By Jim Rutter
FOR THE INQUIRER
Despite science fiction’s immense popularity in books and film, it has never enjoyed similar esteem on stage. Instead, playwrights since Jules Verne’s era have embraced psychological realism as the means to examine life.
Little, I’m sure, felt more real for Kurt Vonnegut than watching a division of Panzer tanks cut his fellow soldiers to ribbons. And he, like many post-war writers, dealt with the horrors of World War II by closing his eyes and clutching the steady hand of fatalism.
Vonnegut grappled with this trend in his 1969 sci-fi novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Eric Simonson’s stage adaptation at Curio Theatre Company absorbs much of Vonnegut’s text and faithfully depicts the major events of the book.
Billy Pilgrim (Steve Carpenter) becomes “unstuck in time,” after being kidnapped by a race of aliens. They lend him their power to see in four dimensions, and teach him that “no one ever dies, because they are always alive in the past.” These words provide early, though deceptive, comfort. Like another famous sci-fi writer, Vonnegut could have built a religion on this epigraph.
Curio’s riveting Philadelphia premiere of this play eschews special effects and employs compelling performances, simple, though substantive lighting, and Patrick Lamborn’s harrowing original score and sound design to compress time and space and carry us across the universe and forward and backward in history. Like time, the stage pulls apart at its joints. Pilgrim travels from the firebombing of Dresden, to a childhood memory, scenes of courtship, his capture and internment by German troops, and even the moment of his death.
Director Jared Reed’s even tempo and Leigh Mumford’s lighting give the illusion that these events happen simultaneously. Costume designer Aetna Gallagher dresses Pilgrim in a pair of pajamas, rendering him a perpetual somnambulist who’s always present, but never there. The remainder of the stellar ensemble wears khaki trousers and shirts to play soldiers on both sides.
Despite the range of locales and historical events depicted, a sense of singularity pervades the production. Reed’s pacing stirs emotions by refusing to linger on any event, no matter how significant. Carpenter’s narrator sees everything at once; he responds to each moment with a face contorted in muted agony, and an even, whispering tone -- the only valid response to an unalterable existence.
The production culminates in a moment of subtle theatrical power: A single death seen through the prism of fate forces the realization that, however comforting, fatalism excuses any abomination.
***
"Slaughterhouse-Five,” presented by Curio Theatre Company, 4740 Baltimore Ave. Through March 3. Tickets $15-$20. Information: 215-525-1350 or curiotheatre.org
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.
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