Sections

Neighborhoods

Features

Follow Us

NHI Newsletter

Some Favorite Sites

Government/ Community Links

Liberals, Beware

by Paul Bass | Sep 21, 2006 1:47 pm

Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Arts

Jeff Rogers as the Cassandra-like Fireman.A newly opened farce in town updates a post-World War II script about fear frenzy. It makes us squirm more than it makes us laugh. What did you expect after 9/11? Reefer Madness? John Birch Pararnoid Blues?

That would have been the reassuring road, at least for the audience, if the Yale Cabaret had chosen to take it. Its liberal audience could have had a good laugh at all those dopes orchestrating Red Alerts and targeting Muslims in the “War on Terror,” then sent everyone back into a complicated with no unresolved dilemmas to tackle. Instead, the Cabaret aimed to challenge us.

Thursday begins a three-night run at the Park Street theater of a modern-day adaptation of The Firebugs, a play Max Frisch wrote in 1953. It tells the story of Gottlieb and Babetter Biedermann (Eric Gilde and Emily Dorsch), a prosperous couple who allow arsonists (Sepp Schmitz and Willi Eisenring) to move in. The Biedermanns remain in denial as the arsonists haul barrels of gasoline into the attic, set up the detonator ... even ask Gottlieb for the match.

Frisch wrestled with the issue of how everyday “good” people can allow evil to flourish in their midst. He was writing for a Germany, and a world, wrestling with the rise and fall of Nazism.

Fast forward to New Haven, 2006. The Yale Cabaret has moved the setting and the time of play to deal with modern-day scares. On one level, the people staging it are wrestling with their fears of rising street crime in New Haven; click here to read about that. More overtly, the updated staging wrestles with terrorism. In case we miss the point, the arsonists’ accents slip at times into Middle Eastern (Islamic jihadist) and Irish (as in Republican Army). They play on their host couple’s guilt and good intentions. Amid a spree of houseguest arsons, the couple doesn’t want to be seen as bigoted, as stereotyping as arsonists all people who have those accents, or who come to stay in homes as strangers ... or who lug barrels marked “Caution - Flammable” into the attic ... or who admit going to jail after their workplaces “burned to the ground.”

Un-Sound Strategy

The question is: How does a person of good will respond to a genuine threat? Yes, it’s a bad idea to turn our houses over to arsonists—or to step aside and help suicide bombers blow up airplanes and bridges and buildings. That’s not what you’d call a sound strategy for survival. On the other hand, submitting to fear and stereotyping comes with a cost, to our freedom, to our humanity. It also leads us to commit evil of our own.

Given the difficulty of balancing our responses to a post-9/11 world, it’s easier just to hate and ridicule George W. Bush for stumbling and hijacking the issue for his own dangerous purposes. Like Michael Moore with Fahrenheit 9/11, the Cabaret could have done that, and generated hearty applause. Like modern-day screenings of Reefer Madness’s send-up of anti-marijuana paranoia (its creators actually did want to scare people), like Bob Dylan’s cutting satire of anti-Communist paranoia in Talkin’ Birch Paranoid Blues, the Cabaret’s post-9/11 comedy could have stayed with the overreactions and left its audience feeling self-satisfied and superior to all the yahoos caught up in fear frenzy.

Heide Janssen's Anna, the maid, knows better than her employers what's going down in the Biedermann abode.But, while it bears similarities to frenzies and withchunts past, today’s terrorism panic isn’t a rerun of Red or pot paranoia. The threats, though exaggerated, are real. We ignore them at our peril. They pose hard questions, and the Cabaret fulfilled its dramatic mission in taking them on.

The Cabaret’s use of its tight subterranean space heightens the tension and discomfort implict in the script, much as in the Summer Cabaret’s staging of Eugene Ionesco’s The New Tenant. In both plays, a pair of men gradually hauls more and more objects onto an increasingly cluttered stage, gradually building a sense of foreboding or doom. The audience is squeezed into the room, too, inside the Cabaret; it can feel the claustrophobia rather than just view it. It makes you wonder: Why are the characters allowing this to happen? How does someone, armed just with words, intimidate other people into cooperating with commands that they recognize as crazy and dangerous?

In the case of The Firebugs, the play’s two settings are merged: the attic and the downstairs dining room are one and the same. All the action takes place there. The table is in the middle of the room. The door to the attic is to the left; the arsonists enter through it and move their barrels of gasoline to either side of the room.

At times the play resonates with some of the lines the Bush/Lieberman/Fox News bullies use to try to silence legitimate criticisms, portraying anyone who questions War on Terror tactics as modern-day Neville Chamberlains refusing to acknowledge and stand up to obvious evil. Over and over, as the arsonists make their plan clear, the Biedermanns try to make “friends” with them rather than stop them. They urge them to pretend they’re camouflaging less evil plans. That they’re basically kidding. No, the arsonists insist, they’re not kidding. “The best camouflage of all,” one of the arsonist/terrorists tells the Biedermanns, “... is the plain and simple truth. Nobody believes it.”

The play, though, like real life, is more complicated than that. Evil exists in the world, including in our own homes. It’s not so simple how the Biedermanns can stop the arsonists—beyond never opening their doors to anyone in the first place.

Yet… there’s no sane justification for handing over the match that lights their inferno. No justification at all. Just an explanation. Which the Cabaret delivers.

The Firebugs runs Sept. 21-23 at the Cabaret, 217 Park St. Performances are at 8:30 and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, just 8:30 on Thursday. Click here for details.

If you go—review it for the Independent! Click here to file a “citizen review.” Or just e-mail it, as an attached word document to this address. If reviews are submitted, they will appear on the site by late Monday afternoon.

Share this story with others.

Share |

Post a Comment

Comments

There were no comments

get ANDI

Events Calendar

loading…

SeeClickFix »

Kids assaulting runner-jogger
May 25, 2012 10:36 am
Address: Peck And Front New Haven, CT
Rating: 1

wow, tough day in Fair Haven. Group of school age kids that hang around on that corner threw...

more »
Drug Deals
May 25, 2012 10:37 am
Address: 16 Hallock Avenue New Haven, CT
Rating: 3

Two days in a row, there has been a drug deal occurring in front of the Little League park on...

more »

Flyerboard

Sponsors

N.H.I. Site Design & Development

smartpill design