Number of People At
the Piven Theatre Workshop By Dan Zeff EVANSTON—Bernard
Beck has roots in Chicagoland theater going back to the glory days of the St.
Nicholas, Wisdom Bridge, Organic, and National Jewish theaters. After decades
of honorable service to area audiences, he deserves a signature role, and he’s
found one in “Number of People,” a searing one-man play at the Piven Theatre
Workshop that explores the horrors of the Holocaust and the trials of old age. Beck plays Leo Gold, an elderly Polish Jew who survived the
Nazi death camps during World War II and now faces a grim battle against
dementia in his declining years. The play was written and directed by Emilie
Beck, Bernard’s daughter. It originated in 2006 and has been seen in California
with Edward Asner as Leo Gold.
The playwright has stated that the character of Leo Gold is
not inspired any actual person. He can stand as a synthesis of the suffering
and loss experienced by millions of victims of the Holocaust and the agony of
living with memories of lost friends and family. The play takes place in the library of a house. The house’s
location and its owner are never specified. The time is also unspecified though
the play clearly is set many years after the end of the war. “Number of People”
is written as a monologue. Leo speaks directly to an invisible audience, never
identified. Do they exist or are they inhabitants of Leo’s fevered mind? The intermissionless 90-minute work meanders for the first
half hour as Leo rambles about his past. We learn that he is a retired
statistician and he uses numbers, with their rigorous reality and absence of
emotion, as a distancing mechanism from his Holocaust memories. The play builds
in intensity and theatricality in the final half, punctuated by a deluge of
books dropping from the rafters as Leo momentarily loses control. One-actor shows make extraordinary demands on the performer.
The actor holds the stage throughout the evening without the safety net of
complementary actors. Beck is entirely on his own in a work that required
considerable physical stamina. And he’s dealing with subject matter that could
turn melodramatic or manipulative in less sensitive hands. Beck paces his performance beautifully, with multiple
climaxes near the end of the drama repeatedly hitting the audience in the
emotional solar plexus. Leo suddenly dousing himself with rainwater from a tin
bucket is a shocking visual image. So is the distraught Leo groveling on the
floor amidst all those books flung from above.
In perhaps the play’s most galvanizing moments, Leo recounts
his camp’s liberation by American troops and his blend of relief at his freedom
and bitterness and anger toward the German nation for all it forced him to
endure. The scene rises to a dramatic crescendo when Leo, armed with a pistol
provided by an American Jewish soldier, invades a German home next to the camp.
Inside the home he faces the hate and contempt of a young boy in the house and
teeters on the brink of shooting the lad until his moral sense, speaking
through the voice of a dead friend, entreats him to pull back. “This is not who
you are,” the voice urges.
There is no glib resolution at the end of the play. Leo has been too damaged by
the cruelties of the death camps and the erosion of old age. The play closes
with the elderly man nodding off in a chair, the main prop on the stage. He
awaits, he says, the arrival of his wife to pick him up. But that's his unstable
memory talking.
It isn’t often that an audience is exposed to a great
performance in the service of an important theme. Emilie Beck has written an
honest play without pandering to audience sensibilities beyond the built-in
impact of the painful subject matter. This is not light theater intended to
stroke the spectator. It’s adult in the best sense of that much abused term,
and Bernard Beck’s performance really is must-see. John Horan designed the mood setting lighting and Sibyl
Wickersheimer designed the no-frills set. Emilie Beck’s directing is as
insightful and affecting as her playwriting. “Number of People” runs through April 11 at the Piven Theatre
Workshop, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 7:30
p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. All tickets are priced at $25. Call 847 866 8049
or visit www.piventheatre.org. The show gets a rating of four stars. March 2010
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The Lover and The Collection
At the Piven Theatre Workshop
By Dan Zeff
EVANSTON—More than half a century has passed since Harold Pinter exploded on the drama scene with his ambiguous and disturbing “comedies of menace.” Plays that many audiences and critics of the 1960’s and 1970’s found elusive, if not baffling, now take their place among the masterworks of the second half of the twentieth century.
The Piven Theatre Workshop is revisiting early Pinter, reviving a pair of one-act plays from the early 1960’s that originated on British radio and television before reaching the stage. “The Lover” and “The Collection” were among a spate of short plays that put Pinter on the theater map. It’s a pleasure to report that they still hold up as small classics and the Piven productions give them their full due.
The plays explore common themes of marriage, sex, truth and fantasy, and shifting power alignments. All this is accomplished through commonplace characters in commonplace settings speaking commonplace language, except that the language is charged with hidden meanings that reveal unexplained tensions among the characters. There is humor, but it falls uneasily on the audience’s ears. In both plays we never quite know where we are with the people on the stage, but then the characters are often unsure where they stand with each other.
“The Lover” is the longer of the two works and, at least on the surface, the simpler. It’s a two-hander about a married couple named Sarah and Richard, a conventional middle class husband and wife with an apparently unconventional open marriage. In the opening moments we learn that Sarah takes a lover two or three afternoons a week while Richard is at work. Richard, in turn, has a casual relationship with a prostitute.
In the past, these sexual dalliances have been agreeable to both husband and wife. About a third into the play we realize that Richard is the afternoon lover and he and Sarah are involved in a game of role-playing to add spice to their sex lives. But now Richard wants the lover abolished from his wife’s life. The strain of the fantasy affair is grinding him down and he’s become anxious and combative. Sarah protests. She enjoys matters as they are.
By the end of the play, Sarah has assumed the upper hand. Women are victorious over men in most Pinter plays, exploiting their sexual power for their ascendancy in an understated but intense battle of the sexes.
“The Collection” is shorter but more complicated. The play involves two couples, a middle aged homosexual named Harry and his young live-in protégé named Bill and a neighboring married couple named Stella and James. The story revolves around whether Bill and Stella had a quickie affair in a hotel in Leeds. We hear various takes on the affair from Harry, Bill, and Stella, but where does the truth lie? Did Stella make up the whole erotic adventure? Did she and Bill meet in the hotel but spend their time talking in the lounge? Or did the affair really come off?
Obviously Stella and Bill know what really happened in the Leeds hotel but the audience is left hanging. Stella is ambiguous to the last, a typical sphinx-like Pinterian woman. James begins smug and dominating but ends up unnerved and subservient to Stella, begging for the truth about the Leeds encounter but getting an inscrutable expression in return.
“The Collection” is dense with possible interpretations, including the meaning of the play’s title. Threads of jealousy and possessiveness thread their way through the drama. It’s a fascinating display of games playing among lovers and spouses, with shifting centers of power insinuating from character to character, with the woman, as usual, holding the psychological high ground at the final blackout.
Both plays demand directing and acting of enormous insight and subtlety. Director Joyce Piven beautifully reads the nuances of each play and the four-member ensemble carries out her, and Pinter’s, intentions with bull’s-eye dramatic precision. A false note would collapse either play but there are no false notes in these two stagings, no over emphasis of the famous Pointer pauses, no distorting exaggeration in the acting, and a magnificent command of the language.
The expert cast consists of Dana Black as Sarah and Stella, Lawrence Grimm as Richard and Harry, Jay Reed as James, and John Francisco as Bill. All but Francisco are alumni of the Piven acting workshop. They should be kept together as a Pinter repertory company.
Aaron Menninga designed the effective multi level set, including translucent doors at the rear that partially conceal characters to enhance the eroticism in “The Lover” and the faintly sinister feel of “The Collection.” Collin Warren wrote the atmospheric music, mostly light classical piano compositions that endow the action with an elegance and sophistication that contrast with the tensions beneath each play’s surface. Seth Reinick designed the lighting and Bill Morey the costumes.
These are both very English plays, but the actors don’t assume English accents, a wise decision. The performers have enough on their plates rendering Pinter’s language without dealing with alien dialects.
This is my first exposure to a Piven Workshop play. The organization has been giving public performances since 1979 but I sense that the workshop never really reached out to the public. But it’s now selling a three-play subscription series so a decision must have been made to increase the workshop’s presence on the area theater scene. On the basis of the success of the Pinter revivals, the workshop should be a major ornament to the Chicagoland theater scene.
“The Lover” and “The Collection” runs through November 15 at the Piven Workshop Theatre at 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 847 866 8049 or visit www.piventheatre.org.
The shows get a rating of four stars. October 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.