Bells, Duncecaps and God

I GUESS Vladimir Mayakovsky probably had something on the ball. Born in 1893, he joined the Bolsheviks at the age of 14, became a Futurist poet, and then the brightest star in the Soviet poetic firmament for a decade or so after 1917. He evidently had mixed feelings about this. "I'm fed to the teeth with agit-prop," he remarked in a poem published about three weeks before his suicide in 1930. More important, he apparently had his doubts about whether the Soviet state was still worth writing agit-prop about. After his suicide Stalin announced he was the greatest poet of the Soviet era. Mayakovsky doesn't seem to have been much of a playwright, however.

There are a lot of lines that sound like poetry in Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, but it's hard to identify them for sure because they don't have much of a context. "All these people here are mere bells on the duncecap of God," remarks one character (the parts are pretty much interchangeable, as near as I could tell, except for the impressive individualization the Cambridge Ensemble occasionally imposes on the writing). The others, as they often do, chime in with repetitions of important questions which no one ever attempts to answer. There's been no previous mention of bells, or duncecaps, or God, or for that matter these people here, and the remark is neither in nor out of character, it's just there. So it goes.

Liberation from any historic context was one of the main tenets of Futurism--this was one reason many of the Italian Futurists turned Fascist later on, according to David R. Ignatius's theory--but it doesn't make for absorbing drama. David Starr Klein as Mayakovsky and David Neill as the man with balloons are particularly effective in minimizing the play's difficulties, Joann Green's direction is effective when there's dialogue going on but understandably weaker during the less than pregnant silences, and Allan Grossman's fine music lifts a couple of speeches into the realm of coherence.

The other half of the bill, Peter Handke's Calling for Help, is more coherent, I guess, since every other sentence is the same. The five actors speak various announcements--"Follow me--unobtrusively," or "Presumably the train will arrive a few minutes late," or whatever else struck Handke's fancy--and then the other actors say "No," with an impressive variety of gestures and expressions. The company is good in this play too, but the gestures and expressions aren't enough. Not even the ending, in which all the actors yell for help and then say "Yes," is enough.