- OTHER MEDIA
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- SF Bay Guardian November 5, 2008 (Robert Avila)
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- Choubert (David Sinaiko) and Madeleine (Felicia Benefield), a comfortably
complacent bourgeois couple, discuss the modern drama from their pleasant
Parisian perch when a knock at the door interrupts them. A detective (Ryan
Oden) is looking for the occupant of a neighboring apartment. They eagerly
cajole him into coming inside, but immediately Choubert becomes the object
of the increasingly ruthless investigation, transforming the pair's staid
surroundings into an embattled landscape of subconscious anxieties and
desires. In Cutting Ball Theater's sleek production, that landscape includes
unexpectedly fertile valleys of grief, betrayal, and sexual sublimation
as well as gleaming peaks of unfettered violence and Marx Brothers–like
mayhem. Of course, the playful discussion of modern theater is only one
of the representative gestures here of said modern theater, not least the
works of Eugene Ionesco, whose Victims of Duty (1953) helped inaugurate
the Theatre of the Absurd. And yet artistic director Rob Melrose's sure
handling of this rarely staged early work shows it too vital and resonant
to feel like a mere history lesson — even as the surprisingly contemporary
thrust of its satirical dream-logic forces us to consider how far back
this "post-9/11" moment of crisis really goes. (Avila)
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