'Hell': Life's dark side, through the eyes of a voyeur

Talk about taking on a challenge: EgoPo Classic Theater's artistic director, Lane Savadove, and local actor Ross Beschler set about adapting a 1908 French novel called L'Enfer, or Hell, to the stage. The book, by Henri Barbusse, was scandalous because of its subject - an obsessed voyeur who observes the dark side of life through a hole in the wall of his rented room.

Barbusse later went on to write Le Feu, generally translated as Under Fire, an early literary docudrama about World War I that won him great respect. But some consider Hell his masterpiece - and surely, in the early 20th century, it was on the cutting edge.

Today, at least in EgoPo's sincere adaptation - part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts - the word that most readily comes to mind is overwrought, preceded by deeply. Savadove and Beschler took care to leave Hell's lyricism intact, but that literary quality is stilted on stage, especially because the cast speaks not just lines, but the book's flowery narration.

"I don't know who I am, where I'm going, or what I'm going to do," Beschler declares as The Man, and neither do we - nor do we understand why this Peeping Tom is in such a despondent state, except that he wallows in pedestrian philosophy. The adaptation and, I suppose, the novel (which I have not read) hint that his catharsis is modeled after Dante, for it has a progression much like The Divine Comedy's three parts: Here, hell is about sex, love, and a confusion of the two; purgatory concerns mortality and disease, and paradise is the realization that life is a great Kumbaya moment.

That paradise part comes suddenly in the final moments of Hell, a silly turnabout on stage after more than two hours of wretched introspection mixed with the tawdry, the maudlin, the pathetic, and the hopeless.

Savadove directs Hell with high-quality production values: Anthony Hostetter's set - whose rear wall slides open to another room, and then to another - is one of the smartest, most workable this season; Matt Sharp's lighting and Ren Manley's video projections are on-point (except for some awful, trite ocean waves), and Janus Stefanowicz's many costumes are rich in their design and beautiful in their fittings.

The supporting cast, including Mary Lee Bednarek, Allen Radway, and Ed Swidey, is solid, and Beschler plays The Man with an intensity that's extreme, but not for a play whose extremes give it little tonal balance, making it more pummeling than persuasive.

Presented by EgoPo Classic Theater at the German Society, 611 Spring Garden St., through May 15. Tickets: $30. Information: 1-800-595-4849 or www.egopo.org.EndText