Jordan Wright
April 6, 2014
Special to The Alexandria Times
Marcus
How would you like to be a French gendarme? In Carol Wolf’s whirligig of a play The Thousandth Night, the audience is addressed as such by Guy de Bonheur, a hapless Frenchman separated from a roving troupe of performers and caught up in the web of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France. The production is the first of a duet of In Rep one-man shows at MetroStage and a celebration of its 30th anniversary.
It is 1943 at a railway station, 50 miles outside of Paris, and Guy is alone having lost his fellow performers to the clutches of the German officers. He is fighting for his life, trying to convince the local constabulary to let him board a train to spirit him away from the Nazis and the ultimate penalty – – a trip to a death camp. He carries a single suitcase filled with the troupe’s props.
The premise of this play is promising. Guy must convince the police he is a harmless actor, a man whose life’s work is only to entertain. But the Third Reich’s enforcers believe his work to be “subversive”, and that he is a saboteur. To convince them otherwise and gain his freedom he reenacts the troupe’s performances to the French police in hopes they will not turn him over to the authorities. To this end Guy performs 38 separate characters in a series of plays from the classic stories of “The Arabian Nights: Tales From a Thousand and One Nights”.
As Guy (Marcus Kyd) segues from donkey, to sultan to wife and baker, to hunchback, dead body and soldier in the first tale, he dons different hats and scarves in order to depict the separate characters. Unfortunately the pathos of the play is lost in schtick and campy banalities – talking hats as puppets and women speaking with a swishy effeminacy – the only drama a series of trains arriving at the station with ever more SS officers hunting down the “saboteurs”. The stories are stale and the characters trivialized, filled with goofy genies, doomed lovers and feisty sultans. Kyd tries his damnedest to pull it off, but it just doesn’t work.
Not even James Kronzer’s spectacular set design of a full-stage train station replete with dusty windows and period architecture, Alexander Keen’s clever lighting using searchlights and silhouettes of moving trains, or Robert Garner’s electrifying sound design, can bail this one out.
Through May 18th at 1201 North Royal Street, Alexandria, 22314. For tickets and information visit www.metrostage.org.
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