Bricolage's 'Firebugs' is absurdist fun

Friday, September 26, 2003

In a Quantum-like coup, Bricolage has found a restored firehouse in Doughboy Square, a perfect space for Max Frisch's "Firebugs." The handsome firehouse and style of presentation are both a lot of fun, but I want to start with the play, one of many once-famous pieces that aren't done as much as they once were. "Firebugs" also belongs to a much smaller category of plays which harbor a broader significance than in the historical situation which made them famous, such as famous political allegories like Sophocles' "Antigone" and Arthur Miller's "The Crucible."

"Biedermann and the Firebugs" is the full title, with the Brechtian subtitle, "a didactic play without a moral." Written in German by the Swiss Frisch, it has had other titles in translation -- "The Fire Raisers," The Arsonists" -- but there has never been uncertainty about its meaning. A parable of how the meekly apolitical become accomplices in political catastrophe, when it debuted in 1958 it was clearly about Nazism.

I first saw it about 1964, and it was obvious Herr Biedermann stood for the German middle class of the 1930s. Determined to stay out of politics while tending to its own creature comforts, it ignored the growing conflagration of political isms and ended up harboring and assisting the most incendiary ism of all. There's nothing subtle about how the one household of "Firebugs" stands for many households, then a whole city, a country and much of a continent. But "Firebugs" is also a theatrical joy because it dresses this obvious political indictment in the flashy glad rags of absurdist exaggeration, an ominous chorus of firemen, herky-jerky rhythms and farcical action.

Gottlieb Biedermann is the archetypal bourgeois, smugly content with his wine cellar, cigars, house, housekeeper and wife. His main ideology is unfocused nostalgia coupled with unexamined outrage, and his resulting political stance is head-in-the-sand. When the firebugs arrive, he refuses to see what they so crudely and obviously are. They lie some but they also tell him plainly enough what they're up to; still, out of cowardice, selfishness and a willful assumption of decency, he believes their lies and treats their plainness as a joke. People don't do such things, he thinks, so he ends up insuring that such things are done.

For me, the obvious current relevance is to the revolution being carried out in front of America's unseeing eyes by the minority Bush administration and its slim but disciplined congressional majority, loosely camouflaged by such diversionary gestures as war and talk of compassion. Like the firebugs, the Bush administration has made clear its revolutionary intention to starve government by cutting its resources so it can't play even its minimal role as policeman, insurer and safety net, let alone address injustice or enhance national life.

Others may see different parallels. It is to Bricolage's credit that it stimulates political thought by reviving this famous play with such playful glee.

Aside from metaphoric appropriateness, the firehouse provides a gorgeous room in which to play. The beautifully restored wood ceilings are about 18-feet high. The front windows, toward which the audience faces, admit lighting effects of fire outside. Free-standing metallic screens hide or reveal characters as the lighting changes. And the chorus (reduced to one imposing individual) enters by sliding down the actual pole.

Director Jeffrey Carpenter partly stages the play as though it was a radio piece, using an old-fashioned siren and other props, but he doesn't make a fetish of it. Much of the time you forget the radio conceit, as actors confront each other in quasi-naturalistic (if purposefully exaggerated) mode. A rich sound design by Evan Knauer summons weather, music, atmosphere and the crackle of fire.

The two firebugs are properly menacing. Patrick Jorden is the young one, initially so cheery and crude it's hard to see him as a threat. The older Terry Parshall is quieter and so menacing that you make excuses for him in self-defense.

Elena Passarello plays Frau Biedermann as a kewpie doll, but even she suspects the firebugs are scarier than her husband admits. As the housekeeper, the very impressive Lea Donatelli sees very clearly, but she's silenced by her subservience. Reducing the bustling chorus of firemen to one lessens the opportunities for humor: Alexi Morrissey plays him as, pretty much, just a voice.

Unfortunately, the central role of Biedermann is given an unfocused, fluttery and perhaps under-rehearsed performance by Chris Josephs. Biedermann is one of those men who think everything happens to them, not realizing they are really the problem; Josephs plays the role that way, too, dissipating momentum in uncertainty, constantly ill at ease on stage.

At under 70 minutes long, "Firebugs" moves quickly through Biedermann's blindness and denial to its inevitable conflagration. "A didactic play without a moral," Frisch calls it. True, he does not explain anyone's behavior -- attend to what they do, he insists, not what they say. When the play concludes in the gleeful crackle of fire, portrayed by a huge sheet of crinkling cellophane and a large firehose, we see clearly that passivity is really complicity and vigilance is the price of liberty.