Electrocuting Josh Perkins at the Alchemist

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Courtesy of The Alchemist Theatre

Soothing piano music can be heard on the way in. Somewhere in the background the soothing voice of Liz Mistele can be heard telling everyone that Big Brother is watching. There are cameras at the bar so casual and unassuming they might not even be noticed at first. The atmosphere is subtle but it's there. There are half a dozen actors. The set is draped in plastic. It's all very minimal. It's an intimate venue. The budget appears almost nonexistent. There's nothing here but the drama. This is the current Bad Example production of George Orwell's 1984 at the Alchemist Theatre.

Michael Gene Sullivan’s adaptation of the novel condenses into the interrogation/trial of a man accused of treason. The man in question is employed by a totalitarian state in the task of rewriting the past in the interest of serving the present. Josh Perkins puts-in a powerful performance as the gentleman who stands accused. The rags he wears may seem artificially tattered. The sense of desperation he had may not seem quite authentic as the play fades in. The kind of brutal subtlety that this production bathes itself in has a tendency to work a very slow magic upon the stage.

By the end of the drama, Perkins’ sense of desperation is positively overwhelming. The fact that he's not entirely convincing early on actually serves the purposes of the play quite well. Early on in the interrogation he may only be trying to tell the authorities what he thinks they want him to say. By the end of the drama, he seems to genuinely want to believe what they want him to. It's quite a transformation. It's almost liberating in a sense. He’s being liberated into the prison. It’s kind of chilling. Quite a performance by Perkins even where it doesn’t seem authentic.

There are four others on stage for the bulk of the performance. They are totalitarian Party Members there to act out moments drawn from his diary. They are dressed neatly in suits and ties. In the course of playing out the drama of the diary, they get caught up in the cognitive dissonance of accused. Directors David and Natasha Kaye have done a really good job of working with the ensemble to gradually intensify the confusion within those Party Members. It all looks a little bit forced and perfunctory at first. We're all familiar with the nightmare images of people conforming to a totalitarian state. It's a bit hard to get beyond the cliché of the imagery. In the course of the events, however, a very real and authentic feel begins to seep-into the atmosphere onstage.

Katie Thompson plays a Party Member is playing a character who has a very animalistic and pleasure-centered understanding of revolution. There's an unashamed kinda total honesty about the character that she brings quite beautifully to the stage. Jake Shaw plays a Party Member who plays the accused in the drama is very clever with the way he handles the characters cognitive dissonance. There is a deep humanity about him. Billy Rae Olsen plays both abject stupidity and towering genius in a couple of contrasting roles. As thee Third Party Member, Jim Donaldson has a handle on the comedic end of the script that I would've liked to seen played up a bit more in the production.

(It’s a personal stylistic thing, but I feel that this same script could be done with the Party Members play a bit more like the Marx Brothers. We’re so used to images of humorless homogenous totalitarian drone-people. It’s way too obvious. I don’t think we as a people would find that image aesthetically pleasing. Our culture simply couldn’t get into that. If we are to be harnessed by Big Brother, it will be through humor. You can get a lot further in controlling a populace with LOL Cats than you can with the muzzle of a gun. I’d like to see a production of this play that embraces that. The Party Members would all be laughing at Big Brother while being totally, fanatically paranoid at the same time. Okay…that aside…)

By the end of the story, Randall Anderson appears as a chillingly sinister and refined hand of authority. Anderson is brilliant. The character he's playing has a very rehearsed understanding of how things usually going to sort of interrogation. One can see Anderson relish the gradual conversion of Perkins’ character. If his movements seem at all reversed because the character knows them all too well. Presumably he’s handled people like Perkins’ character a dozen times already that day. In a sense we can almost see the character trying to enjoy what he knows all too well and has actually grown quite bored with. Look very closely and you might see Anderson affecting a kind of personal disgust and loathing that the character may not be entirely aware of. It would be all too easy to play this type of character as something of a flatly malevolent James Bond type of villain. The script could be read without any sense of subtlety at all. Anderson anticipates this and layers in some level of boredom in the character that seems to speak to a kind of humanity on a level so subtle that it would be easy to miss in a natural viewing of the play.

So much of the success of this production rides in the subtlety that Anderson renders so well. It would be all too easy to dismiss it as kind of an uninspired reading of the script. We’re all so complacent with the concept of authority. Why not spice it up a little with something more? Anderson’s performance speaks to the ghostly intricacies of the script that have been clearly addressed by the Kayes. The directors have done quite a job here, but so much of the more interesting aspects of the characterization get lost in the overwhelming brutality of it all. We are, after all, watching Josh Perkins pretend to take a hell of a lot of electricity. At one point he’s even waterboarded. It's almost too easy to miss how sophisticated the interaction between the characters in and within all that brutality.

Alchemist Theatre and Bad Example Productions’ staging of 1984 runs through Feb. 21 on 2569 2569 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. For ticket reservations, thealchemisttheatre.com.