The ambitious GMU Players are struggling with a flawed production of a difficult but fascinating play as they close out their season. They are asking audiences to concentrate for three-plus hours on "Mephisto," French director Ariane Mnouchkine's stage adaptation of Klaus Mann's bitter novel exploring artistic honor and political dedication in Nazi Germany.
It's a lot to ask. The play sprawls its way through broadly played cabaret skits and scathing polemics, mixing in bits of Goethe's "Faust" along the way. It is alternately dense, satirical, intense and fanciful -- an unwieldy mixture under the best of circumstances. Here, under unsteady direction from Lynnie Raybuck and with a hollow performance in the crucial leading role, the play's weaknesses are manifest, the themes hazy.
The problematic play has undergone transitions of medium and language, originating in 1936 as a passionately personal screed from Klaus Mann, son of Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann, who was exiled from Germany along with his family after Hitler seized power. Mann explored how theater artists dealt with fascism's rise in Germany, using his own family and other acquaintances as inspiration for the play's characters and story.
Mnouchkine adapted the work for the stage in 1979, blurring slightly Mann's indictment of the main character, a thinly veiled portrait of Mann's former brother-in-law, a well-known actor named Gustaf Grundgens who stayed behind and collaborated with the Nazi regime. Mnouchkine broadened Mann's work, adding subversive, anti-Nazi cabaret sketches originally performed in the 1920s and 30s and broadening the denunciation of collaboration, the latter act undercutting the sense of individual responsibility as related to the central character.
Raybuck chose a 1986 English translation from playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, who seems to have tinged the work with her own sense of overt theatricality. The result of this tortured progression is that the moral journey of the central figure becomes much less distinct.
That ambiguity colors the work of Jesse Nepivoda as Hendrik Höfgen, the character Mann based on Grundgens. Enticed by offers from the Nazis, Höfgen leaves Hamburg's Peppermill Club and its satirical, politically dangerous revues for a prominent position in Berlin. Leaving wife and mistress behind, Höfgen, whose major role is that of Mephisto, the character who famously sells his soul to the Devil, flourishes while his former colleagues struggle and even die.
Nepivoda evinces no sense of the character's ambition or the emotional toll his betrayal has on him. Rather, Nepivoda's characterization is bland; the only sentiment displayed throughout the story is petulance, as if the massive, deadly upheaval in society and politics in which Höfgen finds himself is just one rather large nuisance. Petulance is hardly enough of a basis for three hours of tragedy, and it quickly grows tiresome, particularly in the first act, where Raybuck's pacing frequently lags and the cast stumbles over the sophisticated changes in tone as scenes rapidly switch from farce to drama. The satirical cabaret sketches seem more awkward than biting, much of their relevance lost to time.
Raybuck has a heavy hand with histrionics, layering on cartoon-like movement and exaggerated vocal emphasis indiscriminately instead of confining it to scenes where judicious use might be effective. She has even borrowed some of the stylized face masks created for the GMU Players' last production, the extravagantly theatrical stage adaptation of another novel, Franz Kafka's "The Trial," for use by several actors.
Several cast members go their own way, however, effectively creating three-dimensional characters, most notably Jay Saunders as Otto Ulrich, a communist, and Jon Johnson as Theo, an intellectual writer. But mostly, the thick layer of artificiality obscures Mann's search for the delineation between art and life, making the reaction of the characters to the mass hysteria surrounding them in Hitler's Germany all the more difficult to fathom.
"Mephisto," which ends Sunday, is at TheaterSpace, George Mason University Center for the Arts, Braddock Road and Route 123, Fairfax. Showtime is 8 p.m. tonight, Friday and Saturday night with 2 p.m. matinees Saturday and Sunday. For information and tickets, visithttp://www.gmu.edu/departments/theatre/performancesor call 703-993-1120.
