Tramp training

The ART gears up to take on Charlie Chaplin

by Scott T. Cummings

"For a moment he stands there as though amazed, slapshoes splayed, baggy trousers bunched up around his waist and tattered jacket fastidiously buttoned, hands gripping the two ends of his bamboo cane, black derby set square on his head, there in the middle of the gleaming chandeliered hallway near the foot of a broad staircase, its polished balustrade winding above him like the ornate frame of a formal portrait."

So begins Robert Coover's astonishing 1980 novella Charlie in the House of Rue. The character in question is instantly recognizable as Charlie Chaplin, specifically his famous Tramp character. At first, the story reads like a straightforward description of a typical Chaplin film. Charlie, the insouciant outsider, finds himself somewhere he doesn't belong and flirts with disaster right and left as he tries to fit in or get out. Coover's prose is elegant and almost clinical in its step-by-step account of the Tramp's every move. But as Bob McGrath says, "There's something apocalyptic going on."

McGrath is the artistic director of Ridge Theater, an experimental group based in New York and commissioned by the American Repertory Theatre to create a stage adaptation of Coover's novella. McGrath came to Cambridge for three weeks last May to begin work with the ART company and to brainstorm about Chaplin, Coover's take on him, and some of the routines that might go into the finished piece. Now, after another, longer rehearsal period, Charlie in the House of Rue premieres this week at the Hasty Pudding Theatre.

Charlie in the House of Rue is McGrath's third directing project at the ART and the second one that involves turning film into theater. McGrath followed up his staging three years ago of Susan Sontag's Alice in Bed with the world premiere two seasons ago of John Moran's techno-opera The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, which was based on the 1919 German Expressionist film by Robert Wiene. Local theatergoers who saw either of those productions are familiar with the McGrath/Ridge multimedia approach to theater. They use film, slides, and live video along with music, sound, and light as what McGrath calls "a set of membranes" that surround and sometimes supplant the stage action -- to phantasmagoric effect. "Each medium has a different task," says McGrath, "and then they overlap as well."

For the Chaplin project, Ridge founders Laurie Olinder and Fred Tietz have designed the sets, with Olinder creating the multiple slide projections that frame the action. Frequent Ridge collaborator Bill Morrison has created a film track out of archival footage from the early days of silent film. The music comes from the work of composer Bill Frisell. ART resident designers Christopher Walker, John Ambrosone, and Catherine Zuber provide sound, lights, and costumes respectively. And Dan Kamin, a Pittsburgh-based Chaplin expert and physical comedian, was brought in to work with ART veteran Thomas Derrah, who plays the Tramp, and the rest of the company on creating the precise geometrical movement and comic routines that are the hallmark of Chaplin's artistry.

"Charlie Chaplin is the greatest visual thinker of the 20th century," says Kamin with unbridled enthusiasm. "In his time, it was a commonplace to call him the greatest actor in the world. When you watch Chaplin perform, you see thought made visible. He was able to externalize thought into action in a way that nobody else has ever done. Those thoughts were worth seeing because he was also one of the funniest people in the world. If a comedian makes you laugh, he's done his job. Chaplin's films not only make you laugh, but they make you think. They're about real subjects: poverty, injustice, man's inhumanity to man, the prostitution of women in the world, the inequities of the class system. They're an exhilarating demonstration of ways that you can cope in a hostile world. He created what has been called the greatest fictional figure since Don Quixote, a kind of everyman figure that most everybody can relate to."

In confronting a hostile world, Chaplin's Tramp exhibits a winsome invincibility. He is underdog and superman all at once. As Kamin describes it, "The world is very mutable in his hands. Everything he touches he uses for some function other than what it is. One of the delightful things about the films is how everybody starts spinning and dancing to Charlie's dance. Everybody is affected." But in Charlie in the House of Rue, Coover subjects the Tramp to his worst nightmare. The world in which he finds himself does not cooperate with his usual antics. At first, it does not even seem to take notice of him. Then, as the story unfolds, the relationship between act and consequence disintegrates. Even as Coover's prose remains controlled and matter of fact, events become increasingly severe and surreal, suggesting a weird fusion of Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka.

"He comes into a place that is very familiar to him," explains McGrath. "He comes into the big rich mansion where he is going to raise all this mischief and flirt with the girl and get some free stuff and act like a guy in the upper class, but no one reacts to him or they react to him strangely. Finally, the world just turns on him. The funhouse becomes a torture chamber. And yet it remains funny in some strange way. In the end it makes Charlie start to have these very large thoughts about his position in this kind of random, godless, existential universe."

The American Repertory Theatre presents Charlie in the House of Rue at the Hasty Pudding Theatre through April 25. Tickets are $25 to $35. Call 547-8300.