Tripping Through Tragedy

IN A PREFACE to his play Caligula, Albert Camus confessed that he was amazed when French critics spoke of it as a philosophical play. "I look in vain for philosophy in these four acts," Camus writes. "If it exists it stands on the level of this assertion by the hero: 'Men die, and they are not happy.' A very modest ideology, as you see, which I have the impression of sharing with Everyman." If Camus was toying with his readers when he wrote those words--and one has ample reason to believe he was--then the members of the Myriad Experimental Theater Ensemble can only be accused of choosing a play that was over their heads: Only the best professionals could decipher and diplay the metaphysical hieroglyphics Camus chiseled in the walls of French intellectual thought. If, however, we take Camus at his word--and we probably should not--then the members of the experimental ensemble have failed at something worse: conveying the destructive fury to which the leading character's passion for life and the impossible leads him.

Most people leave Caligula with one dominant thought: Camus is heady stuff. Director Vicente Castro, the professional drama coach for the experimental ensemble, attempts half-heartedly to make Camus's abstruse philosophy palatable to the audience, allowing his actors to gloss over nuance with passion, tenderness with violence. Unfortunately, this attempt to tone down the obscure philosophy fails to solve the problems in the play. The members of the audience leave with befuddled expressions on their faces, feeling like they've just been bludgeoned by the Poetic and Profound and that they should probably spend the rest of the evening trying to figure it all out. They also feel somewhat cheated on entertainment.

Basically, Castro gets caught in a hot-box between third base and home plate: It's difficult to ride Camus roughshod, and it's difficult to teach a course in French existentialism in three hours to theater-goers who probably came to escape that very thing. More importantly, it's absolutely impossible to do both and expect your play to make a lasting impression, especially when you're working with students. Castro was overly ambitious when he chose Caligula for members of the experimental ensemble.

CASTRO'S AMBIVALENCE about emphasizing passion or philosophy mars the entire production--the performance ends up fuzzy, focusing on neither theme. This swinging back-and-forth results in passion when a delicate appreciation of the philosophical base of the play is more appropriate, or staunch underplaying when intensity is required. In one scene, Caesonia, Caligula's mistress (Sonia Martinez), tries to explain to Scipio (Matthew Horseman), a sensitive and innocent friend of the young Roman emperor, why Caligula had his father's tongue torn from his mouth and then slain for no apparent reason. In an attempt to make Scipio empathize with the personal torment of Caligula and understand the motives behind his random, merciless acts of violence, Caesonia pulls Scipio close to her and whispers:

Please listen carefully to what I'm going to say. It may sound hard to grasp, but it's as clear as daylight, really. And it's something that would bring about the one real revolution in this world of ours, if people would only take it in. Try to call up a picture of your father's death, of the agony on his face as they were tearing out his tongue. Think of the blood streaming from his mouth, and recall his screams, like a tortured animal (Pause). Now think of Caligula (Pause). Now try to understand him.

Caesonia asks not just Scipio, but the entire audience, to empathize with Caligula and to understand the magnitude of his misery--the torture that drives an individual to such sadism. But Martinez delivers the lines in a flip, spiteful tone--not at all imploringly or sensitively--and, as a result, another numeral of the combination to the play's thematic lock fails to click with the audience.

The plot of Caligula is unspectacular: young, idealistic prince turns into ruthless emperor; ruthless emperor regrets past sins and kills himself--a Freudian explanation for the motives behind the suicide (the death of the emperor's sister-mistress) is available for those non-believers in the true power of spiritual anguish. But the philosophical and moral message of the play is much closer to post-Marxian France than to Rome during the Pax Romana. The young, callow Caligula recognizes the hypocrisy of the dominant values and mores. Devoted to exposing the irrationality of society, he sets out to accomplish the impossible--"to capture the moon"--by personally transforming the very fabric of civilization.

But as time passes, Caligula realizes that historical forces--not emperors--change mankind and that he too cannot escape fate, determinism, predestination. Caligula rebels against the Gods of fate. He tries, through murder and the systematic perversion of all values, to prove the liberty of his own will, challenging friendship and love, common human solidarity, good and evil. But one cannot destroy all without destroying oneself. Caligula is the story of a spectacular suicide.

Tom Myers's attempt to portray the noble and tragic emperor gets bogged down in a cycle of sad, mournful, barely audible line-readings followed by maniacal, ear-shattering ranting and ravings. Myers fails to stress the other side of the emperor--the cool, calculating, dispassionate side. After a while, the audience feels like it is on a roller-coaster--one gets the stop-and-start effect, but it's a little difficult to enjoy the scenery. He does show potential in his final soliloquy, as well as in the last moments of the play when he risks his health by falling several feet from a platform, blood dripping from numerous bodily wounds, contemplating the certainty of death with a believable look of awe, ecstasy and agony.

Matti Savolainen, who plays the part of Carea, one of the few intelligent defenders of the society Caligula sets out to destroy, fails to exude the shrewd acrimony of the practical man who knows what he wants and knows how to get it. This villain sports a long, thin moustache and a Latin accent, suggesting the Frito Bandito loose in the Roman Empire. Sonia Martinez evokes the right amount of cruelty, sensuality, and vacuousness that you would expect from a woman who devotes her life to a man who kills for reasons she finds incomprehensible, although she misses the more serious sides of Caesonia's personality. The supporting players are the weakest link in this rusted chain, many indulging in stilted gestures and inflectionless readings.

CASTRO'S COSTUMES are interesting variations on the usual Roman garb: robes looped and pinned in assorted way, often split up the sides exposing the loin-cloths beneath. Caligula wears especially formidable garments, a black robe in the first act, a red robe in the second, and in the death scene a combination of colors contrasting the themes of Eros and Thanatos. The multi-level set mixes Roman with primitive, cleverly suggesting the conflict between civilization and repressed primal instincts. A pool in the center of the stage allows the actors to stare into the water and look miserable, as though it were an inimicable existential void, and it contains real goldfish--a nice touch. The various platforms and stairs permit some interesting blocking, as well as dramatically effective exits 20 feet above the main level.

But nice touches fail to illuminate the complex, confused philosophy of the young Albert Camus, and Vicente Castro in his last play at Harvard merely trips through it. There are interesting moments in this production, but riding Camus roughshod is, in the great Caligula tradition, artistic suicide.