The Victors

They remain in the cage even during intermission. Thomas Babe never lets the captured Resistance fighters of Sartre's Morts Sans Sepulture (The Tombless Dead) out of their makeshift warehouse prison except when the Vichy officers want them to leave. The magnificent cage of playwright-philosophe Sartre, director Babe, and designer William Schroeder is inescapable for the actors. For the audience it is a powerful philosophical paradigm that is often more lucid than the words exchanged inside it.

Sartre's cage is the problem of life lived in the face of imminent violent death. A group of Underground fighters are caught after a bloody, but unsuccessful mission. Only their leader, Jean (Carl Nagin, also the play's translator) escapes. Later he is taken into the cage under an assumed identity, watches his comrades and lover as they go out to be tortured, and then flees. Of the others, one Sorbier (Dominic Meiman) commits suicide rather than talk, and a young boy (Edward Jay) is killed by his fellows rather than be permitted to talk. The three others in the cage, Henri (Daniel Deitch), Lucic (Kathryn Walker), and Canoris (John Appleby), endure torture, deliver a false confession to be set free, and then are killed at the whim of a Vichy officer.

Schroeder's cage is as successful as it is audacious. In the midst of a cluttered, barrel-heaped warehouse is a tightly webbed bullpen. The leading corner of this cage, facing the audience, is a tall, black obscuring post. The audience can never see the encaged characters without peering through the latticework and around the post.

Babe's direction emphasizes Schroeder's cage. Actors unashamedly play with their backs toward the audience, or careen outward against the flexible but unyielding cagework. All movement in the cage is taut and restricted.

This visual reiteration of the characters' isolation and entrapment makes Sartre's themes unmistakable, but puts a heavy theatrical responsibility on the actors. Their only hold on the audience must be an unflagging physical and vocal intensity. If any effect is dissipated, the audience is already too far removed to pay further attention.

Babe's cast sustains this intensity except where Sartre's shoddy dramatization makes it impossible. Deitch as the cynical, frankly self-centered, intellectual Henri is magnificent. His swagger is far more powerful as potential than as actuality. A painfully trapped man, he smashes into walls and writhes futilely when tied to a chair of torture.

Miss Walker achieves her intensity through a stoic stillness and a searingly powerful voice. Appleby and Meiman have difficulty sustaining the age of their characters, Appleby's stoicism verging on dullness, and Meiman's self-doubts bordering on adolescent hysterics.

The role of Jean is a confused one. Ostensibly the group leader, he is ostracized by the group for avoiding their fate of torture. Jean weakly begs for approval. But since Nagin never appears as a leader, his half-hearted gestures leave one guessing whether he is acting weak or weakly acting.

The total effect within the cage is still one of painfully entrapped lucidity. But the minute Sartre takes his characters out of the cage the intensity is diffused. He has to manipulate his philosophical stances, and as a dramatist Sartre is pretty amateur. He gives us a trio of Vichy officers who are the Enemy and not much more. Ken Tigar and James Woods play two thankless stereo-types, and Dan Chumley plays an officer who has no dramatic or thematic meaning at all. Babe is uncertain what to do with them. They end up serving as comic relief, buttoning their vests to look presentable when a prisoner comes in to be tortured, or else being so evil as to be laughable.

Sometimes The Victors confuses you with details and the seemingly pointless fluttering of some thin characters. But this is only outside the cage. Inside, Sartre and Babe avoid allowing the lines of the play to wander off from each other and the result is a fascinating, lucid view of the tombless dead and the entombed living.