Chalk show

Full Circle deserves a round of applause

by Carolyn Clay

FULL CIRCLE, By Charles L. Mee. Directed by Robert Woodruff. Set design from Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by Michael Chybowski. Puppets by Ruth Pongstaphone. Sound by Christopher Walker. Movement by Doug Elkins. With William Church, Karen MacDonald, Remo Airaldi, Alvin Epstein, Jonathan Hova, Benjamin Evett, Will LeBow, Laura Knight, Mary Shultz, Mirjana Jokovic, Steven Rowe, and John Douglas Thompson. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through March 19.

The last show I saw that included ritual singing of the song "YMCA" was the stage version of The Brady Bunch. Full Circle, too, involves the recycling of popular culture, and if it's not the very best thing I've seen in ages, it is decidedly the most interesting. Charles L. Mee's plays, inspired by history and the art of Max Ernst, are collages -- of culture, politics, deep thoughts and shallow musings both borrowed and original. Several of his works are built on Greek tragedies. In the case of Full Circle, the base is Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle (itself a rewrite of a Chinese legend). But whereas Brecht's play celebrates the birth of Communism, Mee's considers, with a more jaundiced eye, its demise. And it places Brecht's Ironshirts high above the stage on a rickety rope bridge, where they try to assuage their terror by singing the Village People's 1970s encomium to the Young Men's Christian Association.

Both a burlesque of and a conversation with Brecht (whose Marxist utopianism Mee finds naive), Full Circle is set in 1989 in East Berlin, just as the Wall is toppling. The plot closely mirrors that of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, including the initial jockeying over the valley (here an egregiously politically incorrect play being performed by the Berliner Ensemble). But Mee's dramatis personae include head of the German Democratic Republic Erich Honecker; experimental playwright Heiner Müller; well-husbanded socialite and Democratic Party doyenne Pamela Harriman (here called Pamela Dalrymple); and a Coke-swilling American investor based on billionaire Warren Buffett. Also on hand, brandishing a piece of the Wall and an excitable idealism, is Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel's warrior/peasant figure Dulle Griet.

As it happens, Honecker, along with his mistress and baby, is attending a performance of the Berliner Ensemble when rioting breaks out in the streets; the Wall is coming down, and so is Honecker. In the panic that ensues, the baby is abandoned and taken up by the unlikely combination of Pamela and Dulle Griet (the latter hired by the former as an au pair). On the lam with the baby, the two women career through an East Germany low on technology and infrastructure but drunk on the American dream. Eventually, Pam and Dulle must duke it out with the child's birth mother in the famous chalk circle. But Mee isn't of a mind that the parable's traditional ending -- in which true mother love shows itself by letting go -- holds up in a global economy whose mantra is "Hold on."

Full Circle -- which had its premiere in 1998 at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre -- is a rough, sprawling pageant of a play. And ART has brought in just the right person to stage it. Robert Woodruff, who helmed the company's stunning 1998 production of Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, wasn't sure he wanted to sit in the director's seat for what is both an homage and a harpooning -- after all, Brecht is his hero as well as his specialty. Moreover, Woodruff is an admirer of Müller, here no intellectual transformer of "canonical texts" into "metaphorical commentaries on recent European history" but a groveling worm with vomit on his shirt and guilt on his conscience.

But once aboard, Woodruff steers Mee's boat, loaded with referential cargo ranging from Andy Warhol to The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a masterfully stylized course between the shores of cartoon and dream. On a gray-framed playing space that expands and contracts like Spandex, the revolution is suggested by bursts of chaos and flurries of money grubbing, the old oppression by a pair of soldiers at loose ends who pursue Pam and Dulle from the disruption of Berlin to the squalor of Dresden. On the way, a brief sojourn at a hotel is almost danced by mechanical masseuses and cynical cooks. Later a Bruegelesque wedding scene emerges from the orchestra pit. And the final reckoning takes place on a stage strewn with paper, a dumped file cabinet suspended overhead.

The ART design team contributes to Mee's collage, with Christopher Walker providing a muffled barrage of sound, Riccardo Hernandez a versatile set, and Catherine Zuber costumes ranging from Pam's perfect suit to Dulle's combat boots. As is their habit, the ART regulars adapt to extremes of style, with Alvin Epstein playing Honecker practically on the diagonal and a bespectacled Will LeBow, eerily suggestive of Müller, delivering much of a long monologue while lying on his side on the floor, as if weighed down by rationalization. Remo Airaldi and John Douglas Thompson are the click-and-clack soldiers, rocking excitedly to the manly fantasy of "guns wriggling and jerking in our hands like fish," then fragmenting hilariously on that bridge. But Obie winner Mary Shultz, as a Pamela intrepidly steering her way through East Germany without letting go of her Chanel bag, and Yugoslav actress Mirjana Jokovic, a husky-voiced and radiant Dulle, are strikingly worthy additions.

What is Mee actually saying? Unlike Brecht, he seems more ruminator than polemicist. Still, there is a political statement here. The irony is, it's made by a frowzy, sensuous hausfrau who falls into her cups and out of her clothes at the wedding party. Communism is up in smoke, but a hastily aped Capitalism is hardly the answer; there should be, she insists, "a third way." It's a simple point, made here with brilliant, eclectic theatricality.