Performance Review

The Bundle

Since the early 1980s the Irondale Ensemble has been one of New York's most innovative and socially engaged experimental companies, performing in homeless shelters and prisons as well as in more conventional off-off-Broadway venues, working in educational programs concerned with HIV/AIDS, urban violence, and ethnic tensions. They have also developed an Uncle Vanya Show, performed in the United States and in Russia with the St. Petersburg Salon Theatre, and otherwise offer on the average two spirited and innovative productions each season. Their early works were often freewheeling adaptations of familiar classics, reworked with song and dance, references to popular culture and to current social concerns. More recently they have offered more straightforward productions of challenging works such as Danton's Death (1993), The Ghost Sonata (1995), and Ostrovsky's A Family Affair (1995), but always with their distinctive approach.

Although Irondale has previously done three works by Brecht, The Bundle is their first Bond, and given the company's concerns and skills, it seems a perfect choice. The Bundle is one of the most Brechtian works of this most Brechtian of British dramatists, the first of the plays in which Bond undertook to construct his own version of a "teaching play," providing a dramatically powerful parable depicting both social injustice and (as Brecht usually did not) its reform. The initiating incident in The Bundle, when a sympathetic ferryman, although near starvation himself, succumbs to the temptation of goodness and takes home an abandoned baby, strongly recalls The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Later situations recall The Measures Taken, and Brecht is continually suggested by the simple, straightforward style, the stark but agonizing life choices, symbolically loaded situations presented to the characters, and the memorable gestic moments. These qualities of the production are particularly shown when Wang, now grown, finds a baby abandoned like himself and rather than increasing his own poverty throws it into the river, its cloth remaining in his hand, or when, in a moment recalling Mother Courage's silent denial of her son, Wang bites his inside lip so that a drop of blood rolls down his chin as he sits silently watching oppression occurring and knowing that the revolutionary moment has not yet come.

A work of this sort can easily become stiff, didactic, and in its occasional casual brutality even [End Page 79] [Begin Page 81] repugnant, but the Irondale Ensemble negotiates a delicate blend of stylization, rough-edged reality, and nuanced detail that brings this difficult work to powerful life and results in one of the richest and most moving productions in their career. Much of the credit must go to director Jim Niesen, and to the stunning setting by Ken Rothchild, which uses Chinese elements--low platforms, tall bamboo poles, hanging flags, and screens, to evoke a whole dramatic world with minimal means. Individual sequences impressively utilized the scenic abstraction of the classic Chinese stage and the simple evocative style Brecht himself evolved from Chinese sources. In the river scenes, for example, a silken cloth spread out on the wooden matting of the stage floor represented the ferry, its movement convincingly suggested by the Ferryman's pantomime with a long guiding bamboo pole. The rest of the company, seated about the stage and all facing the audience, suggested the river with slow rhythmic movements of long bamboo poles held across their bodies parallel to the stage floor.

Original music was created by Tyler Kent, performed almost entirely on a collection of percussion instruments in one upstage corner and on others carried by the actors. Each half of the play was introduced by a powerful dance and mime sequence performed by the entire company, much of the rhythm of which the company also provided by percussive instruments they carried--long bamboo poles and short sticks at the opening, small bells and large plastic water bottles later.

Most of the company played a variety of parts, in a style that effectively drew upon both the frankly presentational and somewhat exaggerated style that is often associated with Brechtian performance and the psychological realism that is more traditional in American presentation. Steven Satta as the Ferryman, the play's most fully developed character, was also, appropriately, the actor most committed to psychological nuance in his playing, and he movingly evoked series of moral dilemmas in which he is placed by the play. The other leading character was Georgina Corbo as Wang, the "bundle" rescued by the Ferryman who grows into a necessarily uncompromising revolutionary leader. In a character who must eschew the sort of emotional sympathy from the audience that the Ferryman can elicit, Corbo still managed to be powerfully engaging, demanding, clever, and fascinating, offering indeed so rich and interesting a character that he came close to suggesting the "hero Wang" that Bond specifically rejects in his introduction to the play. The two other most striking actors were Michael-David Gordon and Yvbonne Brechbuhler. Gordon's major role was Basho, the poetry-writing idealist whose lifetime obsession with discovering "the narrow road to the deep north" ironically blinds him to the opportunities for real meaningful action in the world and makes of him an ally of the forces of oppression rather than of the seekers of a better order. Brechbuhler gave a memorable performance as the outlaw Tiger, a tour-de-force for both actor and author, a monosyllabic character who nevertheless has a kind of poetic genius, a crude ruffian who wins the audience's heart before being subjected (this is Bond after all) to a cruel and horrible death by the soldiers in support of the established order.

Effective as these individuals were, the real power of this strong production grew from the ensemble, the other members of which were Alain Hunkins, Terry Greiss, David Gordon, Kathryn Grant, and Jacqueline Klee. One of the goals of Irondale has been stated as a search for "the types of theatre that will resonate most meaningfully with today's audiences." This powerful production demonstrates that their mission is being successfully pursued.

Marvin Carlson
Graduate Center, CUNY

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