BIRTH RATE
It takes someone familiar with the sight of lots of people crammed into a few rooms to expose the problem that never really went away. It takes a Polish playwright. Based on an essay by Tadeusz Rozewicz, Birth Rate is Kazimierz Braun’s highly stylized, metaphorical evocation of the emergency–“too many people, too little time,” the prospect of seven billion people crowding the planet by the year 2000.
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An adjoining “gallery of life” contained wild artworks constructed from congealed junk by Teatr Wspolczesny’s Krzysztof Zarebski–a mattress that is splitting in two under a mannequin, a half-open refrigerator packed with test-tube baby parts, and, hanging from the ceiling, dolls stuck in rapidly melting ice. The sexual vibrations from audience members were supposedly being sent to Washington for analysis, and the gallery contained two University of Chicago doctoral candidates intent on discovering a connection between erotic entertainment and the pressure of population as they watched a bag lady and a stripper contort. As we finished this leg of the tour we were asked to read aloud Rozewicz’s description of what happens when the metaphorical railway compartment fills to the bursting point and produces a panic.
So many of these moments impose without touching us. By far the best one in this overblown and overlong play is the compartment scene. The Chicago Actors Ensemble definitely earn their name: employing the most radical acting rapport I’ve seen, they slowly turn a civilized group of passengers into a human swarm desperate to break loose; this picture is not only worth a thousand words, it actually makes sense.
