Benito Cereno

ROBERT LOWELL'S Benito Cereno traces a dark path, negating an American's ideals, showing the invalidity of his perceptions and ending in a release of irrational violence.

The Theatre Company of Boston's production flattens Lowell's resonant verse and staging into an awkward sequence of ironic comment on contemporary America. Directors David Wheeler and Frank Cassidy have constructed Lowell's penetration of an American mind into a simple tragedy of racism.

Based on a short novel by Herman Melville, Benito Cereno confronts Yankee sea captain Amassa Delano with a Peruvian slave ship carrying 80 ominous Africans and four strangely behaved Spaniards, all victims of some unknown disaster, who alternately accept and ignore the American's patronizing assistance.

As the near-derelict San Domingo slowly approaches Delano's President Adams--at anchor off the coast of Trinidad on July 4, 1800--an atmosphere of sultry, pulsing mystery should surround the action, beginning when Delano describes the bizarre view through his telescope: "I see a sulphurous have above her cabin,/ the new sun hangs like a silver dollar to her stern;/ low creeping clouds blow on from them to us."

The TCB production fails by not providing this increasingly foreign and threatening atmosphere. The speech and acting has none of the operatic formalism needed to project what happens beyond specific history into mystery and symbolism.

Larry Bryggman as Delano and Arthur Merrow as his bosun Perkins seldom seem comfortable with Lowell's highly stylized language, and make unfortunate attempts to naturalize it--leaving it stilted and often absurd. The blacks--played by about 15 members of Boston's New African Company -- are effective when overtly menacing, but otherwise confused and distracting, never successfully realizing the foreboding eerie simplicity of a Greek chorus.

Because the cast seems unaware of--or apologetic for--Benito Cereno's deliberate formalism, the entire production loses dignity in its first minutes, and forces the audience to laughter over such accidentally topical phrases as "law and order."

EVEN the remarkable depiction of the master-slave relation between the slave ship's apparent captain, Don Benito Cereno (William Young), and his apparent slave Babu (James Spruill) fails to compensate for the inappropriate tone. The image of Babu as a happy, able and devoted servant seduces Delano into unwitting contradiction of his American democratic precepts: "Sometimes I think we overdo our talk of freedom./ If you looked into our hearts, we all want slaves."

But it turns out that Babu is Cereno's master, that he led the blacks in killing their masters and most of the ship's crew. He is using Cereno in order to capture Delano and force him to pilot the slaves back to Africa.

Before this is revealed, however, Delano refuses to abandon his prejudices (about dutiful servants and degenerate Spaniards) which make it impossible for him to comprehend rightly the situation, even with the mounting evidence that something is wrong and even when his own life depends on correct perception. He insists on the exactly wrong assessment--believing that Cereno's eccentric behavior signifies that the Spaniard intends to harm him.

When the blacks openly indicate their power Delano still can't see them as anything but a threat to his life and a danger to his comfortable preconceptions. He presides while his sailors obliterate them with superior firepower. Babu, the last surviver, petitions Delano for mercy: "Yankee master, understand me. The future is with us." Over the protests of Cereno and Perkins ("We want to save someone") and while the lights dim to blackness, Delano empties his pistol into the black's body.

The power of this final tabloid is more to the credit of Lowell than the TCB. The violence itself is difficult to mis-stage, but it makes sense only if the production's narrow reading of the script is expanded. While racism is essential to Delano's behavior, the TCB fails to suggest that the Yankee would defend his (national) values against any threat--racial or not--not by reason or mercy, but by force. Benito Cereno is less a tragedy of malice or vengefulness--suggested by the Theater Company--than of American blindness.