No Future For Savages

SAVAGES is a doughnut--there's plenty around the edges but not too much in the middle. Sometimes flimsy plots demand a suspension of belief too great for the audience to bear; in this case the leaden weight of an overdrawn script buries the dedicated acting jobs that try to save the show. Christopher Hampton's Savages, unfortunately, is more fundamentally flawed, for it founders when its focus--a Brazilian Indian tribe on the verge of extinction--obscures or perhaps just misses entirely all the other elements in this would-be "major statement." Socialism, repression, guilt and the excesses of exploitative capitalism are all mushed into the play, but any number of well-executed tribal rituals cannot make them fit into a single theatrical experience.

The vehicle supposed to bear this burden is the kidnapping and murder of a minor British embassy official named West (well-played by Trevor Barnes). Throughout the play he is the detached observer of Indians either viciously slaughtered or "civilized." West dies eventually--killed for no reason by Carlos (Jeff Horwitz), an otherwise affable guerrilla, in a mockery of the Marxist's own vision of justice.

The cast tries to make this thing go--certainly they try. The representation of the tribe stands out in this show--breaking the ponderous script. The cast, and special advisers to the show such as David Maybury-Lewis, professor of Anthropology, have put much time and effort into reproducing a cultural microcosm of an endangered tribe. The rituals and dances, the makeup and music, all conspire to take your mind off the surrounding baggage of the rest of the show.

But no amount of dancing can distract the audience long enough. With all the problems of the world to deal with, the play just wanders like a chicken with its head cut off, until the end when all the principals, including the entire tribe, get blown away in less than 30 seconds. For two acts that seem to last longer than the Normandy Invasion, the audience must bear with what passes for dialogue composed of tribal myths, the ramblings of a sensitive and frustrated anthropologist, and the rantings of West and his engaging but strident captor, Carlos.

Somewhere in all of this Hampton is trying to ask the old "Who are the real savages?" question. A noble enough endeavor, no doubt, but the mere juxtaposition of primitive (pure) natives with westernized fellow Indians or vicious white men cannot answer any of the questions Hampton raises in this show.

And that's what is so disappointing here. A lot of hard work was put to waste trying to save Savages. Trevor Barnes's West dominates all the other actors with his fine mellifluous voice throughout his interesting performance. Horwitz as the revolutionary Carlos almost overcomes his hopelessly shallow part, although he occasionally stumbles over a Spanish accent that sounds too patently bogus for the audience to swallow. And Don Pullam comes up with a truly excellent performance in his one scene as an irredeemably culture-bound idiot-missionary bringing civilization to the heathen. The tribe of otherwise Stone-Age Indians singing "Yes, Jesus Loves Me"--in harmony--must be seen to be believed.

THERE are bright spots enough to keep one awake--barely, there is no doubt that the cast deserves an A for effort. But while the play tries to capture the essence of some of the greatest moral and political dilemmas of the century and simultaneously recap some of Brazil's recent history, the audience is expected to sit still for a good two hours or more.

The play makes you think--after all, cultural disintegration and genocide are significant problems--but this play deadens any thought with its almost endless barrage of such problems. The half-minute of slaughter at the end doesn't reduce anything to manageable size--any solution gets lost in the debris. By the time the last Indian falls, even a plain sugar doughnut would have been more satisfying.