THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
The novels of the elder Alexandre Dumas, like those of fellow newspaper serialists Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, tended to be long, intricately plotted affairs; The Count of Monte Cristo, first published in 1844 in the Journal des debats over several months, took more than 1,000 pages to tell. So how does a theater company adapt such a lengthy tome to the stage without either shortchanging the story or exhausting the audience?
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Another answer is to do what Jeff Casazza and David Zak have done in their adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo: cut all you can, and then cut some more. Casazza and Zak have squeezed this sprawling novel into two acts and two and a half hours. The result is a cramped, rather uneven adaptation that, though it has its moments, seems to be in such a hurry that it stumbles over itself.
Of course, things might have gone better if David Zak’s cast of terrific actors hadn’t seemed so harried and underrehearsed. I don’t know when I’ve heard so many flubbed lines in a professional production. Even when the actors got their lines right, they delivered them hurriedly, as if they were afraid the play would leave without them.
Red Black and Ignorant is relentlessly depressing, undramatic, and pretentious. Structured as a series of short vignettes separated by blackouts, it presents us with a man burned to a crisp in a nuclear war, nicknamed Monster, who tells us what his life might have been like had he lived. We see him abused by his fellow classmates. We see him marry and raise a family. But Bond never makes the purpose of these seemingly random scenes clear. The only point seems to be a rather obvious and superficial one: that nuclear war is bad. (Perhaps Bond meant his character’s jet-black hue as an oblique comment on race relations in Britain, but if he did, the comment is very oblique indeed.)
