playing the play
by Douglas Messerli
Back
to Back Theatre company, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich / performed by
Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Brian Tilley and Luke Ryan / Los
Angeles, UCLA Freud Playhouse / the performance I saw as a matinee on Sunday,
January 27, 2013
The
Geelong, Australia Back to Back Theatre group, according to their own
description, “creates new forms of contemporary theatre imagined from the minds
and experiences of a unique ensemble of actors with a disability, giving voice
to the social and political issues that speak to all people.” Certainly those
are lofty goals, but one does have to question the “all.” Can anything speak to
“all” or even attempt to. The two elderly women who sat next to me yesterday
afternoon had no idea what they were about to see, and were quite visibly
disturbed when, late into the play, the actor also playing the director of the
work (Luke Ryan), lashed out at the audience sitting in the first rows for “coming
to see a freak show,” although he mollified them some by claiming he always
imagined the first few rows of the theater as empty. The production I saw was
sold out!
Moreover, this is a work which requires
the audience attend, that they listen closely just to hear some of the disabled,
Australian actors’ words—sometimes slurred with heavy “down under” accents—and
mentally make large metaphorical connections as well as accept a work that
might be seen as morally reprehensible to some. Indeed, when the company first
conceived of a story in which the great Indian Ganesh, the elephant-headed “mover
of obstacles” visits Adolph Hitler and Joseph
Mengele to retrieve the Hindu swastika symbol, they themselves felt it might be
inappropriate to combine such a “fairytale” within the holocaust.
In the end, however, Ganesh Versus
the Third Reich is less about the meeting of the ancient God with the
monstrous Nazi leader that in is a work dealing the attempts of this group to
create and accomplish such an audacious piece of theater. Four of the actors
have difficultly with language, and one, Mark Deans, has trouble in even
expressing himself, often confusing the experience of the performance with
reality. Brian Tilley, playing he elephant-god, strongly questions the
effectiveness or even propriety of his performance. The young actor playing
both a Jewish prisoner and, later, Hitler, Simon Laherty, is often timid to take
on such unlikely roles. Scott Price emphatically feels the whole play is a
terrible mistake, lashing out at the work’s “director” and the rest of the
cast. But gradually we begin to see parallels, not so much in the story, but in
relation to the large issues of power and control, along with Nazi Dr. Megele’s
real-life fascination with what he would described as “degenerates.
Ryan, who The New York Times
critic Ben Brantley described as a “handsome and well spoken man” (i.e.,
apparently not mentally challenged) alone sees the importance of presenting
this play, coaxing his often recalcitrant company with praise, pep-talks, only
to finally give up in complete frustration after Price refuses to fall correctly
upon being “shot,” a scene which ends in all-out battle between him and the
others, closing down the play.
Appearing most of the time only in silk running shorts, as if to show
off his physique, Ryan is caring and protective at the same time he is his glib
and domineering. Although he is a force behind the production, he is also part
of the reason for the company’s own doubts, a kind of friendly bully who,
although sympathetic to their difficulties, is also impatient and sometimes
outright abusive. Although the members might often virulently argue with each other,
they give one another supportive hugs after brutal interchanges, working as a
unit in their achievements. In short, they do precisely what any theater
company must do if they are to attain an effective performance, only here the
effect is the opposite of the naturalistic or theatrically coherent
performances most of us would define as “great theater.” Here it is the
differences, the friction, the interruptions, even the holes in the work that
matter far more than the absolute credibility to which most of Western theater
generally aspires.
This fascinating work ends, in fact, with
a character playing a child’s game—which I would argue is perhaps at the very
heart of any theater (as a child I used to ask other children to “play play”
with me, resulting, often, in a good scolding by some adults for my seeming
baby talk)—when the angry “director” leaves Deans and the others “to take a
swim,” asking him to play “hide-and-seek,” so that he can escape. Deans hides,
quite predictably, beneath a table, but when no one comes to find him, grows
restless, laying down to pretend to sleep, rising again, returning to the
crouch with which he began. Like a trapped animal, he is confused, tired,
impatient, but still continues to participate in the “play” of the game. When
the lights go out, he is the first up for a well-deserved bow to the applauding
audience, and, after the others take their bows, raises his arms in joy once
more to take all that applause in!
And yes, we realize, that does somehow
represent us all. We all want to be appreciated for the theater of the self we
every day create, even if the acts we undertake cannot be as heroic as we might
have desired.
Los Angeles,
January 28, 2013
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