METHUSALEM
Goll (aka Isaac Lang) slaps styles and subjects against each other with an exuberant, violent, vulgar impunity. Building on Jarry and Dada, anticipating Ionesco and Brecht, he sends his audience bouncing across a string of absurd, recklessly digressive vignettes detailing Methusalem’s dirty progress through the class wars. This is kitchen-sink drama in the sense that it hands us everything but.
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Still, the digressions are often the best parts. And very much to the point, in their way. A scene in which the magnate’s daughter Ida trysts with her lover–a radical student just aching to betray his proletarian values–becomes a hilarious dissection not only of treacherous intellectuals but of Freudian theory and male cock-think in general when the student’s ego, id, and superego show up to coach him along.
Maybe the heat got to me, but I don’t think so: a theater critic sits in a lot of sweaty rooms over the course of a Chicago summer. (And then, too, the humidity actually enhanced the mise-en-scene–making the actors’ whiteface run, so that Methusalem in particular looked as if he were going to melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.) Maybe I was put off by the notion of a guy like Cusack–an Evanston boy with a Hollywood future–styling himself a New Criminal, as if the name might make us mistake him for Genet. But again I don’t think so: there was enough conviction and talent evident onstage to excuse Cusack’s subversive posturing.
