If Thy Eye Offend Thee

"FREEDOM IS TO man as water is to fish," declares one of the characters in Bertolt Brecht's The Tutor. In the play, freedom is metaphorically equal to sexual license, so when the lecherous tutor castrates himself, Brecht's message is clear; this misguided soul, in his anxiousness to retain his livelihood, has performed an unnatural act, just like the German intellectuals who kowtowed to Hitler. Lest we construe Brecht's meaning too narrowly, however, he reminds us, in a line emblazoned on the set, that his aim is "to illumine all our sorry state, not only that of Germany." What this production does best, however--in fact, about the only thing it does well--is to illumine the sorry state of the Loeb, which persists in staging mediocre productions of mediocre plays by playwrights who should have known better.

Last year this policy resulted in the performance of such gems as More Stately Mansions, probably the worst play Eugene O'Neill ever wrote, and Ibsen's four-hour monstrosity Peer Gynt, which lost half its audience at intermission. The Tutor, unfortunately, stands squarely in this venerable Loeb tradition, succeeding neither as allegory nor as entertainment.

Brecht's vision is a bleak one. Man, it seems, must plough a course between the Scylla of nature and the Charybdis of conformity to the powers that be. Allegorically speaking, the hapless tutor must renounce his sexual desires for good if he is to continue tutoring young ladies. But while his self-mutilation debars him permanently from natural enjoyment, it earns him only the temporary approbation of the authorities, leaving him ultimately at their mercy. At the end of the play, the tutor doffs his persona and steps forward to explain, for those who might have missed it, the moral of the allegory. "Let his servility teach you to be free," he pontificates. It's a hard lesson to accept, considering that the world Brecht constructs fails to admit of any real possibility of freedom.

THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC nature of Brecht's vision is matched only by the dreariness of the vehicle he uses to convey it. The Tutor is, on the whole, remarkably innocent of such dramatic niceties as plot interest, character development and convincing dialogue. Granted, allegory is hardly the most subtle of theatrical form; still, the minimum requirement for any drama is that it keep its audience awake, and if The Tutor succeeds at all in this regard, the credit belongs mainly to the blaring, percussive music which intervenes between scenes. A relatively short play, The Tutor succeeds at all in this regard, the credit belongs mainly to the blaring, percussive music which intervenes between scenes. A relatively short play, The Tutor is nevertheless slow-moving, dragging along at the pace of a heavily-sedated snail. Part of the fault may lie with director Jurgen Flimm, a professional from the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, but it's doubtful whether even the crispest direction could depetrify dialogue and characters as wooden as these.

In a procession of loosely-connected scenes, characters either mouth inanities or strain unsuccessfully to reach rhetorical heights. An inordinate amount of time is spent in the exchange of civilities, or more often, incivilities; there's one whole pointless sequence, for example, which has three students demanding coffee from their landlady, complaining of its quality and then dumping it out the window. Many of the supposedly humorous lines seem lifted from a late-night bull session in a freshman dormitory, such as this suspiciously misogynous pronouncement:

Women, we know what they are. They don't want it, but they do it. When they itch, they look for someone to scratch them.

The only real laugh in the entire first act comes from an old comic saw--a mother walking in on a stranger in bed with her daughter--which the weary audience, finally seizing upon something it can recognize, greets with a feeling very much akin to relief.

The fact is that while The Tutor has pretensions to both comedy and tragedy, most of the time it flutters droopily at the level of stale melodrama. If there's little genuine humor here, there's even less heartfelt agony. Even the climactic pre-castration scene, replete with lines like "Is it so reprehensible to be human?" and "I pluck out the eye that offends me" is so overdone it falls completely flat. Ralph Martin, as Hasty, the tutor, doesn't help matters any by giving a generally lackluster performance that makes his sudden access of emotion in this sequence seem violently out of place. Bland and mechanical throughout most of the play, Martin's tutor is hardly human enough to merit either our pity or contempt.

In general, the rest of the cast flounder uncomfortably in their roles, unable to do much with such a bad script. Mark O'Donnell as Fritz, the student who makes the mistake of leaving his betrothed alone too long, is even more inept and ineffectual than the part calls for. Derek Pajaczkowski is no better as the loud and boorish Buttress, straining too hard to produce minimal comic effects.

OTHER ACTORS, however, are clearly a notch above their material. Charlie Weinstein's stage presence as Wenceslas, the schoolmaster whose ward Hasty tries unsuccessfully to seduce, almost revives the play near the beginning of the second act, though eventually he too gets bogged down in the inanity of the dialogue. First congratulating the castrated Hasty ("A deed like this can make you a beacon of the school system," he says) and then scornfully branding him a "capon," Weinstein does manage to infuse the play with whatever sense of menace it finally conveys. Emily Apter is also fine in the stereotypical part of the teasing ingenue, and Lorenzo Mariano is sufficiently otherworldly as Squint, the philosophy student.

Usually, the highlights of a Mainstage production are its lavish and innovative sets and costumes. Even in this respect, however, The Tutor, though entirely adequate, is a little bit of a disappointment; if anything, the various low ceilinged sets only add to the confining quality of the drama.

In one of the few humorous sequences in The Tutor, Fritz's father, after listening to him generously forgive his sweetheart's unfaithfulness, presents him with the product of her dalliance, a baby boy. "My son," he says, "having justified the cause, will you shrink back from the effect?" If the effect of Loeb attempts to breathe life into second rate plays is to produce more debacles like this one, a little shrinking back, not to mention a plucking out of the offending eye, might not be such a bad idea.