June 2- 8, 2005

theater

An E for Effort

by David Anthony Fox

"In the beginning, there was nothing," says Menocchio, a 16th-century Venetian miller, as he stands before a large wheel and contemplates a piece of cheese. Menocchio would later be tried for heresy.

Whatever else, you can't accuse Outrage of being about nothing. (It is, however, not about Menocchio — at least, not centrally.) Itamar Moses' three-ring circus of a play takes on nothing less than the history of knowledge and the ways in which its heroes make it available to the public, while its villains attempt to harness it for nefarious ends.

In a prestigious American university, Dean Adriana Kale and her old-fogy mentor, professor Eugene Lomax, disagree about accepting a $40 million donation earmarked for technology. To Kale, who sees this as a tool for scholarship, it's a godsend. For Lomax, it's a matter of there-goes-the-neighborhood.

Moses (Itamar, not the tablets guy) sees this as a microcosmic battle about the future of education. I see it as highly unlikely, but more on that later. Surrounding this, which presumably is the central story of the play, are moral parables involving Socrates, Menocchio and Bertolt Brecht. Outrage is a play within a play, and in a kind of Brechtian satire, Brecht serves also as a narrator. There's more, but let's stick to this.

The good news: The best of Outrage (which includes most of Act 1) is highly accomplished and really funny — a genuinely virtuosic turn from young Moses. The bad news: By Act 2, it's clear that there are far too many subplots, and even the one that really should be there — Brecht and his writing of Galileo — goes on too long. We don't need both Walter Benjamin and Eric Bentley as Brecht's sidekicks, serving only to allow Moses to show off his cleverness. (I wish young playwrights would stop writing like Stoppard. It's more than enough that Stoppard writes like Stoppard.)

Worse, the university story that is the core of Outrage makes little sense. The presumed protagonist, a young professor named Daniel Rivnine who could play a deciding role in the institution's future, is a messy amalgam of highly confused motives. (If Moses sees him as a Brechtian hero, he needs to reread his Brecht.) We're apparently supposed to feel outraged by Outrage, but why? What I feel is that Moses wants it both ways — to show off his erudition like a tiresome graduate student, while decrying university politics in a way that is simultaneously reactionary and naive. Anyway, academia is a far too easy target — like shooting fish in an ivory tower.

Outrage does bring out the best in director Jiri Zizka, who provides a wildly entertaining and deconstructed pageant (Mimi Lien's marvelous set helps a lot). Robert Dorfman plays Brecht as a Yiddish vaudeville comic (from the Irving Berliner Ensemble, maybe?) — like so much of Outrage, it's initially delightful, but becomes wearying. The other actors in the cast do expert work. My favorites included Peter Pryor, William Zielinski and especially Matthew Humphreys — all play multiple roles with great charm.

Outrage Through June 19, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824