Smoking fun

An outing for Frisch's Firebugs

by Anne Marie Donahue

BIEDERMANN AND THE FIREBUGS, by Max Frisch. Translated by Michael Bullock. Directed by Ed Howe. Music by Andres Rivarola. Lighting by Steven Buck. With Rivarola, Dev Luthra, Maggie Steig, Lorraine Grosslight, Caty Laignel, and Rena Baskin. Presented by Huellas Vivas/Living Tracks at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center through March 7.

Of Bertold Brecht's legion of legatees, Max Frisch is surely one of the cheekiest. Like Friedrich Dürrenmatt, his more famous contemporary and countryman, Swiss playwright Frisch (1911-'91) shares Brecht's fondness for parables about 20th-century humankind's moral and political cluelessness, and he lifted heavily from the alienation meister's bag of stylistic and technical tricks. In Biedermann and the Firebugs, however, Frisch shows himself to be more of a wise-ass than either Brecht or Dürrenmatt ever was, and his twisted wit helps to lift the play above the historical particulars that inspired it.

Although Biedermann was first staged in 1958, it's rooted in the disasters of the '40s, commenting most directly on Europe's complacency during the rise of the Nazis. Set entirely in the bourgeois home of a shady hair-tonic magnate named Gottlieb Biedermann, the play explores the spineless protagonist's relationship with a couple of itinerant pyromaniacs who talk their way into his house, pack it with explosives, and eventually burn it to the ground. It's giving away nothing to reveal that the pair are indeed the firebugs who have been terrorizing the town for weeks. A piggish ex-wrestler and a foppish waiter who met in prison while doing time for arson, the firebugs distract their host with jokes, bonhomie, and guilt trips but make little effort to hide their intentions. Initially Biedermann denies the obvious; later he tries to placate the firebugs with a lavish meal. In the end, however, he supplies them with the match. The best way to hoodwink people, one of the pyros observes, "is to tell the plain unvarnished truth. Oddly enough, no one believes it."

Frisch goes totally over the top in his addled "afterpiece," in which Biedermann and his wife bemoan their fate and dissect their folly while awaiting admission to Hell. Until then, however, the piece is provocative and ingenious. Structured as a parody of a medieval morality play, with a chorus of firefighters who warn and philosophize, Biedermann is simultaneously a political parable and a caustic commentary on humankind's moral flaccidity and capacity for self-deception. Frisch's play is also wickedly funny, with a madcap sensibility that has a contemporary feel and not one shred of earnestness.

The Equity-showcase production mounted by Huellas Vivas highlights Frisch's humor. The firefighters wear masks that suggest Bozo the Clown, and the accomplished cast captures the looniness and buffoonery of the main characters. For sheer entertainment, though, nothing in the show approaches the performance delivered by Andres Rivarola, who plays the disgustingly crass ex-wrestler with antic abandon reminiscent of the late John Belushi at his best. The show would work better if director Howe and dramaturg Peter Adrian Cohen had deleted rather than just shortened the epilogue. Even so, his production has a real spark, and it crackles from the start to what should have been the end.