‘Archduke’ — a theater company at its best
You could understand and appreciate the proud giddiness at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley on Saturday, June 8. While the occasion was the opening night and Northern California premiere of Rajiv Joseph’s “Archduke,” there was something more momentous on the horizon: The theater would be receiving the 2019 Regional Theatre Tony Award at the American Theatre Wing’s 73rd Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York Sunday night.
A delegation from the theater, led by founding Artistic Director Robert Kelley, was already in New York. This fall, Kelley embarks on his 50th and final season as the company’s artistic director.
And yet, even with the impending celebration, the focus of the night was on the stage.
Joseph’s sweet, sad and deeply moving “Archduke” continually evoked alternating emotions. Sympathetically directed by Giovanna Sardelli, TheatreWorks’ director of new works, the play is both an incisive comic examination of manipulation and a slightly uneven meditation on life’s meaning, or lack thereof.
Set in 1914, the play imagines the events leading up to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. The
event has long been seen as the tipping point that pushed Europe into World War I. Any parallels to how young men and women around the globe today are recruited and seduced into political martyrdom today are intended. Developed in part at TheatreWorks 2016 New Works Festival, “Archduke” received its world premiere in 2017 at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum. This new TheatreWorks production debuts a substantially rewritten script by Joseph.
The playwright has an affinity for the longing and pathos of common people who are destined for tragedy rather than greatness. In plays such as “Gruesome Playground Injuries” (2011) and “Guards at the Taj” (2015), Joseph creates intimate views of young lives that have either failed to launch or are stunted by circumstance. Here he shows us both through a trio of luckless would-be insurgents — Gavrilo (Stephen Stocking), Nedeljko (Adam Shonkwiler) and Trifko ( Jeremy Kahn) — who come together in a barren warehouse unsure of why they’ve been sent there and what they will be asked to do.
We initially meet Stocking’s cowering Gavrilo as he’s inspecting the spare shadowy space occupied by empty decaying wood shelving and two wooden crates. Tim Mackabee created the darkly expansive set, and Dawn Chiang designed the striking, evocative lighting. Stocking gives Gavrilo an engaging, carefully calibrated performance as we see the timid wondrous boy evolve inexorably into a doomed man-child assassin.
Shonkwiler’s bouncy, clueless Nedjelko soon joins Gavrilo, and the two have a hysterical, poignant verbal pas de deux on no less than the meaning of life. Joseph’s script feels too literal here, yet his empathy toward his characters and the chemistry of the performances makes the long opening scene work.
The boys, not yet men, reflect as best they can on life’s big questions — Why are we here? What does it mean? — and confront the certainty of death. The ultimate resolution is more immediate for them than most: Both are “lungers” — they have had tuberculosis diagnosed by a mysterious, unseen doctor who has sent them to this curious meeting place.
Soon a third bumbler, Trifko, arrives. Though he knows more of their assignation, affecting an empty bravado, we soon see he’s just as hapless.
The beauty of Joseph’s writing is that the boys are hapless but not hopeless. Their dreams, meager and modest as they unfold them to one another, are for slightly better lives than their marginal existences. They long for warm sandwiches, real beds, to make love to a woman. They don’t want to die before they’ve had opportunities to live. It’s not so much to want, and they’re sadly aware of that, too.
Trifko brings the boys to the country home of Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijevic (the archly inventive Scott Coopwood), a Serbian nationalist who’s recruiting them for a mission. In a masterful set piece of comic timing and droll reactions Coopwood and his inscrutable housekeeper cook, Sladjana, (the excellent Luisa Sermon) give a history lesson in Serbian grievances culminating in the explanation that the root of their fatal ailments lies with the Archduke they must eliminate.
Director Sardelli has worked extensively with Joseph across the country and specifically with the different iterations of this play. Her understanding of the playwright’s rhythms and nuances allows the script’s comedy and pathos to arise with purposeful fluidity.
Modern Eastern European views of Gavrilo Princip range from freedom fighter to terrorist. Joseph sees Gavrilo more humanely, as an ill-fated instrument unknowingly spinning the plot of world history. Supporting and advancing this superior level of new work is the perfect example of why the theater is receiving its Tony recognition.