The Idiots' Guide to Literature

THEATER

The Idiots Karamazov

starring Thomas Derrah, Sean Dugan, Karen MacDonald

American Repertory Theatre, Loeb Mainstage

Through Jan. 16

Forget General Exams for English concentrators. If you can make it through a production of Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato's The Idiots Karamazov at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) without feeling lost at least once, then you're well on your way to an encyclopedic knowledge of all Western literature. Talk about high cultural capital. It's not just any play that requires the equivalent of a doctorate in world literature for even cursory reference. But then again, Christopher Durang isn't just any writer. And perhaps only Durang could make a play so unabashedly laden with obscure references so unabashedly entertaining--and irresistibly funny--for everyone in the audience.

The title of Durang's latest work, a perversion (in both senses of the word) of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, seems almost chosen at random from the list of novels that it references. The basic plot of Dostoevsky's famous meditation on being and nothingness (long before Sartre took the patent out on those themes) serves as the starting point of the Durang/Innaurato collaboration: four brothers, tempestuous love, life, death, etc, etc. But it doesn't take long to leave Dostoevsky in the dust as Durang and Innaurato jump full force into the whole of literature since the Book of Genesis. Durang has always been something of the Tom Stoppard of absurdist drama, but in The Idiots Karamazov he outdoes himself. Insert famous femme fatale Anas Nin, lover to the likes of Henry Miller, Gore Vidal and Salvador Dal, a few scenes from Eugene O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night, and references to everything from Macbeth to Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, and you have one of the most delightful literary travesties this side of Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Our guide for this trip (and I do mean trip) through history and literature is the eminent 19th-century translator of Russian literature Constance Garnett, whose unrelenting Englishness (read: priggishness) has been a scourge to modern translators from Nabokov on. Fashioned by Durang as a kind of Charles Kinbote for the entire Western cannon, Garnett is as much a mangler of Russian literature as a scholar of it. (The Russian word for frustrated homosexual is Peter Tchaikovsky, she says). Played with unrelenting and downright hysterical formality by Thomas Derrah, Garnett becomes as loveable as she is overbearing. Listening to her roll her r's is worth the price of admission.

Surrounding this parasite of literature is a cast of characters as diverse in chronology as they are in personality. There's an angry and suicidal Ernest Hemingway who acts as Garnett's servant, the under-recognized and frustrated feminist author Djuna Barnes, the heroine-addicted mother of Eugene O'Neil, and the aforementioned Anas Nin, played with delightfully French self-absorption by Karen MacDonald. Not to mention the entire cast of characters from The Brothers Karamazov, with Alyosha Karamazov (played with effective, i.e. not annoying, wholesomeness by Sean Dugan) serving as Durang's Everyman character in this absurdist romp.

Director Karin Coonrod must be given credit for taming this tornado of a play. Performed as part of the A.R.T.'s CrossCurrents initiative, an ongoing attempt to "create and sustain a body of new music theatre works," The Idiots Karamazov intersperses cabaret-style singing with its mad dash through practically all the Western fiction and drama worth reading. But an experiment in Brechtian musical theater this is not. With love ballads about the loss of Christian morality that come across as even more depressing than Tom Stoppard's musings in Jumpers and show-stoppers about the benefits of being a male nun, Durang's songs are more bizarre than his scripts, if that can be believed. Add to this a text that switches languages as quickly and gleefully as it does literary allusions, and you have what very easily could have been a confusing and tedious wreck of a play.

But Coonrod's direction is so focused and so obviously imbued with energy that it's almost impossible not to get caught up in the sheer joy of the production, even if you can't get that third reference to Freud. But in willing the play into a coherent whole, Coonrod seems to miss at points the sadness that lies beneath Durang's outrageous humor, his underlying pity for characters forced to drag the corpses of their fathers through scene after scene. Their actions may be laughable, but they're not so far from the pains we in the "real" world face every day. But this is a fault that can easily be forgiven in a play as delightfully outrageous as Idiots. It's not just any production that can end with a prolonged and improbable verb conjugation and still rightfully call itself entertaining.