February 4, 1999
BY LUCIA MAURO
Recommended
An overwhelming sense of melancholy hovers over Pendulum Theatre Company's insightful production of Josef and Karel Capek's ``The Insect Play,'' which premiered in Prague in 1922. The brothers Capek, as they were known in their native Czechoslovakia, condensed the entire spectrum of human nature into a play in which insects serve as metaphors for the same desires that propel people to love, procreate and annihilate one another through wars.Karel Capek died in 1938, one year before Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Josef was sent to a German concentration camp, where he died in 1945. Their keen observations of the life cycle and poignant visions of war's futility remain relevant to this day.
A work of operatic proportions, ``The Insect Play'' is framed around a vagrant who observes the mating, foraging and pillaging rituals of bugs in a forest clearing. The playwrights take on the role of creative entomologists who endow butterflies and beetles--all engaged in an eternal battle for self-preservation--with human qualities. In this early feminist study and dark comedy, female butterflies assert their independence and acknowledge their own burning passions. The Capeks also call into question the overriding belief that humans have mightier ambitions
than other species.Director-scenic designer Bill Redding has created a provocative semi-environmental staging: Traditional seats have been replaced with lawn chairs and the space is carpeted with Astroturf. Sound designer Joseph Fosco fills the
room with the purring of cicadas.A perceptive director, Redding is willing to set aside overwrought concepts so that the playwrights' ideas can breathe. Their messages infuse audiences with a renewed vision of the world.
An agile cast takes on the play's fantastical multiple roles without ever crossing the line into children's theater. Even more distressing than the play's climactic war between the red and yellow ants as they create the ``most efficient'' war machine is the ``Marauders'' segment because it most closely mirrors the struggles of our daily lives.
Two dung beetles--one male, the other female--(played with fiery exuberance by Reid Ostrowski and Patti Roeder) search for a place to hide their treasure: a ball of manure, which they consider their life savings. When, for a brief moment, they take their eyes off their nest egg, another beetle runs away with it. A young expectant cricket couple settle into their new home but are swiftly killed by the Ichneumon fly (a suave Robert John Keating), who feeds them to his larvae. A parasite, in turn, gobbles up the larvae.
Dan Zielinski portrays the Vagrant with truthful pessimism as he confronts his own mortality but tries in vain to discover his purpose in life. His weary existence is a bleak counterpoint to the joy of a chrysalis shedding its skin. Jennifer Teeter shimmers as the evolving moth who gives every ounce of energy to her brief moment on Earth.
The eclectic ensemble--from the campy Katherine Martinez Ripley to the measured Mark Rayko--delight throughout this clever, sobering production.
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