Ethical Rogues

BILLED as a "Brazilian Spectacle," a celebration of South American peasant life, Ariano Suassuna's The Rogue's Trial is an often entertaining, somewhat uneven, quasi-insipid piece of theater. It is, we are informed as soon as the lights have dimmed, "a highly moral story," a plea for mercy. The high moral which the play espouses, however, turns out to be that regardless of what one does on earth, heaven is ultimately attainable. It is no wonder that the Brazilian government and coffee-growers have supported the production of the play.

The characters of The Rogue's Trial have an intense need for mercy. The Church, represented by a bishop, a priest, and a sacristan, is responsive only to the needs of the rich, personified by Antonio Morris (Frank Gerold) who claims to be "maintaining the ancient leisure of the nobleman." Workers John Cricket and Chico, (Tom Wright and Felipe Michael Noguera) are exploited and abused by their masters, the baker and his wife (Carlo Rizzo and Patricia Dougan), and all of the characters are robbed by bandits.

The much-maligned, outspoken, picaresque hero, John Cricket, attempts to deceive anyone and everyone, including, at the time of his last judgement, Satan, God and the Virgin Mary. "Necessity is an excuse for anything," he says, expressing the general morality of the play.

Yet The Rogue's Trial is a comedy, a parade of entertaining literary personages in whose characters the audience is expected to delight. As such, it is the individual characterizations which make or break the production and which give it its air of unevenness.

Rolling his eyes, scratching his head and clutching his amulet, Noguera dominates the stage in his performance as the superstitious Chico, continually closing his bizarre tales with his plaintive cry, "I don't know, all I know is, that's the way it was."

Kenneth Demsky creates a truly comic whimpering bishop through constant use of his protruding quivering tongue, while Seth Daniel Riemer twitches, screeches and squeals his way toward a successful portrayal of the greedy sacristan.

With the exception of the narrating, gymnastic clown (Sheira Freedman), who flits in and out of the action, the performances of the rest of the cast do not live up to the standards set by Noguera, Demsky and Riemer.

It is especially unfortunate that nothing more was done by Wright in his lead portrayal of Cricket. His lines fail miserably: they are shouted past the person to whom they are directed or delivered with the ingenuousness of Mary Martin's Peter Pan. Tom Wright is a capable actor. When called upon in the course of the play to imitate other characters, he does so admirably. His own character, however, lacks vitality and creativity.

Richard Pena's directing reaches its height as the eight now dead characters are confronted by Satan in preparation for their final judgements. Merging into one shivering, jello-like mass, the eight actors jitter and moan together with effective apprehension.

Upon losing all his prey to the Virgin Mary, Satan, himself, (Frank Gerold) does an impressive backward flip and performs more phenomenal contortions. This dramatic use of his entire body, is absent in all but this final scene.

The Rogue's Trial, a play whose morals pose peculiar moral questions, is essentially an enjoyable amalgamation of evocative characterizations.