BAAL
Sliced Bread Productions at Club Lower Links
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But Brecht’s steadfast rejection of anything smacking of pathos or preaching shows that Baal was never intended to be a cautionary tale against a life-style of excess. Written in the wake of World War I, which ruptured the political and moral guidelines that had governed Europe for centuries, Baal is a mythic drama whose subject is the primal struggle between life and death in a valueless society. Brecht’s appropriation of the ancient fertility god who came to epitomize pagan evil in the Judeo-Christian tradition was a clear signal of his intent: condemned by modern Christian society for his heathen ways (just as in biblical times Baal, lord of life, became Beelzebub, lord of the flies), Baal is a weirdly heroic figure, driven by a poetic urge too gigantic to be channeled into a career and a sexual urge too insatiable to conform to standard morality.
Seeking to restore this unorthodox hero to something like his original radical vigor some 70 years after the play was written, Bullion has put together a new version of a script that has already been authoritatively translated by several Brecht scholars. Based on a literal translation by actress Kandalyn Hahn, Bullion’s adaptation resets the action in an undetermined time and place that might very well be 1992 Chicago–specifically in and around the Clark Street performance-art and rock-music scene to whose audience this cabaret-musical production is geared.
More effective are the direct, unaffected supporting performances of Wes Bailey as Ekhart, Baal’s doomed lover (he’s also credited for the costumes, a witty grab bag of countercultural styles); Kandalyn Hahn as the publisher’s wife; Jodi Jinks as Joanna, the virgin who kills herself after Baal jilts her; and especially Michael Dowd, as a lumberjack who starts the show off with a bang by singing the “Chorale of Baal the Gigantic.” Dowd’s earthy vitality and potent singing are exactly what Olken’s Baal is missing.
