DZUMA (THE PLAGUE)
at the Rainbo Club
We’ve got AIDS, after all. And vast famines. Also, the greenhouse effect. Also, the plastics that never decompose, the nuclear waste that never cools, the toxic chemicals that make eating even an apple a risky business.
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We’ve got drugs and the war on drugs, poverty and our absolute ineptitude in the face of poverty. We’ve got Mussolini and Pinochet. We’ve got the pathological avarice that makes Reaganism work.
Even so, what we see onstage and in the various rooms to which we’re led during this promenade-style production isn’t Jaruzelski’s clampdown per se, but the progress of an actual biological disease–an outbreak of bubonic plague, brought on by a squad of vicious, rapacious, insidious, well-organized, and thoroughly insolent rats.
That final diapers-on-barbed-wire image isn’t original with this production or its codirectors, Rick Helweg and Jill Daly. It comes–like most of the other blunt, eloquent images here–from Braun’s text, which is arranged something like a shooting script for a film, with dialogue in one column and the mise-en-scene set alongside it in another. What Helweg and Daly and company have done is taken the mise-en-scene and given it an absurd and vivid life. Sometimes it’s the small things that do it: the ritualized motions of several nurses impart a special ominousness to a scene set in an operating room. Sometimes it’s the big: rat-squad member Michael Franco takes exquisite advantage of one of Braun’s best theatrical ideas, performing a danse macabre–at once gruesome and offhanded–in a plague ward.
