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.
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