Charlie's angst

Chaplin's Tramp in postmodern times

by Carolyn Clay

CHARLIE IN THE HOUSE OF RUE, Created by the American Repertory Theatre in association with Ridge Theater. Based on the novella by Robert Coover. Directed by Bob McGrath. Set design by Laurie Olinder and Fred Tietz. Slides by Olinder. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Film by Bill Morrison. Music selections from the work of Bill Frisell. Sound by Christopher Walker. Comedy and movement coaching by Dan Kamin. With Thomas Derrah, Caroline Hall, Remo Airaldi, Karen MacDonald, Alvin Epstein, and Benjamin Evett. Presented by the ART at the Hasty Pudding Theatre through April 25.

When Charlie Chaplin made Modern Times, in 1936, he hadn't seen nuthin' yet. Charlie in the House of Rue welcomes "the little fellow" to postmodern times, then runs over him with the welcome wagon. Robert Coover's startling 1980 novella -- written in what amount to precise, poetical stage directions -- places Chaplin's Little Tramp in an opulent but sinister Victorian manse on whose accessories and occupants, many of them familiar types from the early films, he tries to work his adorable, mustachio'd wiles. But things turn sour for the Tramp, whose slapstick interactions with his surroundings spiral out of control until what you have is less a "flicker" than a dying light.

"All slapstick is surreal, and maybe vice versa," writes Coover in a program note. Certainly that's true in Charlie in the House of Rue, which has been transformed by the American Repertory Theatre and Ridge Theater into a multimedia Dagwood served up on a plate of sound and music that ranges from the jaunty to the spiritual. In the theater piece, which is getting its world premiere at the Hasty Pudding Theatre, the formulaic albeit brilliant routines of early Chaplin short subjects exist in the midst of an evocative media sandwich. The live action of the piece is set between transparent screens on which slides and archival film are projected, some of it racing by like an ambulatory Rorschach blot. The comedy, however insouciant or rambunctious, seems distant, dreamy -- even before it catapults out of control, the slapstick morphing into tragedy, the surrealism turning grotesque, until the scrappy, innocent, early-20th-century world of the Tramp hurtles toward a barren and apocalyptic end.

There is no way for the theater piece to conjure the full effect of Coover's novella, much of which is generated by the story's clinical yet lyrical prose. And of course there is no way for any actor, even the improbably dexterous Thomas Derrah, to imitate perfectly the inimitable Chaplin. That said, the 70-minute theater piece created by ART and Ridge Theater is quite affecting. The collaborators are by and large the same team who brought The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari to the Loeb mainstage last season: director Bob McGrath and designers Laurie Olinder and Fred Tietz of Ridge, working here with filmmaker Bill Morrison, composer Bill Frisell, and ART designers Catherine Zuber, John Ambrosone, and Christopher Walker. But Caligari, though visually arresting, was hollow, providing little of the Artaudian horror to which it aspired. Technically bravura, the piece seemed pointless. Charlie is smaller-scale but more successful. This is primarily because the material, with its strange mix of banana peels and catastrophe, pratfalls and poignancy, is so striking.

The production wisely truncates Coover's scenario, in which the Chaplin figure reels repeatedly among the rooms of the hostile edifice into which he has stumbled, finding his trademark hat, cane, and mischievous charm increasingly less effective against mounting disaster. The streamlining makes for an unusually brief but less repetitive work. Moreover, the suggestion of Chaplin, by ART stalwart Derrah, and of frequent Chaplin players including Max Swain and Edna Purviance, by the rest of the cast, is uncanny. Indeed, the entire on-stage re-creation of an old-time silent movie -- with its buzzing projector, abrupt dissolves, and framed subtitles -- is impressive.

When you enter the theater, the name of the play is already projected on the front scrim; what sounds like silent-movie accompaniment is playing. Then, very gradually, the back picture comes into focus, disclosing the entrance hall of the House of Rue. A white figure reveals itself to be an alabaster statue of a woman. There is a moose head on the wall. And Chaplin appears atop a small stand center stage, tipping his hat, flexing his cane, dipping into a splay-footed plié, before waggling off in an approximation of the Tramp's trademark suit.

In a series of at first innocuous if vaguely ominous scenes, the scruffy but lovable Tramp moves among the rooms of the house, flirting with a beautiful lady in the hallway, trying to cadge some soup from a bald man in the kitchen, conning a stone-faced geezer out of some liquor in the library, engaging in some risqué hanky-panky with a maid in the boudoir, and playing tricks on a dome-helmeted policeman who's fishing in the bathroom. In the beginning, no one but the maid -- who alternates between come-on and offense -- seems to notice him. So he pulls his Chaplin-esque tricks, replacing the bald man's tightly held spoon with a rose so he can use the implement to slurp up soup, moving glasses around like cups in a shell game so that the old man will inadvertently pour him a drink, fishing a crab out of the toilet to attach to the policeman's nose. Most of these bits are rooted in early-Chaplin shtick -- which involved a fair amount of light-hearted sadism and connivance.

But things start to go wrong for the Tramp. The lovely lady, unresponsive to his kibitzing, reaches plaintively into the ether. The old man, seemingly in a trance, commences to pour endlessly, whether there's a glass beneath his bottle or not. (Later, his eyes pop out of his head and won't go back in.) A subsequent excursion to the kitchen finds the big bald man pissing into his smoking cauldron of soup, then on the Tramp. Eventually, Charlie discovers the beautiful white-clad lady draped in a noose and about to hang herself. Distraught, he does a little act to discourage her, in the process knocking her off the banister and into the air. (This is not made sufficiently clear in the theater piece.) From then on, Charlie's mission is to save the lady. But his chivalry falls prey to an increasingly cruel and macabre milieu in which physical comedy becomes an endless, preventative loop. Still, tossed among the horror chambers of the house, he never gives up. In its own deconstructionist way, then, Charlie in the House of Rue is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in a dark world that acknowledges neither humor nor valor.

It is Coover's modus operandi to take well-known formulas, or "myths," and see whether they can survive when turned on their heads. In the case of Charlie, he co-opts the world's most famous comedian and puts him in a situation that defies, even as it invites in some kneejerk way, laughter. The result is discomforting and sometimes grotesquely funny. The theater piece doesn't attempt all of Coover's flights of fancy (probably because Alvin Epstein, however dedicated to the ART, does not wish to be separated from his head). And it must forgo some of the novella's most plangent narrative connections, among them the repeated references to a custard pie in the face of the beautiful lady, even as she suffers and decays. But director McGrath and company get up to their own tricks, including a flashing-light effect that intensifies a ghoulish encounter in which the maid, wielding giant scissors, seems set on castrating the Tramp. And a scene in which the bald man pummels the Tramp with a dead rabbit throbs with both mechanization (a favorite Chaplin target) and true viciousness -- all to a jazzy beat.

Most of the performers are called upon to represent both types and disconnection, which they do, with Caroline Hall hauntingly sad as the lady, Remo Airaldi stonily malevolent as the bald man, Karen MacDonald pert and then predatory as the maid, Alvin Epstein zombie-like as the mournful old man, and Benjamin Evett hale and hearty as the policeman who engages with Charlie in a repeated series of co-pratfalls that keep them from saving the lady. As for the gifted Derrah, it is a brave thing to attempt Chaplin as the Tramp and no mean feat to come out unbowed. The actor -- who was coached by Chaplin expert Dan Kamin -- doesn't particularly look like Charlie, even in a dark, curly wig. But he comes close enough to the Tramp's pluckish swagger and ineffable grace to represent him. Derrah's handling of the physical bits, from lithely back-kicking a discarded match to pouring himself out of a chair to acting with flailing legs while head-down in the tub, is pretty amazing. And when it comes to timing, his Chaplin takes a licking and goes on ticking.

It would be hard not to be impressed by the layering of "membranes" of suggestive sight and sound that have gone into the making of Charlie in the House of Rue. Yet this arty stratification of media can prove hopelessly distancing. It is to the work's credit, and particularly to Derrah's as the defeated yet still shoulder-squaring Tramp of the Beckett-esque coda, that Charlie gets under your skin. Like the Tramp himself, it's diminutive but not to be forgotten.