Island of Slaves
Subject: Quicktake - "Island of Slaves" by Pierre Marivaux, translated/adapted by Gideon Lester
Date: Thurs, May 18, 11:44 PM
Quicktake on ISLAND OF SLAVES
The final offering for the season from the A.R.T. is another dismal reconception of a minor classic, this time one of Pierre Marivaux's philosophical comedies from pre-Revolutionary France. While their joint production with SITI of "La Dispute" had some amusement value, this mangled version of "L'Ile des Esclaves" is set in grungy theatrical locale, this time by David Zinn, using ideas left over from "Orpheus X." Instead of an island off Greece ruled by escaped slaves, director Robert Woodruff has designated the locale to be a rundown basement club featuring drag queens, presided over by Thomas Derrah in a blond wig as Trivelin, the one of the five original speaking characters in Marivaux's 11 scene dissertation on overbearing masters and long-suffering servants.
The first pairing of master and slave washed up on this mythical shore are John Campion, whose most notable part at the ART in the past few seasons was Oedipus, as irasible Iphicrate and ART veteran, Remo Airaldi as Arlequin, his downtrodden smart-aleck slave. Next comes ART original Karen MacDonald as Euphrosine, a hard taskmasters and her sullen maid, Cleanthis, played by newcomer Fiona Gallagher. The premise of this comedy. blown much out of proportion in this production, is that under the rule of this island's inhabitants, masters must become slaves and vice versa. The drag queen chorus (Freddy Franklin, Ryan Carpenter, Adam Shanahan Airline Inthyrath, and Santio C. Cupon) is evidently supposed to highlight this reversal, but instead becomes manages to overshadow the argument of the play, try as the cast might to get through Gideon Leaster's versions of the original confrontations. By the time the situation is reconciled, with mutual apologies, the audience is just glad the 90 minutes of high-volume antics are over.
While Campion and Airaldi manage to set things up in scene one, the rest of the show can be summed up by the scene of Euphrosine's humiliation midway through, where MacDonald shows her loyalty to the ART by being strapped to a revolving target wearing a pig mask while paint is thrown at her by the queens. The original show played 127 times in the repertory of the Theatre-Italien, an evolved commedia troupe, between 1725-1768 despite the French court's lack of enthusiasm for its preaching against the mistreatment of servants. The play was revived for the repertory of the Comedie-Francaise in 1930 and has had success recently in English language productions even here in the States. But ramping up the stakes of "L'Ile des Esclaves" rather timid morality to the level of this ART effort, as in the ART's previous excursion with "La Dispute," results in another exercise of theatricality, this time tinged with the theatre of cruelty accomplishing little other than titillation. If there's a lesson about man's inhumanity to man being taught, it's more typified by the artistic license exercised onstage than by anything in this abortive text.
"Island of Slaves" by Pierre Marivaux, May 13 - June 11
A.R.T.at Loeb Drama Center
64 Brattle St. Harvard Sq., (617) 547 - 8300
A.R.T.
posted by will at 1:54 PM
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