NOTHING SACRED
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Because Nothing Sacred, George F. Walker’s play based on Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, is about a man who claims to hate illusions. His name’s Bazarov, and he lives the nihilist ideal (if that’s the word for it) of negation: attacking every accepted structure and received notion, from class privilege and the existence of God to fashionable dress and established mealtimes.
A disciplined and energetic subversive, Bazarov’s got no patience for anything aesthetic, romantic, traditional, inscrutable, or ideal. He abhors the flabby, unscientific ambiguities of love and poetry. Like Bakunin, he wants to tear the conventional world apart–both as a revolutionary act and as an interesting perceptual exercise. “Principles mean nothing to me,” he remarks early on. “I simply base my conduct on what is useful.”
He’s wrong, though. Or only half-right. And this show proves it finally–not with a broken light board, but by means of Walker’s simple, ironic, exceedingly delicate mining of Bazarov’s own contradictions. Because Bazarov turns out to be human. It’s his goodwill as much as his analysis, his sense of the sacred as much as his insistence on the nothing, that brings about his one great revolutionary triumph. This is a sweet lesson, and it’s true even when the computer’s working.
This is the first I’ve seen of Actor’s Repertory Theatre. I hope they bring this level of bravado to everything they do. They’ll be something if they can find a use for it.
