Rarefied Body-Surfing

ONLY IN HIS DOTAGE could Goethe have thought that "the eternal feminine draws us ever upward." What bullshit! I mean, it made a nice line for the end of Faust, and a useful epigram when sending flowers to a classy girl, but only someone deep in the throes of his impotence could ever really mean it. For Frank Wedekind, sexual relations were like some sort of rarefied body-surfing: exhilaration in the midst of a mortal undertow. Wedekind believed that the eternal feminine could only draw men upward by making them think that down is up, and then sucking them further and further into the pit.

But this notion, the meat of Wedekind's sex tragedies, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, has been all but completely lost in Lee Breuer's production of Lulu at the Loeb. Lulu, the angelic witch who seduces men with her blend of whorishness and innocence in the Wedekind plays, has become the eponym for an adaptation by Michael Feingold. Feingold, and the company in rehearsal, have updated the play by translating it to a contemporary landscape. So we get references to the Dalai Lama, Lulu moves on roller skates, Schwartz the painter becomes Carbone the fashion photographer, Rodrigo the acrobat becomes Juan dos Tres the welterweight champ--all of which is fine and good.

And the set reflects the change. The actors speak with microphones (although not all the time), a synthesizer drones in the background, voices come from hidden speakers, echo effects abound--all part of an objectified high-tech nightmare. There's a huge screen in the background, used for the projection of close ups of Lulu's face (her lips, her eyes, all very eerie at 20 feet tall), and in more ingenious ways as well: as a huge contact sheet when Carbone is taking his pictures of Lulu; for a photo-montage providing a dimension of memory to a sex scene between Lulu and Louis Lebow; as a scrim behind which silhouettes meet in confrontation; finally, for the stunning reappearance of the eyeball, the motif of the play, serving at this point as an exclamation point for Lulu's murder.

What Breuer has constructed is a fantasia on Wedekind, less Wedekind than Breuer. Which is not necessarily to knock it, for when it is good, Lulu is as good as anything the Rep has yet put on. The staging is continuously engaging and visually interesting, the technical effects are never gratuitous, and always surprising; throughout, there's a contagious joy in theatre, a constant thread of spieltrieb, of play and wit and imagination. For example, there's the spontaneous appearance in the first half of a rock band, led by the preternaturally cool Steve Drury, on a podium that rises out of the stage. They are having fun, and the fun draws us in, which is showmanship of the first order.

NOBODY COULD FAULT Breuer on his showman's instincts, except maybe the blockish Cambridge bourgeoisie who have made walking out of Lulu all the rage. But all of this only makes Lulu a sort of elevated circus; a lot of the good things you could say about Breuer could be said about P.T. Barnum, with little modification. There is an awful lot of camp, and because of Breuer's theatre sense it almost always works. But it's still camp. And there are shock effects--I am thinking particularly of the murder at the end--that work as well as a pistol shot behind your ear, but are still little more, artistically, than a pistol shot. Of course, there is a large place in the theatre for theatre-as-circus, but it's a little disappointing that a director of Breuer's obvious talent and intelligence should stop there.

More to the point, Wedekind hardly lends himself to this kind of diffuse purpose. Because of the nature of expressionism, the plays are more or less incoherent on paper; the only unifying nexus is the mind of the playwright, and that, of course, is his alone. The plays need a strong directorial concept to bring that mind onto the stage, to fill in the lacunae between the playwright's own macabre circus rings. Breuer's approach only succeeds in fracturing it still more.

The situation is only aggravated by weak leading performers. A large star is needed to bend the Wedekind/Breuer universe around her; instead, Lulu is played by Catherine Slade, who walks through the play as if it were a cold reading. For three hours she fails to project either innocence or perversity; there is a lot of mugging and a lot of whining, a lot of effort but almost no success. Physically, she is virtually inert, although she seems graceful next to her leading man, Frederick Neumann. Neumann does wonderful things with his voice, and his vocal virtuosity is put to good use by Breuer; but the voice seems like an incubus that is very, very unhappy with the body it has fallen into. And Neumann seems a little confused by the production--he plays it very much as an actor, bantering, for example, with the technical people; but this undercuts the extreme emotionalism of his exit. Actually, it may be that Neumann knows the production too well. For in this Lulu, virtuosity always supersedes any emotional or intellectual depth.

THE SUPPORTING CAST, on the other hand, is almost uniformly excellent. Eric Elice is very funny, and letter-perfect, as the affected fashion photographer Carbone; he prances through his part like a Middle European cockatoo. Kenneth Ryan excels himself as Alan B. Lebow, a hip filmmaker; Jeremy Geidt is startling as Pittsburgh, the Black saxophonist cum hustler--he uses a gurgling accent that sounds like the rapid pour of a bottle of bourbon. Thomas Derrah takes off brilliantly with a comic interpolation of Richard III--it is this sort of magical appearance of the impossible that makes Lulu so consistently interesting and amusing. Tony Shalhoub is chilling in his flat, langourous portrayal of a pimp, although not as chilling as Harry Murphy, who comes straight out of a John Carpenter movie.

What this leaves us with, then, is a tremendous show with no greater aspirations than its own exuberance. Because of Breuer's approach, and the failure of the female lead, the play is emotionally and intellectually a nullity; there is fun but no power, a tour de force with no force, a wonderful personal aesthetic with no lasting effect. This is the theatre of spectacle; nobody is going to leave the theatre changed in even the smallest way, even if they stay till the end. Lee Breuer has a huge talent, and he has buried it.