'Zucco' piles up the bodies, cackling all the way

ANDREW HEID/YH Cue the theme from Psycho at steadily increasing pitch.

Once the opening medley of police blotters and news reports has died down, Roberto Zucco opens to two harshly lit police guards bantering atop a balcony. One asks, "Do you believe in the concept of an interior universe?" The other hardly has time to answer before the murderous protagonist, Zucco (Brennan Gerard, TD '00), has escaped in front of their eyes. Running offstage in a panic, the characters leave this philosophical question suspended, ringing in the ears of the audience along with the sound of an ominous prison alarm.

Over the next three hours, Roberto Zucco attempts to illustrate the possibility of such a world through absolute immersion in the psyche of the severely disgruntled title character. While this dive into psychosis can, at times, become suffocating, the performance is kept violently alive by the strength of its acting and design. It is through the sheer willpower of its cast and crew that Roberto Zucco meets the challenges that its intense script presents.

Roberto Zucco's fragmented plot encompasses a multitude of horrific events, such as these sensationalistic TV programs would gleefully exploit. The play begins with a patricide, followed by an offstage rape, then proceeds to some nearly incestuous violence, which leads to a hostage scene, some child torture, and so on. The script approaches these repugnant acts with dark humor. One of its many villains, for example, bemoans how he should have hired someone to beat his wife after his "arm got too tired" to "beat her every day, at regular hours."

If such humor seems inappropriate, that is the point. Roberto Zucco tries to be as outrageous as possible, to make explicit the most unspeakable horrors, to parody every dramatic genre, and to ridicule all emotions—even the most serious ones—all this in a manner that jolts the audience to attention. More than the content of its script, the specifics of Louis Cancelmi's, SY '00, direction work to achieve such calculated shock: characters appear nude onstage, the play's frequent monologues are screamingly loud, and nearly every physical interaction between the characters has some element of violence, implicit or not.

Gerard captures the psychosis of Zucco with a fierce intensity. While his physical movements modulate between the soothingly pathetic and the violently ungovernable, the confusion and fear in his wide eyes remain constant—a detail that helps this antihero elicit a begrudging sympathy even when he is at the height of insanity. His interactions with the unnamed female lead (Clelia Peters, BK '00) and an old man (Angus Beasley, DC '01) constitute the play's more conventionally touching scenes and provide a needed relief from the frenzy of Zucco's other, more violent engagements. However, even when Zucco becomes his most vicious, Gerard tempers this aggression with a confused innocence that saves his character from becoming completely abhorrent.

The aesthetic simplicity of Zucco's set and design also mitigates the play's harshness. Nick Chapel allows for one small, blackened stage, and Roberto Zucco makes the most of it through a large silver board that serves alternately as a table and a backdrop. The simplicity of such a centering prop focuses the scenes instead of adding to the panicked confusion, and its versatility allows the frequent scene changes to occur quickly—an appreciated benefit, considering the play's formidable running time. The production also benefits from the costuming more than its simplicity might initially suggest. The subtly blocked colors of the characters' wardrobes—primarily white in one scene, all orange in another—often render the scenes visually stunning.

Roberto Zucco achieves its greatest effect as a stark analysis of modern culture and individual psychosis. In one of the play's most effective scenes, Zucco stands before a group of bemused onlookers with a gun in a woman's mouth and a foot on her child's head. The reaction of the civilians watching is ridiculous, considering their proximity to the shooter—no one jokes about hostages when he is sitting 10 feet away from the gunman. However, the scene orients the viewers as if they were watching a television screen, which renders their callousness depressingly familiar.

As a comedy, Roberto Zucco is not as successful. With the exception of one undeniably funny Dragnet parody, the subject matter is too horrific to allow for many laughs. This does not take away from the production's drama, though. As the lead faces the audience and identifies himself with the most abominable of crimes against humanity—"I am my mother's murderer. I am my father's murderer. I am the murderer of a police inspector. I am the murderer of a child—" the viewer feels both pity and fear beneath his condemnation. Such potential for catharsis lies at the core of Roberto Zucco, provided that one is willing to experience the play's stifling intensity before Zucco gets there.

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