Begging for More

FEW PIECES of modern drama approach The Threepenny Opera's degree of achievement on any of the several levels on which the play is totally triumphant. Bertolt Brecht's writing is an extraordinary synthesis of wit, imagination, political commitment, and human insight. Kurt Weill's brash, deceptively melodic music intensifies the force of the drama spectacularly. No adaptation could be more faithful than Mark Blitzstein's to the atmosphere Brecht and Weill sought to create, truer to their message or more sympathetic to their dramatic approach. But if the drama is to succeed on stage, these achievements must be equalled by the director's intelligence and the cast's performance. The Harvard Summer School Repertory Theater is remarkably suited to these demanding tasks; with imagination and insight, the group successfully mines nearly all of the play's musical--so consequently, its political--potential.

The cast at the Loeb is almost uniformly excellent; no performance is worse than good. The scene is set skillfully at the onset by a London street singer (Scott Taylor), who tells of Mac the Knife, a ruthless, but versatile killer, robber, and rapist with an ability bordering enchantment to escape the police. Mac (Christopher Reeve) is about to marry Polly Peachum (Jessica Richman), the naive, though self-confidant, daughter of Jonathan Peachum (Colgate Salsbury), the man who coordinates all the panhandling in London.

Peachum, a greedy and self-righteous rascal, and his alcholic wife (Margo Martindale) want better for their son-in-law than an infamous criminal. With little virtue of their own of which to boast, they bribe one of Mac's whores, Jenny Diver (Tiina Cartmell), into betraying him to the police. Scotland Yard is led by Mac's old army buddy, the powerful Tiger-Brown (Patrick Clean), whose own daughter Lucy (Cynthia Dickason) is also married secretly to Mac. Mac is arrested twice. The women fight for his allegiance. He is saved at the very end by a royal pardon which also grants him peerage.

There are further complications, but the web of plots and interrelationships ultimately amounts to a struggle of poor, generally powerless men and women to preserve what passes for dignity and self-respect--usually at each other's expense. Their problem, as Brecht shows it, is that they have no understanding of dignity beyond the sham that passes for gentility among a capitalist society's ruling class. They have a passion for outward virtue combined with an infinite corruptibility. They parody bourgeois family life, but are loyal only so far as self-protection permits. Peachum is forever misquoting scripture to defend arguments for fraud and betrayal. Tiger Brown's conception of honor is simply his right to a glittering uniform.

Brecht once wrote that the actors in his plays needed to remember that they could not become the characters they portrayed. An audience, Brecht said, had to be forced into viewing a drama with critical detachment. To pretend that the theatrical world is real or to win an audience's allegiance to a character through sentimental appeal is to deprive the audience of the opportunity to learn from a play, rather than merely to be entertained by it.

Musical theater gave Brecht his perfect forum. Brecht turned the artificiality of the musical drama's structure--bits of action framed by songs--to his advantage. The songs became detached commentaries by the characters on their lives. Through songs, Brecht could argue that necessity was the mother of his characters' villainy and cynicism. "The Army Song," for example, Mac and Tiger Brown's recollection of army days, turns the fraternal joyfulness of army reminiscences into a horrible realization of what the military represents. In two show-stopping soliloquies, Lucy Brown's "Barbara Song" and Jenny Diver's "Solomon Song," the two women show that succumbing to sentimental attachment means ruin in the brutal milieu in which they live.

The performances of Tiina Cartmell, Colgate Salsbury, Margo Martindale, Christopher Reeve, Jessica Richman, and Cynthia Dickason are all magnificent. All manage Weill's difficult music skillfully, and successfully recreate Brecht's mix of cynicism and passion. They derive admirable assistance from the minor players, particularly from Jonathan Frakes, who plays Matt, a resentful member of Mac's gang, and from Patrick Clear, who plays Tiger Brown.

Stephen Aaron's direction is intelligent, fluid, and painstaking. The orchestra, under Arthur Finstein's musical direction, is as successful as the singers it accompanies. Linda Martin's costumes enhance the personality of each character, and Zack Brown's ingenious set has only one troublesome flaw: A screen showing the descriptions Brecht wrote for each scene--a means of emphasizing that the drama existed in the performance and not in the accident of suspense--is impossible to read from the lower rows or the side sections.

The Threepenny Opera is often cited for its lyrical and musical inventiveness, qualities which the Loeb production brings to the fore. But the lasting power of the play lies in the persistence of the problems which were paramount to Brecht's political concerns--the perversion of human character by poverty and exploitation, the evils of monied power, and the shallowness of middle class virtue in capitalist society. The themes of his musical are broad, stark, and important--and all the more forceful for the Repertory's outstanding performance.