By Michael Phillips
Tribune theater critic
You may recall the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil,
the fox-in-the-henhouse libertines at the black heart of "Les
Liaisons Dangereuses," written in 1782 in epistolary form
and more recently given currency by the Christopher Hampton play
and subsequent film "Dangerous Liaisons."
Well. Valmont and Merteuil have left 18th Century France and
checked into what appears to be a Days Inn somewhere outside Denver.
Only it's not a realistically scaled motel room. The proportions
are a little off: The room is long and narrow, like a shoebox.
Somehow the familiar two double beds and polyester bedcovers and
pale-pink wallpaper look unfamiliar, the stuff of odd, insinuating
dreams.
This is the universe of JoAnne Akalaitis' "Quartet,"
in which the adventurous and, in this new century, ever-more-valuable
director offers her response to the one-hour, two-actor Heiner
Muller compression of "Dangereuses."
Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art, this Court Theatre production
is eerily beautiful in ways you can't always pinpoint. It represents
theatrical design of the highest order, the sort that can only
happen under a director who has never stopped asking questions.
And it has a couple of very fine actors putting over the harsh
Muller line on humanity in general, and vengeance in particular.
"It's not that I feel anything for you," says Merteuil,
here played by the muscled and intense Karen Kandel. "It's
my skin that remembers." The production begins with Kandel,
wild-eyed and pacing her cage like a panther, sorting through
her postcoital feelings for her old, cold confidante, Valmont,
played by Steven Rishard. As she speaks, a naked Rishard —
his back to the audience — tilts precariously in a motel
room chair before jumping up and putting on the first of many
different costumes of both genders for both actors. The clothes
begin in present-day America and end in late 18th Century period
garb.
Muller had it the other way. He wrote "Quartet," first
staged in 1981, to be performed in what he called a "time-space"
beginning in an 18th Century French parlor and ending in a post-World
War III bunker. Scrambling the time sequence and relocating the
action to a wittily mundane chain-motel setting achieves something
very interesting. It makes these two blackguards, and all those
they impersonate, modern without reducing their size.
You feel you are watching beasts in a long, highway-adjacent
cage, or a museum diorama run amok. The set and costumes by Kaye
Voyce, the brilliant, nerve-racking lighting scheme by Jennifer
Tipton, the wonderful plucked-bass and rustling-percussion music
and soundscape of Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman all work together,
even when Akalaitis' wilder notions take the stage. Augmenting
the notion of inhuman human beings as beasts, Rishard and Kandel
snarl and pounce and pretend to tear each other's flesh. (Rishard
executes a hilarious catlike jump from one bed to the other.)
Outside the window, a stuffed wild boar is replaced by a succession
of other stuffed animals, and then Rishard.
Does everything work? No. You detect a slackening of intensity
and purpose around the four-fifths mark. And Muller's theatrical
concerns will always strike a portion of any audience —
any American audience, especially — as pretty rough going.
Yet when it's over, this superbly detailed and indelibly strange
version of "Quartet" sticks in your head like a dream
that is sort of bad and sort of terrific.
© 2005 Chicago Tribune
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