'Absurd' Drama From Paris Very Well Played at Harvard

"On all counts, this is one of the most interesting and satisfying productions the Harvard Dramatic Club has done in the last 15 years."

ON ITS OWN TERMS, which are admittedly peculiar, and in its own way, which is often exasperating, "The Empire Builders" is a fascinating drama in the Absurd tradition: which means that it mingles farce and tragedy, fantasy and reality, in a dramaturgic jumble; that its people are fools, doomed to play clown roles in the face of impending disaster; that it is myterious, mystifying, enignatic, foolish, funny--all at the same time.

The work of the late Boris Vian, an astonishing Parisian who played the trumpet, wrote science fiction, novels and poetry by turns, it was first produced in Paris not long before his death, at the age of 39, nine years ago, and was known here only by name until the Harvard Dramatic Club presented it in a surprisingly good production at the Loeb Drama Center, where it continues.

What Vian was driving at is not entirely clear. Like Harold Pinter, and even more like the novelist Franz Kafka, he creates a world in which more questions are raised than answers given; in which words often conceal rather than reveal meaning; in which, at the end, mystery is not clarified but rather intensified.

The remarkable thing is that--like Pinter--he does create a real world of living creatures and does draw the playgoer into it. And the Harvard actors and actresses make it a vital, if baffling, world.

A Certain Amount of Suspense

There is no plot, but there is a definite sequence of actions and a certain amount of suspense.

There are "characters," too, members of an American family in Simon Watson Taylor's translation of the French original. They are, all but one, fairly normal people: a middle-aged father and mother, their young daughter, their contentious maid-of-all-work, and, for a single scene, a visitor from an apartment on the same floor of an apartment house where they are presently living.

There is one other: a strange creature, half monster and half man; with a clown's white face, dressed in a rubber coverall, listed in the program as a "schmurz."

Nobody knows what a schmurz is, but it seems as menacing as it is silent. Yet the family ignores it--except when, from time to time, they are kicking or beating or trying to strangle it. It never speaks, never makes a sound, but crawls on the floor and submits without so much as a sound to frequent assaults.

The schmurz is an endlessly silent witness to the strange antics of the father, the mother, the daughter and the maid of this family: people who would seem to be normal in many ways, for they sit and stare part of the time at a huge television screen where a hilariously silly soap opera goes on and on, interrupted by equally hilarious and equally foolish commercials. But they move a lot, and for reasons not clear.

There is heard from time to time a great Noise, which rumbles and grumbles with definite menace. When they hear the Noise, mother, father, daughter and maid move upstairs one more flight, to get away from it.

Each time they move, they leave something behind. As they go higher, they begin to lose people: the daughter is shut out, the maid walks out, the wife is unable to make it to the topmost floor.

Still Dumb, Still Menacing

In the third and final act, there is no one left but the father--and the schmurz, still silent but now beginning to make contact: moving packages which the man has brought upstairs to this his ultimate retreat, yet still dumb, still quietly menacing.

Until this concluding scene, which is gravely serious as the man faces looming extinction, much of the action and many of the lines of "The Empire Builders" are foolish but amusing: foolish as the father tells long-winded stories, or acts out some of his memories of the past; or prattles with a foolish neighbor, meanwhile kicking the schmurz from time to time.

The play is intended as a parable, a fable, perhaps, of man trying to escape death, fearing it, moving always ahead of it in panic: foolish as he tries to escape, even more foolish as he tries to rationalize his behavior ultimately pathetic as he tries to brave it out, knowing there is now no way out.

The mysterious, silent schmurz expires before the man does. But before the curtain falls, four others like him are crawling like rubber-suited crocodiles, silent and ominous, into the room. And what that may mean is anyone's guess.

George Hamlin makes the father of the family lively and sympathetic in this Harvard production. Nancy Cox is a prattling wife and mother, Mary Moss a disgruntled daughter, and James Shuman slides and glides through the evening as the dumb schmurz. On all counts, this is one of the most interesting and satisfying productions the Harvard Dramatic Club has done in the last 15 years.