Another Tania

WHEN PATTY HEARST wanted to symbolize the end of her bourgeois existence and her reincarnation as a dedicated revolutionary, she chose to rechristen herself Tania. The Tania she was thinking of was an Argentinian communist undercover-agent and guerilla fighter who was killed with Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. But this Tania--the subject of the current production at the Cambridge Ensemble--was in fact the second in the line of revolutionary Tanias, having abandoned her given name. Tamara Bunke, to rename herself after "the Tania that died in the siege of Leningrad."

And so one Tania rises out of the ashes of another, the struggling spirit of an obscure Russian revolutionary passes through the body of a Latin American guerilla to live on in the unlikely incarnation of a kidnapped American heiress, and the revolution continues. The individual Tanias throw off their bourgeois identities to merge into a greater Tania, a Tania who lives and breathes the revolution.

Or such is the message of Maxine Klein's play, which in its structure and in its production reflects the striving towards collectivism that has been a fundamental part of most 20th-century revolutionary movements. Even the program carefully avoids anything resembling star billing. Under the heading. "The Tania Collective," everyone in the production is listed in alphabetical order, their names followed by words like "actor" or "stage manager." Klein's name appears about a quarter of the way down the page, with the explanatory note, "Author, Director." Most of the actors play several different parts, and most of the characters are portrayed by several different players--even the role of Tania is divided between two actors (the word actress is not included in the non-sexist vocabulary of the collective) who often switch off in mid-scene or even mid-sentence.

The problem is that collectivism may make good revolutions, but it doesn't necessarily make good theater. Even in the revolution there are individuals. Tania gives us too many chants and slogans and not enough character development, too many shining, upraised eyes and not enough genuine emotion. Especially in the overly long first act, the actors subject the audience to rhetorical harangues supposedly broadcast over Radio Havana, speeches that do little to explain the action or the characters. A line like "it is the duty of all revolutionaries to behave as revolutionaries no matter what country they are in" will be shouted in unison over and over to the sound of a drumroll as if to engrave it on the audience's memory. A general confusion is created by the shouting, the quick shifts of scene, and the fact that you're never sure which actor is supposed to be which character at any given time.

The closest thing to a real character in the play is, of course. Tania, particularly in the second act when her personality receives some relatively extended scrutiny and she is allowed to indulge briefly in what she herself calls "bourgeois introspection." Here we get a glimpse of the fears, the isolation, the stifled doubts that flesh out an otherwise two-dimensional character who always seems to be singing cheerfully about fighting "imperialismo." Working as a spy in Europe and Latin America. Tania adopts a succession of bourgeois identities--including one that she describes as "a cross between Sophia Loren and Minnie Mouse"--until she is no longer sure of her own identity and has a nightmare in which she is denied any identity at all. The audience can share Tania's uncertainty about her real identity because it is never sure which of the two actors playing Tania is the one to believe in. The frustration in both cases is similar.

But when Tania awakes from her nightmare, she is her own self again, or rather non-self. "Dreams...." she scoffs, "what can I do about my dreams? I'll get rid of my fears in them." She has rejoined--at least psychologically--the other characters in the play, all to a certain extent interchangeable, all serving as illustrations of a quotation from Che that is printed in the program: "For the authentic revolutionaries there is no life outside the revolution."

Part of Tania's denial of her individuality is a denial of her womanhood. She is a woman and a revolutionary, but obviously a revolutionary first. Despite a passing reference to the "infamous Latin American disease of machismo," Klein's script gives little attention to the position of women in the revolution. It is assumed that women will fight alongside men, and when a team of women workers outdoes the men's team, they shout triumphantly "Viva las mujeres!" But it is also assumed that after a hard day's fighting in the jungle the women will do the cooking. Tania's no-nonsense personality is in obvious contrast to the role of the bourgeois flirt that she assumes as a spy, but when she wants to show her admiration for Che, she bakes him a cake. There are a few slightly barbed jests directed against sexism, but no one presses the issue because to do so might interfere with the revolution.

For Tania and her fellow revolutionaries, selflessness and collectivism serve a definite purpose--it is the only way for them to live under the constant threat of death. Not only do they themselves gain a kind of immortality--no matter what happens, their spirit will live on in the revolution--but they can also find consolation for the death of their friends. "We must take time to weep for our fallen comrades," Che tells the troops, adding pointedly. "While we sharpen our machetes." And when, all the end of the play. Tania and Che themselves fall victims to the enemy's bullets, the cast adds their names to a litany of revolutionary martyrs, all of whom, they proclaim, "are technically dead--that is all, technically dead."

What follows from that statement is that these revolutionaries have been only technically alive, and characters that are only technically alive make for a fairly dead play. Tania does have moments of true vivacity, however, and these moments usually come--not surprisingly--when the cast is acting as a collective entity. When they sing "Que linda es Cuba" or chant "El pueblo--unido--jamas sera vencido" with what looks like genuine revolutionary fervor, they manage to capture some of the warm communal feeling that you might experience at a revolutionary summer camp, or, more likely, at a demonstration. But as this production of Tania proves, demonstrations are more fun to participate in than they are to watch.