Cal Shakes’ ‘Szechwan’ is Brecht at its best
So often in contemporary performance the theories of playwright Bertolt Brecht translate poorly into practice. Actors distancing themselves from and commenting on their characters? Frequently that just looks like tepid commitment, the absence of choice where choice is urgently needed — bad acting. Direction that constantly reminds you that you’re at a performance, never letting you emotionally identify with characters and story, so that you might think critically instead of feel mindlessly? Big deal — theater has been breaking the fourth wall forever.
Against that backdrop, the achievement of California Shakespeare Theater’s “The Good Person of Szechwan” is all the more remarkable.
Eric Ting’s vision of Brecht’s 1943 play, which opened Saturday, July 6, is fully, lovingly thought through and impeccably realized from the moment Lance Gardner opens the show as Wang, the WaterSeller.
Wang’s heard that three gods, the “awakened ones,” are on their way, seeking tru
ly, purely good people who might open their homes for the night to strangers in need. As he leads them (Phil Wong, Lily Tung Crystal and Monica Lin — though, as shapeshifters, they’ll be personified by other actors later) in what threatens to be a futile search, Gardner speaks in a capering cadence, a bit like a Shakespearean actor overemphasizing the meter of his verse. But there’s no mistake here. Lilting along at a steady clip, he doesn’t hunker down in his thoughts and feelings but merely suggests them, that your imagination, your powers of inference and analysis might fill in the outlines.
As Shen Te, a sex worker and the one person in Szechwan virtuous enough to put the gods up, Francesca Fernandez McKenzie makes an ingenue’s openness not static or stock but dramatic, juicy with possibility; she somehow shows, in that wideeyed receptiveness to the world, how that same world has the capacity to hurt her — and it does.
After the gods remunerate Shen Te for her goodness, she opens a smoke shop, which in theory ought to multiply her capacity to do good — if, that is, everyone else weren’t intent on sucking her dry by moving in, bumming all her cigarettes, eating all her rice, claiming to love her in return for her money. Through all this, McKenzie’s Shen Te looks on her own performance as if through the warping lens of time and space, beating herself up for her choices, lamenting her plight, raging at the world then shrugging at it. “Could it be any other way?” she seems to ask. “Could you be any better?”
If there’s a saturnine aspect to all this distancing and selfexamination, it’s not the kind that bogs down but the sort that keeps adding layers. And Ting’s direction of Tony Kushner’s fluid, illuminating adaptation of the play (working from a translation by Wendy Arons) consistently leavens. Entrances and exits whoosh. A witty parade of costumes, by Ulises Alcala, bursts with color. Foley sound effects make characters into cartoons, each step or turn of the head or lightbulb of an idea accentuated with its own ding or creak or clomp. Flashed placards, a traditional Brechtian device, turn the tables on Brecht. “Brecht never went to China,” an early one announces, by way of explanation why actors pronounce all the Chinese names and terms with exaggeratedly bad American accents.
In a variety of ensemble roles, Cal Shakes stalwart Anthony Fusco gets the too-rare chance to showcase his talents as a character actor, triumphing as a selfassured streetwalker languorously displaying his armpit hair, then as a dude straight out of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” then as a 1970s rock star seizing a microphone to yowl. Wong excels especially as the barber, Shu Fu, caressing his copiously padded belly as if it’s a comfort blanket, then a sexual organ.
“Good Person” asks whether it’s possible to be good in an evil world, especially if you seek more than a handtomouth existence. Most of us already know the answer to that question, but this play and this production define how morality gets set — which is necessarily to say, how we make compromises, how we decide to be OK with how we bad we are — with uncommon clarity, with boundless compassion, with fearless artistry. It makes you want to make yourself and the world better, and believe that perhaps you can and know that you must.