The Physicists

I urge you to go see this production, but let me warn you about something first: to get in, you'll have to step over a dead body. It's only "dead" for stage purposes, of course, but there it is, lying in the only entrance to this little theatre-in-the-round.

Duerrenmatt, not writing his play with the Tufts Arena Theatre in min, wrote a stage direction that calls for the body to be on stage and in view of the audience. Director Harry M. Ritchie has thought about the stage direction, has thought about the physical limitations of his theater, and moved the corpse so that you can't avoid it.

This bit of gimmickry works, and works beautifully, and so does almost everything Ritchietries. Furthermore, the cast is competent in the lesser roles and excellent in the three most important one--three physicists who have been confined to an asylum. This all adds up to the best production Boston has seen this summer.

I don't want to tell you about the plot, but let me not briefly that the single thing that would make this production more cohesive would be an extraordinary Mathilde von Sahnd. Joan Abrahams, strapped into a hunchback's brace, must be a real contortionist to get through the evening; she plays the role quietly and competently. A performer with greater vitality might somehow have been able to suggest the importance and the ominousness of this figure. The production's asscts include a splendid set by Donald Mullin and fine lighting by Don Cate.

Ritchie, though, deserves much of the credit for the success of this show. The Physicist is immensely difficult to produce successfully, because Duerrenmatt clearly wants it to be an educational, as well as a theatrical experience, a any good post-Brechtian European playwright would. But he, like Brecht, is a natural dramatist; you automatically empathize with these wacky . So Duerrenmatt could hardly accept idea that an audience must be made to detach itself from the play completely -- forced not to empathize with the characters, but only to think about them.

Duerrenmatt meets Brecht halfway. He cannot write a drama that does not excite sympathy, any more than Brecht could himslef. So he uses the sympathy he creates to set up the kind of didactic theatre Brecht talked about. To return to the example of the body in the doorway: to have to walk over that actress labels her an effect. It creates a detachment and prevents the building up of a mystery-story suspense as the play begins; Duerrenmatt trusts that the suspense will develop but itself. At the end of the act, another body is on the floor, and the audience again is detached forcibly from the illusions that the actors have created.

This is what Duerrenmatt wants. He has given up on the idea of teaching his audience directly through the action; he wants to give them the chance to learn. "Drama can dupe the spectator into exposing himself to reality, but cannot compel him to withstand it or even to master it," he wrote in his notes to this play.

His means of exposing them can be questioned. The speeches he gives to his characters in the important final scene are long and none too subtle. But the Tufts production moves through the story excitingly and gives the playwright his chance to convince. Neither he, nor the audience, can ask any more.

Duerrenmatt meets Brecht halfway. He cannot write a drama that does not excite sympathy, any more than Brecht could himslef. So he uses the sympathy he creates to set up the kind of didactic theatre Brecht talked about. To return to the example of the body in the doorway: to have to walk over that actress labels her an effect. It creates a detachment and prevents the building up of a mystery-story suspense as the play begins; Duerrenmatt trusts that the suspense will develop but itself. At the end of the act, another body is on the floor, and the audience again is detached forcibly from the illusions that the actors have created.

This is what Duerrenmatt wants. He has given up on the idea of teaching his audience directly through the action; he wants to give them the chance to learn. "Drama can dupe the spectator into exposing himself to reality, but cannot compel him to withstand it or even to master it," he wrote in his notes to this play.

His means of exposing them can be questioned. The speeches he gives to his characters in the important final scene are long and none too subtle. But the Tufts production moves through the story excitingly and gives the playwright his chance to convince. Neither he, nor the audience, can ask any more.