Set to the head-splicing staccato of the French Revolution’s guillotine, George B’uuml;chner’s ‘Danton’s Death’ halts too often for the fermatas of long-winded monologues to capture the despair of political upheaval. Straddling eras, the drama ponders 20th century existentialism while retaining the metaphoric, Elizabethan language of Shakespeare. Befuddled with the mysteries of humanity, ‘Death’ never quite grips the terrors of homicidal revolution, offering instead a two-and-a-half-hour-long reign of stupor.
Premiering at the Mandell Weiss Theatre, ‘Danton’s Death’ showcases undergraduate and graduate student actors tackling the operatic scope of a 200-year-old work, under the direction of Quinn Martin Chair in Drama, Dominique Serrand.
‘Danton’s Death’ smacks audiences in medias res, with the Committee of Public Safety quarrelling in the heated aftermath of King Louis XVI’s execution. The committee, which had initially banded to protest aristocratic extravagance, experiences a sudden civil rift.
Danton (Bowman Wright) heads the committee’s liberal faction, a nonconformist who indulges in ‘what gives him pleasure’ ‘mdash; heavy drinking and the carnal pleasures of whorehouses. He resigns support for the guillotine after realizing that ‘the Revolution devours its own children.’
But despite Danton’s empathetic appeals, his adversary Robespierre (Ross Crain) governs the committee’s opposing faction with staunch conservatism, preoccupied with creating a Republic of Virtue. For the adamant technocrat, ‘the social revolution isn’t finished. Anybody who goes only halfway with a revolution digs his own grave.’ Robespierre sentences Danton to death, convinced that the ‘wholly degenerate class’ of political dissenters must be duly punished.
Tugging at the traditional yarns of storytelling, Danton’s wife, Julie (Sara Garcia), and his confidant’s wife, Lucille (Maren Bush), add romantic confusion to the play’s m’eacute;lange of genres, desperately pleading for their husbands to forfeit their resistance against a bloodthirsty Robespierre.
If Danton emblematizes Christ in his self-sacrificing martyrdom, then Lacroix (Lorene Chesley) and Camille (Jessica Watkins) are his faithful and talented disciples, their emotional r
ange and colorful inflections offsetting the cyclical speeches of Danton and Robespierre.
In tangential, Aristotelian musings, ‘Danton’s Death’ departs from its political underpinnings, with scatter-brained aesthetics only further tangling a muddled narrative. Taking up half the stage, a makeshift pit prevents close interaction between characters ‘mdash; perhaps reflecting their escalating emotional and political distance, but more likely a slip of overambitious set designers. Unintentionally, the pit requires characters to march sternly around its expansiveness (as if storming the Bastille wasn’t hard enough). The minimalist set fails to complement the realism of the play’s harsh political context. If not for the imitation sans-culottes, nothing on stage would connote a French milieu.
The play opens with only a projection screen on stage, as phrases that evoke the political turmoil emerge amid a scrambled paragraph of words. The screen then lifts to reveal a trippy, mountainous arrangement of wooden chairs on stage left ‘mdash; the legs of some chairs jutting across, atop, and beneath the backs of others. But, like the impetus for Robespierre’s ornery despotism, the play glosses ever so glibly over the reasoning behind this surrealist eyesore.
Deft lighting, casting shadows eerily against the set’s backdrop in stark contrast, momentarily salvages the play’s artistic merit. But the transient brilliance soon capitulates to histrionic sound bites. Opera clips signal the end of emotive scenes, with the pious gloom of hymns like ‘Donna Nobis Pacem’ jolting a heavy-lidded audience.
The personification of Liberty (Bianca Harlow) as a silent omnipresence, one of the play’s greatest stabs at symbolic depth, proves brilliant in its irony ‘mdash; that a woman clad in African tribal garb represents ultimate freedom.
Lost in its own gaucherie, ‘Danton’s Death’ desperately clings to the puns and tropes of Shakespearean classics. Here, the hamartia of B’uuml;chner’s tragic hero, Danton, lies in his sloth and indecision. The Hamlet allusion again resurfaces when an emo Robespierre, self-alienated from the newfound bourgeois, mourns: ‘Everything is empty and desolate. I am alone.’
Robespierre then turns into Lady Macbeth, guiltily rebuffing Danton’s accusation of him: ‘It doesn’t matter how many rags I wrap around it, the blood seeps through.’ Before the words ‘Out, damned spot!’ leak, he harkens ‘The Tempest,’ comparing life to reverie: ‘Are we only sleep walkers? Isn’t our life like a dream?’ For B’uuml;chner, too, all the world’s a stage ‘mdash; characters repeatedly iterate the scarcity of free will in their marionette-strung lives, forever at the mercy of some intangible force.
But ‘Danton’s Death’ lacks the Bard’s sophistication. Its frequent squabbles demand extensive political know-how, leaving us impossibly scrambling to comprehend the drama’s antiquated discourse. ‘Death’ approaches us with the twofold intent of demystifying the enigmas of humanity and recapitulating the Reign of Terror ‘agrave; la CliffsNotes. And, in a way, it does ‘mdash; we experience confusion akin to the French Revolution’s own bewildered peasantry. C’est la guerre!