Toward the end of the prologue that Brecht wrote for “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” but did not submit to his publishers (because, according to Eric Bentley, his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee was imminent), the professional bard who has been hired to tell two feuding farm collectives the story of the Chalk Circle remarks, “Comrades, we hope you’ll find that old poetry can sound well in the shadow of new tractors.” Anyone who thinks that this line—or the whole prologue—would not sound so hot today might very well enjoy the version of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” that’s currently at the Public Theater. Directed by George C. Wolfe—who wrote “The Colored Museum” and is one of Joe Papp’s newly appointed associates—and performed by eleven black actors and one Hispanic, the production is uplifting and exhilarating in a way that New York Shakespeare Festival theater hardly ever is: through simply showing a work to its best advantage and giving the audience a good time.
More than anything else I can remember seeing at the Public in recent years, in fact, this adaptation—by Thulani Davis, from a translation by William R. Spiegelberger—seems characterized by a kind of artistic good faith. This may sound strange, in view of the liberties Mr. Wolfe has taken: he has lopped off the prologue entirely, and has transplanted the whole story to present-day Haiti. Almost by definition, however, Brecht’s theater is such that it doesn’t really matter where you set it, and in this case the choice of locality seems less a reference to the Duvalier regime than a way of providing a cultural context in which it makes sense to tell a story using the highly stylized form of theater that Brecht called “epic” and we call “Brechtian,” though we might just as easily call it “ancient” or primitive.” Mr. Wolfe uses a three-man West Indian band and a quantity of ingenious masks and puppets to tell Brecht’s story of the peasant girl, Grusha, who rescues the child of the deposed governor during a palace uprising and refuses to give the baby up when the real mother presents herself.
The Caribbean setting allows Mr. Wolfe to play a very clever trick on Brecht, who, when the possibility of a Broadway production of “Chalk Circle” faded, rewrote the character of Grusha to make her less appealing. (He said that he wanted a figure who “bore the stamp of the retarded development of her class,” bless his heart) In Wolfe’s version, which casts Charlayne Woodard in the role, those aspects of Grusha’s personality which Brecht might have intended as meanness or stupidity come across as “attitude.” By robbing the play of its élément soviétique, Mr. Wolfe frees it from its programmatic constraints and comes up with a better story.
In Miss Davis’s patois-laced adaptation, the Governor’s Wife becomes Madame Le Gouverneur (Sharon Washington), the Grand Duke becomes Le Grand Blanc, the Singer becomes a Storyteller (Novella Nelson). In the role of the vaudevillian judge, Azdak—a sort of Dr. Quackenbush of the judiciary—Mr. Wolfe has cast Reggie Montgomery, a former clown, who plays the character with Groucho Marx mannerisms and an Alec Guinness lisp. The costume designer, Toni-Leslie James, has fitted him out with a coat-of-many-colors shawl, which Mr. Montgomery trips over with great fluency and grace, and the shawl picks up the colors that dominate the production—bright shades of red and aquamarine, which are echoed on a paint-spattered pillar on Loy Arcenas’s set, and in the harlequin ties that Luis A. Ramos and Cynthia Martells, playing a couple of lawyers in white-face, wear with blue blazers.
The production takes a little while to get off the ground: the first twenty minutes or so seem more self-conscious than charming, and for a while there’s a curious lack of music in the voices of the actors, who otherwise simulate Caribbean speech quite well. But then Fanni Green begins to take a more active part in things, and the others seem to pick up her cadences. At times, the play appears to be dominated by a matriarchal trio made up of Miss Woodard, Miss Nelson, and Miss Green, as the mother of the young man with whom Grusha enters into a marriage of convenience in Act I (she also does a marvelous drag turn as the policeman, Shauva, in Act II). But everyone gets a comic cameo or a moment in the sun, and Mr. Wolfe seems to bring out the best in his actors.
For years, the New York Shakespeare Festival has specialized in presenting versions of the classics that emasculate them by reducing them to the simplest political terms. Perhaps with Mr. Wolfe’s help the theater is embarking on a new chapter: creating classics by emasculating agitprop theater.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 17, 1990