Theatre in Review: Incident at Vichy
Incident at Vichy
Light and Sound
David Barbour
March 17, 2009
Ever since its 1964 debut, Incident at Vichy has been relegated to that shelf titled "Miller, Arthur; minor works of." Having seen the new production by The Actors Company Theatre, I can't think why.
According to the extensive and revealing program notes, the play's many nay-sayers found it to be moralizing and manipulative. But even those who tend to be put off by the occasional windiness found in major Miller works like, say, The Crucible, should be able to appreciate the taut exercise in existential terror that is Incident at Vichy. For 90 minutes, it held me in its ugly, vice-like grip.
The playwright entraps a dozen or so men in a place of detention in Vichy, France, in 1942. The police have rounded them up and they sit outside, awaiting interrogation by a Nazi major and Professor Hoffman, a specialist in racial anthropology. We quickly realize that none of the men -- most of whom are Jews -- have identity papers that can't stand up to close scrutiny; even more alarmingly, one of them reports that the Germans tried to measure his nose. Soon after, they learn that they will be required to open their pants, revealing their tell-tale circumcision.
The tension builds as, one by one, the men are called in for questioning -- and most of them are never seen again. (That one is occasionally let go only makes the odds seem worse for the rest.) Meanwhile, the others, their nerves stretched to the breaking point, wonder what to do: Stay calm? Try to escape? Talk one's way out of this predicament?
Lebeau, an artist, can't stop fretting out loud, his chatter setting everyone else further on edge. Bayard, a communist, spreads rumors of the death camps, which are frantically denied by Monceau, an actor, who insists it's all a mistake. A teenage boy, picked up trying to pawn his mother's wedding ring -- the family's sole remaining valuable -- begs one of the others to redeem it for him and save his parents from starvation. As the group grows smaller, a moral duel erupts between Leduc, a physician who has been living in hiding with his family, and Von Berg, an Austrian Catholic aristocrat, who fled his home and who maintains that "Naziism is an outburst of vulgarity."
The talk is frequently elegant and sharp-tongued, full of blunt appraisals of horrors to come. Miller is especially acute at analyzing how the power of evil was allowed to overrun civilized Europe. "Nobody listens to music like a German," someone remarks, refuting the argument that the Nazis are louts. "That is their power -- to do the inconceivable. They are paralyzing us," says Von Berg, who speaks from experience. "They are relying on our own logic to immobilize ourselves," adds Leduc, who nevertheless declines to rush the single guard watching over them. When only two men are left, they are forced to quickly make a decision that is awful in its implications, yet will allow at least one of them to survive.
Much of the production's power comes from Scott Alan Evans' direction, which invests the action with a present-tense quality that vividly evokes the second-by-second tension of waiting to find out if one is going to live or die. He has assembled a cast that plays with fine restraint. Mark Alhadeff captures Lebeau's runaway loquaciousness, his habit of imagining the worst as a perverse form of comfort. Christopher Burns is a model of controlled, thoughtful anguish as Leduc. ("It's not your guilt I want; it's your responsibility," he tells the sympathetic but ineffectual Von Berg.) Todd Gearhart is thoroughly convincing as Von Berg, who cannot surrender his polished manners, even under the most grotesque circumstances. Jack Koenig sketches an acute portrait of psychological dislocation as the Nazi major who becomes enraged at his victims because they can't appreciate his disapproval of their detention. ("There are no persons left," he remarks, full of self-disgust.) Gregory Salata makes something arresting out of Monceau's attempt at using his acting skills to create a confident persona.
Adding to the production's bleak reality is Scott Bradley's setting -- a low-rise structure and a frame of dirty, industrial-grade windows - and Mary Louise Geiger's lighting, a weak daylight from which all hope has been extinguished. David Toser's costumes and Jill BC DuBoff's sound effects -- especially a disconcertingly pretty accordion melody from offstage -- are equally well-done.
Incident at Vichy is ripe for re-appraisal, and The Actors Company Theatre has done us all a favor by giving it a production that puts it in the best possible light. It may be time to move it to that other Arthur Miller shelf, where the better-known works reside.