by George F. Walker
Directed by Ken Gass
At Factory Theatre
March 30-May 4, 2008

    That Beyond Mozambique is anti-naturalistic I agree. That it could be a political allegory I also agree. That its six starkly self-obsessed Euro-centric characters are oblivious to the revolution about to be unleashed across the African continent is also a point I can agree with. However, that it is a good play is something that strains credulity. What is even more in dispute is that the present production is even a satisfactory rendering of the text. As a director, Ken Gass can be wildly uneven: he is either very good or terrible. In this instance, he is terrible—not because he lacks intelligence or that he shies away from the visceral. It is because his vision of this early Walker piece has no sturdy frame to contain it and no sense of real style.

   The first problem, both with the play and this production, concerns the setting. Is it somewhere deep in the jungle of an unnamed African country, whose (invisible) natives are on the verge of revolution? Or is it, rather, a jungle of the mind—a projection of the darkest possibilities of the post-colonial misadventure? Walker is not explicit, and neither is director Gass. Shawn Kerwin’s set suggests the dusty front yard and porch of a rundown colonial house that would fit a Joseph Conrad fiction, but nothing in it (or Kimberly Purtell’s lighting) really suggests cinema of the mind or the experience of watching or being watched—with visceral feelings of fear, terror, resignation, et cetera. A much earlier production of the play staged it as a fading print of a garish, discomfiting B-movie—one with grotesque farce. Gass’ production doesn’t seem to know how to fuse the political with the metaphysical or the political with the theatrical. True, Walker doesn’t help his own cause by creating cartoon stereotypes: an Italian Nazi doctor (Rocco) who experiments grotesquely with the living and the dead; his wife Olga who imagines she is the Chekhovian character of the same name from Three Sisters; their lobotomized Greek servant (Tomas), a former gigolo with homosexual urges; a perverted, disgraced former Mountie (Corporal Lance) who has malaria and suffers from hallucinations; an American porn-star (Rita) who wants to be another Rita Hayworth; and a neurotic and sexually aberrant Eurasian priest (Liduc, who is half Chinese, half Jewish) with pronounced addictions to cocaine and boys. The story has the wild energy of hectic farce on the level of broad parody, but for it to work as a political or metaphysical allegory or fable, the play needs to be chilling rather than merely deranged, and Gass’ production lacks feverish ferocity or tenderness.

     The cast gives performances of very uneven quality, not even managing, in many cases, to suggest the masks, much less the faces of Walker’s bizarre microcosm of the colonial human condition. Oliver Becker’s Rocco, Richard Zeppieri’s Lance, and Dmitry Chepovetsky’s Tomas have stage presence, but none has good diction, and only Chepovetsky has enough bitter comic edge for the black humour. Tara Nicodemo hasn’t the faintest idea of Rita Hayworth, so her performance falls flat, but two other performers almost keep the play suspended between mad farce and nightmarish satire. Joe Cobden turns Liduc into an amusing and touching figure, somewhat in the shadow of a nervous, wry Tony Perkins, while Sarah Orenstein’s Olga gives schizophrenia recognizable faces, though she is sometimes too light for the tragic core of her masquerade. She nevertheless succeeds in the ventriloquist scene (where she is Rocco’s dummy) in conveying the idea of a woman at the mercy of an artificial life where masquerade runs down to destruction. These two performances give hints of what a good production might have wrought with Walker’s quirky piece. However, a play meant to be an ironic parable about nothingness turns into just plain excruciatingly boring nothing in the current version.

photos:
pic 1 (L-R) Oliver Becker and Sarah Orenstein
pic 2 (L-R) Joe Cobden and Richard Zeppieri


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