Hunchback
Conceived and Designed by Jim Lasko
Spoken Text Written by Mickle Maher
Directed by Leslie Buxbaum Danzig
At the Redmoon Theater in Chicago
A review of the performance on Jan. 5, 2008
This spectacle-on-stage is less a re-telling of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris than it is a story about a troupe of players trying to present it in a colorful and unorthodox way. In other words, Redmoon Theater's Hunchback is just as meaningful when interpreted not as a play about Hugo's tragic tale, but as a play about the telling of that tale.
Hugo's chronicle of Quasimodo the hunchback bell-ringer, Esmeralda the compassionate gypsy, Frollo the mad archdeacon, and Phoebus the narcissistic soldier, is actually secondary to the story of the characters who are staging the novel (and necessarily condensing it). The audience follows the troupe's effort to distill the emotional essence of Notre Dame de Paris, all the while witnessing the actors' reactions to each other and to the situations, their remarkably emotive puppetry, their mirth in the lighter moments and sobriety in
the heavier ones, their
representational acrobatics, and their exchanges with Hugo himself, who appears on
stage at various times to interject his thoughts about how well the players
are rendering his story. In fact, the few spoken words in this production issue from Hugo, the rest of the company remaining largely, though not entirely, silent.
For me, the recurring question throughout the hour and a half of this play was not what comes next in the plot, but rather how the troupe was going to depict Hugo's overarching themes. For example, how would these silent actors, while wearing masks with frozen countenances, or while manipulating stiff mechanical puppets, evoke a sense of pity? How would they capture the esoteric virtues of grace and magnanimity without the benefit of words or tone of voice? And how, with a modicum of narration from Hugo, would they evince the complexity of a character like Frollo, a man whose soul was at war with itself?
Their success was impressive. And the best example of their success happens to answer the last of those three questions. In the attempted murder of Phoebus by Frollo, the marrow of the moment wasn't Frollo's action; rather, it was Hugo's stunned reluctance, rooted in something resembling fear or disgust, to don Frollo's mask at the urging of another character in the play, and then to complete this element of the story by plunging the dagger into his victim. This followed directly on the heels of Hugo's impassioned effort to explain Frollo's personality as the product of a tragic childhood. All the while, the characters in the play elaborated Hugo's poignant narration with puppets on a clever pop-up storybook, punctuating the vignette with their own facial expressions and physical gestures.
Ironically, the most disappointing moment in the play directly preceded this one. Lust is one of the motivators in Hugo's novel, as it is in many literary works and -- gasp -- in many human lives. After all, this member of the Seven Deadlies was one of the forces that drove Frollo's darker behavior. To ignore it is to be foolishly puritanical. Redmoon, however, ignored tastefulness instead and gave us puppet sex between Esmeralda and Phoebus in a display that was utterly juvenile, far beneath the dignity of this production.
But back to the company's skill. One other noteworthy instance lay in Esmeralda's commitment to carry out a simple act of kindness: to give some water to Quasimodo while he was locked in the stocks. Her compassion cut through the silence and shone through the mask in the form of her creative problem-solving acrobatics, which symbolized both the physical risk she willingly took on Quasimodo's behalf and her determination to relieve the suffering of this misunderstood, misshapen man. A very smart scene.
The asinine puppet copulation aside, this production showed a well-seasoned appreciation for the value of capricious humor, even in a tragedy as dark as this one, and for timing that humor well. The many whimsical interruptions not only broke the mounting tension, but also kept shifting the focus of this play from Hugo's story back to the storytellers. And as I said above, it was how these storytellers interacted with the material that made this play so engaging.
Redmoon's production preserves the centrality of the cathedral in Hugo's novel, complete with a representation of the Rose Window. The result is a Gothic atmosphere that marks the irrationality of the age, while amplifying the hatred, love, violence, tenderness, justice, and iniquity that pervade this story.
The cacophanous background sounds advanced the Gothic ambience, but they were sometimes harsh enough to cause physical discomfort. During the final scenes, in fact, there was one sustained frequency in the lower register that was somewhat painful. The theater should consider this potential problem carefully.
Shoshanna Utchenik's masks were beautiful to behold, almost effective enough to obviate any acting behind them. As Esmeralda, Katie Rose McLaughlin was playful, savvy, and strong. Samuel Taylor's Frollo was imperious, yet miserably obsessed -- quite chilling, all in all. Jay Torrence gave us a thoroughly sympathetic Quasimodo, vaguely reminiscent of John Hurt's portrayal of John Merrick. And Hugo himself, played by Jeremy Sher, convinced me of his abiding respect for the story, his artistic discontent with the proceedings, and his firm understanding of the characters and their times.