Another Tired Political Parable
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Ariel Dorfman’s “The Other Side” reportedly trimmed an hour off its running time during previews, currently clocking in at just under 80 minutes. It still could stand to lose another 78 minutes or so.
This strident political parable by Mr. Dorfman, a Chilean exile who has spent the last 32 years in the United States, boldly comes out against war and in favor of familial love. Employing a belabored visual metaphor to depict the tribal resentments and divisions that so often accompany regional conflicts, he and director Blanka Zizka have contributed a tired, predictable new chapter to the sad state of American political theater.
The only edifice still standing in Tomis, a bombed-out expanse of rubble and gravestones that has been battling Constanza for 20 years, is the home where Atom Roma (John Cullum) and his wife, Levana Julak (Rosemary Harris),go about their bleak work.They are in charge of identifying and burying Tomis’s corpses – they’re up to no. 5,096 – and their grisly responsibilities have earned them immunity from the violence surrounding them.
When a long-anticipated peace finally breaks out,Atom is eager to leave the blighted region (designed skillfully, with Beckettian foreboding, by Beowulf Boritt).Levana,who was originally from Constanza and who abandoned her family to live with Atom, would rather stay where they are and wait for their son, Joseph, who left 20 years earlier to fight.”Where they are” becomes a very fluid concept, however, when an officious soldier (Gene Farber) knocks down the side of their home and stretches police tape through the middle of the house, bisecting their marriage bed.
The peace agreement has redrawn the borders between the once-warring countries: Tomis now begins on the side of the house with the kitchen, while the bathroom is in Constanza. The soldier separates Atom and Levana according to their nationalities,”repatriating” her to her side of the home, and forbids any sort of crossing over or “fraternizing” (i.e., holding hands) without the proper visas. “Whoever is in the middle always gets screwed,” the guard acknowledges, and Mr. Dorfman clearly means to suggest that all three characters are, in one way or the other, in the middle.
As in 1992’s “Death and the Maiden,” by far Mr. Dorfman’s best-known work,a central question hinges on whether the married couple actually knows the intruder. Could the soldier be their long-lost Joseph? Is the division of their bed – the soldier later replaces the police tape with razor wire – a canny Oedipal gambit? (He condemns their proximity as “a promiscuous situation, dangerously promiscuous.”) If he isn’t their son, is it in their interest to pretend he is? And if he is, has war dehumanized them all to the point where traditional family bonds are useless?
What little dramatic weight Mr.Dorfman and Ms. Zizka have provided stems from this last question. As the tensions rise, tiny sparks of nationalist hatred flare up between husband and wife, and the dialogue’s banalities fade into the background.The idea of an arbitrary border and its increasingly absurd ramifications conceivably could work in the hands of a deft ironist like Vaclav Havel or Beckett himself, but Mr. Dorfman substitutes histrionics for political insight. Every plot twist is visible a mile away, every political point is made with the subtlety of the soldier hammering his stakes across the room.
Ms. Harris fares best despite being given much of Mr. Dorfman’s most self-consciously florid material. (“We’ll build your toilet with the samples we take from the dead, we’ll make love in the night blessing the dead.”) What is presumably meant to be fatigue on Atom’s part instead comes across as a lack of interest on Mr. Cullum’s – he exhibited surprising sloppiness with his lines at one press performance – and Mr. Farber’s zesty, high-decibel take on the border guard can’t mask the role’s cartoonish limitations. Ms. Zizka does a passable job introducing the weary comfort that comes from a long marriage – sometimes jovial, sometimes cantankerous, sometimes amorous – but has no luck making dramatic sense of the later, angrier scenes.
This week Harold Pinter made a blistering Nobel acceptance speech, while a few days later fellow Nobel laureate Dario Fo premiered a new play about Cindy Sheehan – a reminder of how relatively timid Americans are when it comes to mixing politics and theater. Tony Kushner and Kia Corthron and Karen Hartman and a handful of others have begun to pick up the mantle, and it would be wonderful to see Mr. Dorfman, who has two other new works being mounted regionally this season, join their ranks. But plays as clumsy and slack as “The Other Side” shed no new light, content instead to splash around in their perceived depths.
This production, understandably, dropped its intermission during previews. Without it, Manhattan Theatre Club audiences would find Atom and Levana’s predicament – trapped, helpless,unable to find a moment’s peace – all too familiar.
Until January 15 (131 W. 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-581-1212).