Volpone

The Prologue to Ben Jonson's Volpone promises to "rub your cheeks on, red with laughter. They shall look fresh a week after." The opening of Volpone at Brandeis University's new theatre has produced a curious combination not open admiration, long-lasting laughter, and problems which will last considerably longer than one week.

The new Spingold Theatre itself can produce only admiration--even were it not for the contrast with its predecessor, the makeshift theatre which dissatisfied drama students labelled "The Shell." Spingold is actually a drama center: it includes classrooms, offices for the Theatre Arts faculty, a dance studio, and two small theatres. The main stage theatre itself seats 750 people and has a fully automatic lighting board and excellent acoustics.

Down the hall from the entrance to the building, winding staircases lead to a small art gallery. The exhibit, chosen from Brandeis' collection, will change for every performance; the audience crowds into it before the show and during intermission.

Brandeis' "professional" theatre set-up is being initiated by a cast which is literally and completely professional. The director, Morris Carnovsky, is a veteran of Broadway and Stratford, Connecticut, who now teaches at Brandeis. Of the three other programs scheduled at Spingold this year, one will be acted by a professional company, as will some of next year's shows. Whereas students emphasize that working with the professional cast has been a valuable experience, many fear that the new theatre will never offer students a chance to act; professionals never appeared in "The Shell." The review which appeared in the Brandeis newspaper Monday emphasized this serious and long-range problem. The Loeb has been criticized for demanding professional standards of students; the opening performance in the Spingold Theatre is not even allowing students to attempt to reach such standards.

But this performance of Volpone is worthy of its theatre; the cast does an outstanding job with a rather difficult play, Stefan Zweig's adaptation of Ben Jonson's sixteenth century original. Jonson's version shows a man who tricks others eventually being tricked himself: the avaricious Volpone collects expensive gifts by pretending that he is dying and will leave his fortune to whoever materially proves his friendship. After an extraordinarily complex set of misunderstandings, misdeeds, and mistrials. Volpone is condemned to lie in prison until he becomes as sick as he pretended to be. Following the tradition of "animal fables," all the flatterers who cluster around Volpone ("the fox") bear animal names which indicate the faults they personify--for instance a lawyer is known as Voltore, "the vulture." Almost all of these characters are as avaricious and as absurd as Volpone is, and they too are defeated and mocked at the end of the play.

Zweig's version retains the basic plot and much of the humor of the original as well as adding a delightfully cynical prostitute and some anti-clerical wit. Most important, where Jonson's play mocks many types of human affectation and plays for power, Zweig concentrates on the corruption engendered by money.

The characters do not become repulsive--but the fault they share does. And Zweig radically alters one character, Volpone's toady Mosca, to further emphasize the central theme of money. As his name suggests, in Johnson's original he is a "fly"--engagingly ingenious and quickwitted, but as unscruplous as the rest. In the course of Zweig's play, however, he turns from his original admiration of Volpone's riches and wiles to disgust at the power of money; having inherited his master's fortune, he chooses in the closing scene of the play to share it with the people of Venice.

In directing the play, Morris Carnovsky has played up the broad comedy in Zweig's dialogue. Many gestures underline the characters' faults; for instance, "the dove" Colomba, a hypocritically pious and hypocritically faithful wife affectionately twirls her husband's hair into horns while avowing her undying love. Even the blocking is significant. In an opening scene, Mosca lies at his master's feet while they both drink a toast to Volpone; in the final scene, "the fox" grovels before Mosca.

The actors create the broad, good-humored caricatures which the play demands. They play up the many double entendres, frequently illustrating distinctly off-color lines with distinctly off-color gestures. Carnovsky himself is perfect as the self-centered, conniving Volpone. He accomplishes the transition from the half-dead malingerer to his avaricious, lecherous self skillfully--and riotously. As one of the minor characters (a captain in the Venetian police) Nick Smith steals a scene with his impersonation of a Brooklyn cop. One shortcoming does stand out amidst the otherwise excellent caricatures: occasionally the young soldier Leone understates the egocentric bravado which should undercut any respect we might have for his heroism.

Zweig's Mosca poses serious problems for any actor: he must be portrayed straightforwardly in a cast of caricatured characters. After finessing a series of unsavory plots, he must win both the audience's admiration and their acceptance of his reformation. The boyish energy and joie de vivre which John Cunningham brings to the part help to solve these problems: he clearly enjoys his villainy because he enjoys quick-witted plots, particularly at the expense of villains, rather than because he shares the other charactrs' vices. Cunningham understandably has trouble with the rather mawkish conclusion, which Carnovsky has adapted from the Zweig version without wholly removing its sentimentality.

Howard Bay's sets capture the gondola-and-moonlight atmosphere of Venice while avoiding the stereotyped gondolas-and-moonlight. The scenery is unusually attractive in its own right, particularly one shell-like backdrop--and yet it suggests the absurd opulence and greed which the play satirizes.