Good People

THE GOOD PEOPLE of Andorra kill a Jew. The Jew is not really a Jew, but his parents have reasons to tell him he is, and the townspeople begin to need to call him one when their inner security is threatened by outside enemies.

Andorra is a quiet, whitewashed country, small and seemingly guiltless. But Max Frisch's mythical principality (which bears a suspicious resemblance to the playwright's native Switzerland during the Second World War) is also bourgeois, complacent, chauvinistic, murderous. Sam Guckenheimer's production of Andorra tries to dramatize a Semite-as-scapegoat projection by a society of private interests united out of fear. It works, but blunts a few edges of Frisch's dialogue.

Fortunately half of the drama's stress is on the individual--the Jew, Andri--and here the production shines. Andri thinks he's a Jew, and it flatters the people's image of themselves to tolerate him when he's young. He tries to emulate them. But when their obsession changes guise and the persecution begins, Andri can't decide which identity to embrace--to be like the others or be different from them. He's even taught to act like a "Jew," and he can't find his freedom either way.

This conflict moves the play, particularly when every joint of Guckenheimer's structure is riveted by the performance of Douglas Hughes. When Hughes's fiery, adolescent Andri is forced into the dilemma of conformity or rebellion, the strain grinds him into a slow, crumpling burn; rubbing palms on trousers as if to ease the searing; stretching fingers behind his back to find air he's not sure he's entitled to. A tight stickfigure of nervousness, he moves like he's in an invisible bag. So his courage lashes out like electricity, for he can never breathe enough to show exhiliration after the first few minutes of the play. The voltage of his fitful estrangement is so high that he can't bear being touched; his body and his Jewishness become associated so that the Jewdetector can spot him by his walk. They put a bag over his head.

Hughes creates a real character, possibly to the detriment of some others in the play. The townspeople are given time to develop individual identities--they are much more than a mob--but often each is only a grotesque caricature, too easily contemptible. The point about these people, even as they stand up for solo absolution speeches--the I-take-no-responsibility echos of collective murder--is that they're supposed to be nice middleclass folks. Maybe the moral resonance of the play infects the actors with a louder evil. Anyway the only ones who can carry off the bourgeois ambivalence are those with their own natural appeal, like John Carito's Journeyman. The others sometimes blow too-sinister cigar smoke, and take over the simpler, symbolic function of the leering village idiot.

Part of the problem lies with the rash use of theater-in-the-round. Close audience proximity places harsh demands on the facial features of amateur actors; group scenes require complex and flawless stage directions in this circular space; lighting is made difficult; technical effects more intrusive. Virtually all of the play's striking visual moments--as when the rapacious soldier lurches bare-chested and vain from the bedroom of the Jew's fiance--would have been as effective on a conventional stage.

But in a very difficult, sophisticated play--a stripped and probably lost-in-translation parable--ambition is commendable. The one-dimensional portrayal of the townspeople may only accentuate a repetitiveness built into the play itself. Perhaps it is only a small fault that the society that Andri can't pin down as either antagonistic or welcoming seems to know the answer too soon.