Jungle fever

At ART, the early Brecht catches the worm

by Carolyn Clay

IN THE JUNGLE OF CITIES, by Bertolt Brecht. Translated by Paul Schmidt. Directed by Robert Woodruff. Set design by Robert Pyzocha. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by Michael Chybowski. Sound by Christopher Walker. With Arliss Howard, Jeremy Geidt, Randy Danson, Leslie Beatty, Alvin Epstein, Justin Campbell, Dmetrius Conley-Williams, Harry S. Murphy, Joe Owens, Emma Roberts, Kevin Varner, Robert Ross, Sarah Zwick-Tapley, and Rob Grader. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through March 14.

In the Bible, corrupt cities get zapped. In Brecht, the evil metropolis goes on heavy-breathing while the inhabitants, duking it out with degradation and each other, are destroyed. The Chicago of In the Jungle of Cities -- written before the playwright was 25 or had set foot in America -- is a lurid, strident, muscular myth of a town, a lonely, teeming setting for Brecht's arbitrary duel to the death between a Malaysian lumber dealer and the down-on-his-luck book clerk the Asian entrepreneur tempts to blood sport. Inspired by Upton Sinclair but rooted in the playwright's hothouse imagination and cartoon assumptions about America, the urban jungle of Cities is a sultry, shrill, yet bleak and dehumanizing nightmare vision. Abrasively yet hypnotically conjured at the American Repertory Theatre by the director Robert Woodruff and a crack team of designers, it's a fever dream that will have you sweating in your seat -- even if you wake to its twanging buzzers scratching your head.

That's okay. Yours is not to reason why; yours is but to watch them die. "Don't waste time trying to figure out why these men are fighting," instructs the playwright in his prologue to the 1923 work. "Just identify with the human risks involved, be fair when you judge the fighters' maneuvers, and pay close attention to the outcome."

Indeed, Brecht fashions the play in 10 rounds, like a boxing match. But the relationship of the adversaries, who drip a grotesque passion, is less suggestive of the sport for which the Marquis of Queensberry made the rules than it is of the relationship between Oscar Wilde and Queensberry's son -- if you can imagine Oscar as an angst-ridden Oriental inscrutable and Bosie Douglas as a furious idealist turned nihilist. (Actually, Brecht was in thrall of the affair between poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.) Moreover, the "outcome" is that, in this circle-of-Hell as fight ring, there are no winners. One combatant is vanquished; in fact, the pain of the KO is what he seeks. The other, increasingly addicted to the unholy contest, survives but sinks.

Written before Brecht had embraced Communism or fully formulated his theories of epic theater and alienation, In the Jungle of Cities is a sort of parable cum poetic screed, its visceral, hard-bodied language vividly captured in the new Paul Schmidt translation unveiled here. Woodruff makes of the three-hour play a sensory, unsentimental assault in which the acting is loud, angry, but hardly sensitive, the characters -- sinister, scrofulous, or sluttish -- mapping more a downward trajectory than an emotional journey.

Still, Brecht-coiffed Arliss Howard turns in a harrowing, increasingly corrosive performance as George Garga. Smugly if meticulously tending his lending library in the first scene, he is challenged by the mysterious C. Shlink, who wants to "buy" his opinion about a book. Garga will not proffer his viewpoint for money; he equates that with whoring (so much for us critics). Shlink and his henchmen taunt the clerk with his impoverishment, his pretensions, even his girlfriend, a laundress they have loaded up with "cocktails" and turned into a tart (with, it would appear at ART, minimal effort). Eventually, raging like Brecht's Baal, Garga takes the bait -- answering Shlink's call to arms and abandoning in the process his ideals, his soul, and his family.

Speaking of Baal, I recall it was Woodruff's exquisite staging of Brecht's first play, at Trinity Rep in 1991, that pulled me onto the director's skiff. This In the Jungle of Cities shares with that production a commingling of ruthlessness and heartbreak. It also wears an ART-ish veneer of irony. And the oft-brilliant high-tech staging puts a protective distance between us and the play that did not exist at Trinity. In particular, the red-lit Hollywood Squares grid that forms the "Chinese flophouse" where Shlink and his henchmen hang out is a visually striking but high-rent Lower Depths, each stacked compartment a frame for some arty tableau of depravity.

In one square, a near-naked man is chained. In another, a trio of Threepenny whores play cards. In the lower right corner, Shlink's employee, Baboon, keeps Garga's girlfriend, Jane, tanked and drugged while next door Garga's sister Marie, who has fallen for Shlink and will fall farther, listens to the depressed Asian's tales of childhood torture on the Yangtse river that gave him skin thicker than leather. Given the geometric pageant of feelingless sex, it would be easy to miss these near-monotonic expressions of existential angst, delicately rendered as they are by Alvin Epstein as a slant-eyed, long-braided, yellow-rubber-gloved Fu Manchu figure.

But the larger mistake, in my view, is the decision to saddle Shlink with a cartoon Asian accent for which translator Schmidt bears no responsibility. Yes, it's an audacious choice, given the current mania for political correctness. And yes, as Robert Brustein points out in his cogent analysis of this play in The Theatre of Revolt, the dramatist's "seedy Chinese bars and hotels seem to have come out of Anna May Wong movies or Charlie Chan novels." But despite Epstein's glistening performance as Shlink, a mixture of craftiness and despair, the accent dehumanizes the character in Jungle who most epitomizes the human condition!

Still, Woodruff's Jungle is a spectacular ride through an abyss both garish and dark. The production's Expressionism is less Germanic than postmodern, beset by surges of whimsy and shock that power both the high-pitched performances and Catherine Zuber's costumes -- an inventive melding of bright-hued grotesquerie and period sleaze that finds Garga's sister, Marie, in the angular person of Leslie Beatty, morphing from a gangly waif in kabuki whiteface and ankle socks to a teddy-clad hooker astride a sink, stuffing its drain with the ill-gotten cash she can't bring herself to spend.

Last month marked the centennial of Brecht's birth. As one of the most influential theater writers and theorists of this century, he will doubtless receive many tributes. You can count among them this penetrating peek at a not insignificant page from his baby album.