The Garden of a Supreme Artificer

IN HIS GARDEN of poisonous plants, Dr. Rappaccini plots the second genesis. He has given life to new species of herbs more deadly than hemlock. Each shrub he cultivates is a hybrid of poison and medicinal, each plant developed as a result of his devotion to science, Dr. Rappaccini's most perfect--and most fatal--creation is his daughter, the beautiful Beatriz. She is a symbol of man's inventiveness to rival Pygmalia. The only mother Beatriz can claim is Curiosity; she knows she belongs body and soul to her father. Her breath poison, her tears acid, Beatriz lures the new Adam, a student named Juan, to descent into the garden from his garret room next door.

Rappaccini's daughter embodies all her father's designs and more: innocently guilty, guiltily innocent, she is death in life, life in death; simultaneously poison and antidote. Despite her beauty and naivete, Beatriz is also the perversion of many myths. The forbidden fruit, she is an Italian Beatrice who leads a young man into an inferno, the Christfigure whose father shouts "My child, why have you forsaken me?" This Beatriz not only represents a reworking of past myths, she is also a symbol of moderns. As a solitary prisoner of her condition, she is doomed in her passion for another. She like Juan touches only images of herself--never her true self. Self-conscious but skeptical, both are trapped in a void. More than an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's familiar tale, Rappaccini's Daughter, now at the Loeb Ex, is a new play by Octavio Paz who grows poetry around the seed of Hawthorne's prose. With Hawthorne compressed and Paz added, the play offers a bounty of interpretive possibilities, some of which this production is able to luxuriate in.

The play begins with the Messenger (the only character entirely created by Paz) introducing the modern themes and the action of the play. He identifies himself as "a transparent soul," neither male nor female, old nor young. His poetic commentaries are interspersed throughout the action. Bartlett Collins Naylor as the Messenger makes certain we realize it's poetry he's speaking. He accentuates every word, each syllable of "exultation" is distinct.

Costumed in a pinstripe three-piece suit, Naylor is deadpan. His expoundings vary less in expression than in dynamics. I was confused with what might be a masterly stroke: this Everysoul looks like and speaks with the authority of those stereotyped but elegant men in serious, insurance and aspirin, television commercials. I kept wondering if it was apt to have this television bombardment say to us--you are "condemned to remain within yourself." Perhaps.

EVEN IF NAYLOR is coping as he was directed, Anne Strassner as Beatriz sometimes slips into reciting when acting poetry. Strassner is a Beatriz without innocence, more a Coppelia than a New Eve with her shoulders drooping and her tinge of petulance. She is as at her best at the end as she gulps from a silver vial that is supposed to redeem her poisonous blood--even though it seems to contradict her intent in the preceding speech.

Of all six actors, Goberto Lewis Fernandez and Antonio Dajer Cerna, as Dr. Baglioni and Juan, give the most color to their roles. Almost buried under a 17th century cape and stiff collar, Fernandez mixes feisty arrogance with guile and pomp. Dajer (co-director with Chuck Gray) has engaging warmth as the young student and happy romantic. With robust simplicity, he blinds himself to the man-made net that entraps him far from the "green hills and sea foam" of his native Naples. Unfortunately, this makes his realization of the odiousness of Beatriz and the extent of his predicament as sudden as the play is short.

Dajer is the most relaxed moving on stage. More careful direction could have helped the others. Elena Gragnalia slurs her authentic Italian accent maternally, yet as the landlady Isabel, she is reduced to desultory shuffling. Ponderous pauses mar Alan Fink's performance as Dr. Rappacini. He seems to have been set out to graze in his garden, talking to his vegetative creations with no sharp sinisterness. Even if he cares for his daughter, he's supposed to be a man who is imperious if not self-deifying. Fink improves at the end to bellow like the God of Genesis at his New Adam and Eve in their garden of evil.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of the acting, suggestiveness proliferates in the set and lighting. Plastic ferns and gaudy gold grapes appear hideous at first until they assume nightmarish vibrancy under the lights. Then again, it is appropriate to use flagrantly artificial plants for the garden of a supreme artificer. In addition, the tree which Beatriz calls her brother is made to resemble a stick figure of a man with his head at a tilt. Later, behind Beatriz drinking from the vial, the tree looms like a crucifix. The lighting (designed by James Meyer) creates an illusion of transparency as the Messenger blends in and out of patches of light. Although the set (designed by Elizabeth Clark) allows Juan to fall into Rappaccini's garden from his garret, it also places the needlessly realistic bedroom distractingly in the center, at eye level.

The eye wanders; the set distracts partially because of the acting and staging, partially because of the play itself. Rappaccini's Daughter is very much a play for the ear. The emphasis is on language rather than dramatic development. The play was translated by the production staff with the help of Mr. Paz. Although the English may not be as lush as the original Spanish, the translation is quite smooth except for a few howlers. It's a much happier genesis than any Dr. Rappaccini ever attended.