Jungle of Cities

The plays this summer at Agassiz have all been refreshingly irreverent. Aristophanes got new music and lyrics. The Trojan Women became twentieth century refugees. Measure for Measure was liberated from standard period staging. The Agassiz directors, Thom Babe and Timothy Mayer have cut, adapted, rewritten. Composer Bradley Burg has scored electric guitars in a domain usually restricted to recorders.

But with the production of Bertolt Brecht's early play In the Jungle of the Cities, the Agassiz players have grown strangely timid. Thom Babe has directed a lucid, often striking play. But he and his associates, unawed by the Greeks and Shakespeare, are frightened of Brecht. Babe hasn't dared to cut or revise some pointless speeches and scenes. The play is too long, the play's overall impact, too weak.

Brecht's story is set in Chicago, 1912, where two men battle each other to the death for no reason at all but that they are both alive. Says Brecht: "In observing this battle do not rack your brain for motives: concern yourself with the human element...concentrate your interest on the showdown." The play lives off power, the juxtaposition of the brute vitalities of the prairie born George Garga (Daniel Deitch) and the Malay lumber dealer, Shlink (Seth Adagala).

But Brecht left some extraneous, aborted lines of action in the play and even more half-hearted speeches elucidating motivation, which rightfully enough is an obscene word in a play which is a succession of naked images. Garga has a mother who accomplishes nothing and then leaves in a pointless flourish. And he has a sister copied out of Dostoyevsky, played by Carrie Rose as a perverted Chekhov ingenue.

These elements of a not quite finished play become a damn nuisance after a while. They should have been rewritten. Especially in face of the finely directed and magnificently acted confrontation between Deitch and Adagala. Adagala moves with Stoic strength and speaks a measured rage from behind a white mask of makeup. Deitch's eventually triumphant vitality is less restrained. His eyes grip the audience even with his head hanging upside down off the edge of a table.

But whenever the two deadly combatants bring the theater alive there is a set change. Mother of God, there is a set change. Director Babe cast his show expertly and then he cose a designer. As some kind of answer to Chicago's Picasso, quondam director Timothy Mayer has burst upon the world of set design with his impression of a giant grass-hopper with muscular dystrophy. It is supposed to be a cage of pipe that with the help of movable clothes racks and imaginative props can smoothly transform itself into the show's nine sets. The rearrangement of schematic sets by openly visible stagehands is a standard cliche of modern direction, especially for Brecht, where we're all supposed to be aware we're in a theater. But Mayer has put too many realistic props in his settings, and too many crossbars in his machinery. The first few of the ten-minute set chages are uproariously funny as everything topples into place. Composer Burg, also afraid to tamper with Brecht, accompanies each little comedy with imitation Kurt Weil orchestrations of imitation Kurt Weil melodies. But it's not that funny after a while and it blows to hell all hope of growing impact.

Even in theory the set is out of place. A jungle gym may remind one of the jungle, but it is misguided to try to cage the scenes of a highly dialectic play into once central playing area.

Babe backs up Deitch and Adagala with an engaging ensemble. Patricia Hawkins is Garga's selfish, brightly brainless wife. Jim Shuman, Anthony Mowbray, and Lloyd Schwartz as Skinny, the Baboon and the Worm respectively are a trio of underworld figures who are funny yet always potentially dangerous. And I. M. Lamb as Garga's father is the most amazingly impotent old man ever to live off his children.

But In the Jungle of the Cities should be more than a well-acted mood piece with occasional flares of brilliance. It is regrettable that the Agassiz company saw fit to drop their imaginative critical judgment and stand with unquestioning awe in the temple of Brecht. The Goodhead himself probably thumbs his nose in the Holy of Holies.