Strong 'Arms' burdens itself with the banal

By Nikolai Slywka

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Jacob Grigolia-rosenbaum, JE '00, and Amy Justman, SM '00, face off.

Visible in the wings of this production of Arms and the Man is the Ezra Stiles Coca-Cola machine. It's a big red anachronism for a play set in 1885 Bulgaria and perhaps a sign that director Nicole Diamond, MC '99, has been a little careless in staging what is, by-and-large, a successful treatment of one of Shaw's earliest comedies. Or perhaps in leaving the Coke machine exposed, Diamond isn't being careless but inviting the audience to note how easily certain mundane details can disrupt even the most carefully constructed illusions. Arms and the Man, after all, is a satire of an upper class family's failed attempt to maintain its illusions of gallantry in a world given over to the unheroic and banal. The Coke machine is a token of a contemporary banality intruding upon the illusions of the stage itself.

Coke machine aside, this production of Arms and the Man attends closely to Shaw's script. As Raina Petkoff (Amy Justman, SM '00), a young Bulgarian woman prepares for bed in her wealthy home, she learns that her fiancèe, Sergius (Vikram Somaya, CC '98) has led a triumphant charge against the Serbians in a battle on the outskirts of town. Captain Bluntschli (Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum, JE '00) of the Serbian army soon bursts into her room and compels Raina to hide him from the Bulgarian search parties. He admits that he's not Serbian, but instead something much worse in Raina's eyes--a Swiss soldier-of-fortune indifferent to aristocratic codes of war. Despite herself, Raina helps Bluntschli escape and finds herself by the end of act one referring to him as "the poor darling."

The rest of the play traces the implications of this night's affair for the relationships between Sergius and Raina, Sergius and Louka, the maid (Maya Goldsmith, SM '01), and Louka and her fiancée, Nicola (Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, CC '01). Raina's idolization of Sergius as a hero straight out of "Byron and Pushkin" slowly transforms into a recognition of her own self-serving naïveté. Sergius, in turn, recognizes that his well-groomed gusto is a front for a self-estranged, often vicious character. At one point, he admits his frustration with the "higher love" he has for Raina and seizes Louka, leaving her arm black-and-blue. The scene almost too-neatly dramatizes Shaw's satirization of martial heroism: Vergil was concerned with "arms and the man;" Arms and the Man is concerned with the bruises that this type of man in the modern day often leaves on an innocent woman's arms. Presiding over the play's tumultuous affairs is the superb pair of Raina's imperious mother, Catherine (Sarah Ichioka, JE '01) and bumbling father, Major Petkoff (Andrew Stigler, GRD '02). With his loose jowls, darting, confused eyes, and air of smug satisfaction, Stigler puts in a wonderful performance. He's a full-grown Eddie Haskell in crass, central European finery, blissfully unaware of his own irrelevance and incompetence. Catherine, all too aware of her husband's failings, spends the play arching her eyebrows and cocking up her nose, successfully exaggerating the status anxieties of a newly-arrived member of the upper-class.

Grigolia-Rosenbaum brings reserve and subdued self-confidence to his role as the debunker of the Petkoff's myths of honor and romance. The cynical professionalism with which he handles his military duties contrasts with Sergius's dandyism and Major Petkoff's empty rhetoric. At times, however, he loses his cynical edge, depriving the audience of the one character that shares its ironic distance from the Petkoff's antics.

The Ezra Stiles Little Theater is a difficult space for the play. Although the theater's black walls, black ceiling, and black floor are more suggestive of a long-defunct meat locker than an opulent home, Diamond and her production staff manage to create a certain air of domesticity with a few couches, bookcases, and a nightstand. The set would have profited from a few pieces of scenery evoking the Balkan landscape. Without these, Raina is left at times to stare dreamily out a window into a lusterless, pipelined wall. The audience is left to wonder if the production might not be exploiting Shaw's illusion-rupturing emphasis rather than cleverly reinscribing it within certain markers of contemporary disenchantment.

Back to A&E...