The San Diego Union-Tribune
July 22, 1985
Brecht Play Offers Compelling Look at Man's Dark Side
By GREGORY NELSON JOSEPH, Tribune Staff Writer
At the height of the Vietnam War. If the American public protested and eventually forced an end to the war because of what they were seeing on their television sets, what might they have done after beholding this version of Brecht's work that opened last night at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts?
Those who chose to stay tuned might find more -- much more -- than they had expected, although logic suggests that Brecht's sardonic, nihilistic vision of society, combined with his stylized and frequently pedantic approach might shrink the viewing audience to Sermonette size.
That would be a pity, for the production pieced together by director Robert Woodruff has all the things a fine play should have, including but not limited to, the capacity to move, enlighten and entertain.
"A Man's a Man" (as translated here by Gerhard Nellhaus) is more than an anti-war play, although on its most obvious level it certainly succeeds as that (the German-born Brecht was a hospital orderly in World War I, and on the basis of this work alone, one suspects the misery he endured at the experience was monumental).
At its root, the comedy-cum-tragedy is about corruption of the individual -- specifically, how deceptively easy the corrupution is to accomplish, and what such infestation can do to an entire social structure (another subject with which Brecht was painfully familiar -- he fled his homeland when Hitler rose to power in 1933).
At the fulcrum of it all is a Buster Keaton-like Everyman named Galy Gay, a simple dock worker who leaves home one morning to buy some fish, is hoodwinked by three unscrupulous soldiers into masquerading as their missing buddy and winds up becoming the most murderous -- and heroic -- military man of them all.
The much-heralded Bill Irwin -- an actor, mime and clown who has been compared to Keaton in carriage and technique -- begins by depicting Galy as an absolutely blank canvas, a simpleton whose attitudes and beliefs can be colored in by the people and events around him.
When the character departs his wife, even for a few moments, his attitudes are painted in by the trio of soldiers and, ultimately, their creed is substituted entirely for his own. In the end, he is more committed to it than they, and eventually goes so far as to forsake his original manipulator -- his wife.
The show brims with stunning portrayals -- Brandis Kemp's funny-tragic canteen owner, with her own horrible war secret to hide; Ray Barry's Sgt. Fairchild, aka "Bloody Five" for the five people he shot in cold blood, as crazed as a loon by war, but frighteningly sympathetic; John Vickery's mesmerizing, unctuous squad leader, who concocts the plan to Shanghai Galy; Ebbe Roe Smith and Geoff Hoyle as Vickery's equally perfectly unscrupulous buddies, and Maury Chaykin as the one who gets left behind. In briefer turns, Gloria Mann, as Galy's wife, and Felton Perry as the Tibetan monk, could scarcely be better.
But the sleek performances are only part of this show's appeal.
The expressionistic audacity of the production -- excessive spectacle anywhere else but so Brechtian and thus so right here -- leaves the audience gasping (especially the modernized touches, such as having the soldiers each wear a long colored arm patch with corporate names like Exxon and IBM, and dropping a half-dozen red Coke-like banners from the ceiling inside the pagoda, proclaiming the commercial arrival of a new product -- "the new God").
Here credit goes evenly to director Woodruff, set designer Doug Stein, lighting chief Richard Riddell (a Tony Award-winner for "Big River") and costumer Susan Denison. And composer Douglas Wieselman's syncopated score, zanily performed, is murky perfection.
In the end, those who attend the playhouse's sure-to-arouse "A Man'a a Man" might find new meaning in Galy's benumbed lament: "I went after a small fish and I came back with a large elephant. Who knows what tomorrow might bring!"
"A Man's a Man" continues through Aug. 10 at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts, at La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road on the UCSD campus.