Delightfully Absurd

SPRING HAS BEEN a long time in returning to Cambridge, and all the seemingly endless darkness, clouds, and rain, fire murky, malevolent impulses find their perfect expression in the Mather House Drama Society production of Antonin Artaud's The Cenci. The little-known play, set in sixteenth century Italy, details the family problems of the slightly offbeat Duke of Cenci, who in the course of the play turns Oedipus on his ear by killing his sons and sleeping with his daughter.

Cenci (David Wingrove) is a man fed up with the hypocrisies of the Renaissance Church, personified by Camillo (Roger Kaplan). We know that Camillo embodies these hypocrisies--he always wears a miter--especially since he denounces Cenci for some unnamed crime, yet wants to punish our hero by taking away his estates in the name of the Church, thereby revealing greed. To demonstrate his contempt for this false system of values, Cenci embarks on a spree of killing and feasting, all leading up to his "defilement" of his daughter Beatrice (Susan Kelly). "For me," he says, "life, death, god, incest, repentance, crime do not exist. I obey my own law." Finally, Cenci's angry wife and angrier daughter have him killed. All the preceeding facts are the parts of the play that are conclusively true. Everything else that the audience sees--embarrassingly florid and melodramatic orations, weird communions with the gods of darkness, shrieks, screams and flashing lights--is so far out of the ordinary as to fire debate as to t he meaning of the piece--that is, if the piece has any meaning at all.

BUT EVEN though Monsieur Artaud was a strange and rather tortured fellow--a French poet-actor who equated sex with eviceration and spent most of his life following the 1935 debut of The Cenci in an insane asylum--and although he wrote a strange and rather tortuous play, his work has been redeemed as more than a curiosity by this Mather House group. Cenci is frequently longwinded, but Wingrove takes stage with sweeping and dynamic gestures, booming tones, and a demonic glint, effectively conveying the sickly obsession of the protagonist. Like her father, Susan Kelly's Beatrice is wronged but not quite innocent, just as she should be. But most importantly, this production captures effectively the play's malevolent absurdist humor. Artaud's characters are felonious, but preposterous, and the McCreery O'Donnell direction deserves credit for avoiding oppressive modern-drama self-seriousness.

For example, the play opens and intersperses scenes with flashing lights, organ music, and Gregorian chants a la Young Frankenstein. The audience, though puzzled, is amused, and the playmakers are faithful to Artaud's intention that theatre be the church of an inverted religion exorcising violence from man by acting it out on stage.

Similarly, when two bungling assassins bounce across the stage, or Cenci's partygoers do a ritual dance to the strains of avant-garde rock, the audience is happy to perceive the action on two levels. Those who understand exactly what Artaud meant by his elliptical dialogue appreciate the refined symbolism, while the rest of us can chuckle in relief along with the tongue-in-cheek directors.

The play's final image, Beatrice being tortured on a giant wheel to atone for her father's murder, amidst a clutter of bicycle wheels and tractor tires, lives up to the spirit set in the earlier scenes. Director McCreery, who expressed some concern that audiences might see the play merely as an exercise in ridiculousness, need not worry. Artaud wrote occasionally about the similarity between all strong emotional reactions, and he would certainly understand the thin line between dark laughter and somber rapture. The Mather House production spans the line with ease. At the very least, The Cenci is not pompous or boring, and as we approach Reading Period, what other company of speakers can talk to you for an hour and make that claim?