Menace and wit

Of entertainment and evil

January 31, 2007 11:30:16 AM

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, though certainly not in that order. That’s the first thing to mention about the ambitious current production at the Gamm, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. The two-hour evening consists of four one-act plays that deal directly and indirectly with torture.

Since playwrights Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Peter Barnes are modern theater masters and since the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre and its associate directors and actors are no slouches either, the prospect is promising.

Amnesty International was sufficiently impress¬ed to sign on as a sponsor of the production. Following evening performances on February 1, 8, and 15, there will be audience discussions with the organization’s staff and invited speakers. After the February 4 matinee, the speaker will be a former US Army interrogator who now teaches interrogation techniques.

“The Guantánamo Bays and the Abu Ghraibs and the rest of them have never really gone away, so it seemed the perfect time to bring this to the audience,” said Tony Estrella, the Gamm’s artistic director, who is appearing in one of the plays.

While on the face of it, this evening of theater might sound like a definitive downer, there is more being offered than wince-inducing sympathy and moral instruction. Estrella describes the evening as about “the dignity of man asserting itself.” Ending the evening is Becket’s Catastrophe, which was dedicated to the former president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, when he was in prison. Estrella considers that play to be particularly “hopeful” and “ultimately about political issues as much as it’s about a primal power struggle between one human and another.”

Joining a discussion with Estrella and Peter Sampieri, who is directing the Barnes play, was longtime Trinity Repertory Company actor Fred Sullivan Jr. Sullivan noted that he settled in Providence because of Beckett. The year was 1980 and the occasion was a Trinity Rep production of Waiting for Godot, with Richard Jenkins, Richard Kavanaugh, and George Martin. It was the best production of the modernist classic that he’d ever seen.

“I said if that theater can do that with that writer, this is where I want to be,” Sullivan recalled.

Gamm creative boss Estrella has chalked up plenty of experience directing, but on this occasion he left that job to Sullivan and Gamm resident director Sampieri. Estrella remarked that he doesn’t know any director “who loves and understands” Pinter and Beckett better than Sullivan, who saw the world premiere of Catastrophe, one of the three plays he is directing.

Sullivan is also a good choice for leavening a subject that could be oppressive as hell. “I’ve always loved more circus than church in my theater,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be arid and dry just because it’s smart.” That’s certainly so with the piece that Sampieri is directing, Peter Barnes’s A Hand Witch of the Second Stage.

“All of these playwrights are absolutely anti-authoritarian — but Barnes has made a career out of that,” Sampieri said. “To me, the most refreshing thing about Hand Witch is that we continuously will watch and love to watch and need to watch and need to be reminded that authority can be subverted, can be subjugated.

“When we live in such a brutal world and are aware of things like Abu Ghraib, the theater reminds me that something different can occur, that you can defeat authority by using authority’s weapons,” he continued. “That’s the comic gold of the piece, the fuel of the piece.” And that provides the opportunity to deal obliquely at times with something as horrific as torture.

“Part of the genius of One for the Road,” Sullivan began about one of the Pinter plays, “is that you are entertained by the most evil son of a bitch you’ll meet in a long time. That’s absolutely Shakespearean.”

He said that some invited guests were watching a rehearsal about a week into production. “I said to them, ‘Don’t feel guilty when you laugh.’ Because you find yourself kind of on the side of the cruelest person in the world, on some level.”

In the conversation, both Sullivan and Sampieri mentioned the necessity of balancing menace and wit in these plays. The golden mean, they are aware, wasn’t just a concern for the Greeks.