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Going Hungary By John Barry If you’ve been complaining—as this reviewer has—that local theater in Baltimore tends to rehash the old standards, Run of the Mill’s season-opening production of The Danube certainly goes against the flow. The dramaturg’s notes to Maria Irene Fornes’ The Danube include a picture of an Iraqi woman from November 2003 proudly holding aloft a metal barrel that she found at one of the country’s recently abandoned and unguarded nuclear facilities. She’s emptied it of contaminated uranium oxide, the text explains, and now she’s going to use it to store milk and yogurt. The connection between that recent event and a play about pre-World War II Hungary may seem tenuous at first, but let it sink in. What would life be like in one of those Iraqi villages, where their first response to freedom was to start digging through yellowcake to find milk containers? In The Danube, playwright Fornes seems to be telling us that life in those situations goes on—but in somewhat altered form. The Danube is a story of a small Eastern European nation in the mid-20th century that has confronted a massive environmental disaster—something on the level of a nuclear war. Fornes’ approach to the particulars of the situation are elliptical, but that’s not the point—this is about the poor slobs who have to deal with these disasters the same way that they got into it: one step at a time. Hungary in this play is being subjected to massive upheavals, but the characters are looking at their lives using old-fashioned tunnel vision. The world around them is falling to pieces and the situation seems to be similar to nuclear winter, but they can think only of their next trip to the barber, their next meal, their latest romance. And when the going gets rough, and their air, water, and food is contaminated, they start thinking of leaving Hungary and heading to the United States, where people are supposed to be better at confronting those problems. But George W. would not approve this message. Fornes’ satire is a little more compassionate than that of, say, Jonathan Swift, but it has an oddly unsettling effect that’s similar to that of Swift’s darker humor. It leaves you laughing at the way the average Joe bungles through the nightmarish world he lives in. The average Joe in this story is Paul Green (Jon Ferreira), an American businessman who comes to Hungary and falls in love with Eve Sandor (Janel Miley Knipple), a local businessman’s daughter. But their romance is guided by old Hungarian language-instruction recordings—the type you would listen to in the ’30s before heading off to Budapest for a few weeks. Characters sometimes recite their lines after they’ve been played over a loudspeaker in Hungarian and then English; this infuses the drama with the wooden language of a Berlitz lesson, but still, the conversations about food and trips to the barber and jobs of relatives ultimately wind up blossoming into romance and tragedy. It sounds a little postmodern, but the four actors pull it off with an odd mix of deadpan comedy and high drama. As Green, Ferreira goes through a fascinating sequence of transformations—from a traveling businessman with an eye for the ladies to a desperately ill, vomiting expatriate who is trying to escape the nightmare around him. Ben Lawrence is an impressive comic foil in four minor roles, and his flat hammering out of phrases has its own subtle shifts. Miley Knipple, as Eve, and Richard Cutting, as Eve’s father, also navigate the play’s transitions as two Hungarians soldiering through their country’s destruction. The Danube is structurally complex, and may sound a little confusing on paper, but director Kathleen Amshoff keeps her eye on the ball; the situation is nightmarishly surreal, but the characters are oblivious in a down-to-earth way. It makes for some great comic scenes, a few touching, Chaplinesque moments, and a few scary parallels to ecological scenarios of our own. Two other theatrical sketches by Djuna Barnes—Little Drops of Rain and Five Thousand Miles—were chosen to sandwich The Danube, but frankly, the connection between them is unclear. The brief-but-tedious Little Drops of Rain involves a discussion between a grande dame of the Victorian era (Cutting) and a lisping young 20th century girl (Miley Knipple). Ferreira and Miley Knipple, however, cap an evening of energetic performances more successfully as “He” and “She” in Five Thousand Miles, in which a shipwrecked man and woman find themselves abandoned on a desert island. Like Barnes’ other one-act, this quickie had topical appeal, I’m sure, in the 1930s, but what seem like references to Gilligan’s Island today are no doubt unintentional. |