster in her Builder - we never see the man Gregor Zubrowski. Without it in the text, Elich can't deliver it on stage, and without it on stage, the Builder is superficial and uninteresting. He's a medieval allegory - not the kind of protagonist an actor can sink his teeth into and compel an audience with.

The Monster-Builder, according to Freed in the program, is not a direct riff on Ibsen's The Master Builder. Instead, it takes its point of departure from Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, a condemnation of twentieth-century architectural trends that sprang from the Bauhaus movement in Weimar Germany. Gregor Zubrowski is the epitome of the conceptually inaccessible architect, and much of the play takes place in his glass house with nowhere to sit (a monumental and stark design by Tom Buderwitz). The play opens with a small party in which he finds idealistic, beautiful young architect Rita (Allison Tigard) and takes her under his wing. She wants to design modern Commons, accessible spaces where communities can grow together. Zubrowski will have none of that - his new mission is to corrupt this idealist into his vision of a world developed into rectangular gray monstrosities.

The Monster-Builder has the same basic aesthetic as The Beard of Avon - they're both farces meant to satirize a particular aspect of the artistic world. In Beard, it was the Shakespeare authorship controversy. In Builder, it's high-concept architects who design uninhabitable structures. On one hand, Freed and set designer Buderwitz succeed. Zubrowski is an inherently unlikable person - more and more so as the play progresses. There's no place to sit down on Buderwitz's set  - a compellingly simple obstacle that serves to point out the major flaw in Zubrowski's aesthetic. On the other hand, they fail. Freed goes too far in making Zubrowski unlikable. Without the pathos of her Oxford, or some other redeeming, relatable quality, it's too easy to dismiss him as merely a caricature, an allegory for Evil. At the same time, Buderwitz doesn't go far enough in creating an uninhabitable set. When the scene does shift from Zubrowski's glass house, we never have a full set change. Instead, the running crew brings a small flat, desk and chair. They put pillows on one of the glass house's structures to make it into a seat. This breaks the tension of Zubrowski's world, where austerity and art interfere with the ability to live.

It's been a long time since gods (or monsters) - monolithic representatives of good or evil or what have you - have been particularly interesting on stage. Actors are trained to explore the human nuances of their characters, and audiences have come to expect that they do so. So it becomes the playwright's responsibility to understand the actor's craft, and to write plays that work from an actor's professional standpoint. And Amy Freed knows how to do this - her Earl of Oxford is a nuanced man painted in the broad strokes of farce. But she slips in The Monster-Builder - here her sexily sinister subject has only Tom Wolfe's disdain, and none of the love an actor needs to fully engage in the role.