Eileen Rivera_Hubert Point Du-Jour                             photos by Paula Court

 

                               by EUGENE PAUL

There’s a grungy someone lying supine at the edge of the stage, nose in the air, ankles crossed, at ease in John McDermott’s vigorously suggestive, multileveled setting , suggestive of what, we are wondering until we are brought up short by the supine one barking at us to turn off our damn cell phones and pay attention.  He sits up, glaring,  snarling, enjoying our discomfiture, completely free of any inhibiting restraint. He’ll say, growl, shout, pop his eyes, laugh at us, prepared to take part in the coming struggle with any force for good that will try to circumvent his designs for destroying whatever the hell he wants to destroy.  He’s Luke.  You might know him – heaven forfend – as Lucifer.

In short order, the simple folk on what is now this small farm, a school teacher (Alok Tewari), his wife (Liz Fernandez), his daughter (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), are mercilessly beaten, the teacher’s eye gouged out, the mother raped and killed, the daughter raped, barely alive, by some soldiers. Because that is what soldiers do.  In this war.  Which no one knows what anyone is fighting for. One of the soldiers, Jonny (Hubert Point Du-Jour), protests that his  fellow combatants are beating and betraying the very people they’re meant to protect, is himself beaten and left behind.  His is the good soul that becomes the focal point for Luke’s duel with Angela, an angel.

Gordon Joseph Weiss

If Luke (Gordon Joseph Weiss) is the meanest, wildest, scruffiest,  rambunctiously  menacing son of a gun you ever saw,

Samantha Soule

Angela (Samantha Soule) is the hottest, sleekest, most fetching babe in skin tight white, from high heels to glittering necklace at her plunging neckline, as obvious a force for good as you could possibly imagine Off Off Broadway where the ambiance is ready for this at all times.

And thus, playwright  David Van Asselt and director Daniel Talbott scramble headlong into their picaresque retelling of the oft told tale of the struggle of Good versus Evil for the souls of mere mortals. And in spite of everything they throw at the characters and the audience, the pace never slackens.  No, that’s not quite accurate.  There’s another element which  should have been but is not left out:  songs, rather nice ones sometimes, -- they’re by Elizabeth Swados, eternally young, eternally redundant – which stop the  rampant soul destroying depravity Luke piles on, but also stop the battle for goodness and light which Angela pursues so arduously, you get to see angel sweat, and for balance, you get to see a devil no sweat it.

By now, you’ve realized once again that once again the wheel is being invented, hence, the intensity and energy of the actors, the director, the playwright, all striving to bring forth a new work of new passion, new artistic expression, the almost necessary hubris required to catapult this work, this hard, hard work, onto a stage, before an audience. What’s missing becomes apparent early and trampled under racing feet. These entities representing Good and Evil are engaged in battle.  Why?  What for? They are so pungent as characters in their own right they diminish the humans they’re fighting over. Humans have no free will in their game.  Or if they think they do, it’s just to spice up the game. Good is just same old good, Evil, the same old evil, loud, louder, loudest.  Between songs. The evils are so numerous and so identified with the litany of  what we face outside the performance before us that  we cannot be shocked into righteous anger, only recognition and a kind of resignation.  Playwright, director, company have no answers.

At best, mounting this kind of play is an attempt to understand, the beginning of awareness which the sensitive young must go through before they challenge the world with their own answers. At best,  you learn by doing. And wiser heads know they have to allow the process to go on. Because out of all this, the rare ones emerge. And that is what keeps theater ever the cauldron of genius.

A Fable. At the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street. Tickets: $66. Students, $21. 866-811-4111.  Through June 28.