- OTHER MEDIA
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- Mystery knocks Parisian couple off-kilter, absurdly, in 'Victims'
- SF Chronicle review November 1, 2008 (Robert Hurwitt)
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- "Drama's always been realistic, and there's always been a detective
about," the mild-mannered intellectual Choubert proclaims in Eugène
Ionesco's "Victims of Duty." "Every play's an investigation
brought to a successful conclusion. There's a riddle and it's solved in
the final scene."
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- Nothing is ever quite so simple in Ionesco's theater of the absurd,
which is one of its points. Patterns are to be identified, mocked and played
with. Expectations are set up, teased, thwarted, revived and stood on their
heads. The particular delight Cutting Ball Theater Artistic Director Rob
Melrose creates with Ionesco's rarely seen "Victims" derives
from his skill in exploiting the many twists in the author's metatheatrical
humor to brightly comic and unexpectedly touching ends.
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- The "Victims" that opened Monday is a propitious beginning
for Cutting Ball's first full season as resident theater at Exit on Taylor
- and an appropriate nod to its host Exit Theatre's long history of producing
Ionesco's plays (though never this one).
- Subtitled "a pseudo-drama," "Victims," first staged
in 1953, is a bundle of absurdist takes on middlebrow theatrical traditions
and a typical Ionesco attack on the perfidiousness of social conformity
(this was Paris after the Nazi occupation, remember), wrapped in a superficial
but perilous detective story. It's also spiced with some unobtrusively
stark vignettes from the wounding parental conflicts of the author's childhood.
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- The eager-to-please Choubert (David Sinaiko, replaced in the final
weekend by Brian Livingston) and his effortlessly, seductively dominant
wife, Madeleine (Felicia Benefield), are enjoying a quiet evening discussing
drama and civic duty in their comfortable Parisian flat. Then the Detective
(Ryan Oden) arrives. After a few gently comic pleasantries, Choubert -
pronounced either "Shubert" or, as will become apparent, "Chew-bear"
- is cajoled and bullied into an investigation that sends him swimming
through murky seas of memory and tumbling down slippery stairs to childhood.
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- Ionesco can be a little cloying in his self-congratulatory cleverness,
but Melrose and his actors keep the material fresh and surprising. Oden
and Sinaiko are particularly deft in executing quick shifts from drawing-room
comedy to noir thriller, memory play, dark comedy and sharply staged slapstick,
with Avery Monsen and Lisa Woods adding crisp touches of unreliable anti-hero
and gratuitously decorative, languid femme fatale. Michael Locher's deceptively
upscale set and Heather Basarab's shadowy lights deepen the noir elements
and add a bit of underwater adventure genre as well.
- It's a bright entertainment with some moving and evocative passages.
Melrose succeeds in making us rather happy victims of Ionesco's strange
world in the end.
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