Theatre in Review: The Nomad (Flea Theater)

	Photo: Isaiah Tannenbaum

Isabelle Eberhardt is the kind of character no fiction writer would dream up. The Swiss-born daughter of a Russian aristocrat and an Armenian anarchist, she began dressing as a boy at an early age; she also conceived a fascination with the Arab world. At 20, she traveled with her mother to Algeria to meet up with her brother, who was in the French Foreign Legion. While there, she converted to Islam. After the deaths of her parents, she more or less cut ties with her family and traveled extensively in Arabia, dressed as a man and taking an assumed name. She got involved with a Sufi order. She also became a journalist, publishing many articles and books about her experiences. She survived a saber attack, although she nearly lost an arm. She married but didn't often live with her husband. They were killed together when their house collapsed on them in a flash flood. She was 27. It's no wonder that she has been the subject of a film, an opera, a play, and a novel. My only question is, How come David Lean never got his hands on her story?

You have to wonder what drove Eberhardt to such an extreme and risky existence, and most likely you'll still be wondering after you've seen The Nomad. The libretto, by Elizabeth Swados and Erin Courtney, gives the events listed above the once-over-lightly treatment, although often with so little context that you kind of have to guess at what you're seeing. But she remains a distant object of admiration to the authors; they are so taken by their subject's pluck and restlessness, they never stop to wonder why she so consistently put herself in harm's way, nor why she found Arab culture so appealing. As for the Arabs she encounters, they mostly seem perfectly happy to take at face value a Western European woman running around in male drag, writing up colorful prose about their ways. You have to wonder about that.

Swados' music has a sinuous beauty that, at least for the first half of this one-hour piece, proves to be thoroughly seductive. But as one episode follows another without leading to any kind of character revelation, Isabelle increasingly seems to become a cipher, and one's interest flags. Meanwhile, there remain nagging questions: Why are there two Isabelles -- young and adult -- when they are put to no particular dramatic use? Why introduce Isabelle's mother if she isn't going to have a single line? Why did Isabelle marry her lover if she never really intended to live with him?

Under the busy direction of Swados and Molly Marinik, with choreography by Ani Taj, a chorus of Arabs is always swirling around Isabelle, forming and reforming patterns as they go, but, again, little attempt is made to find a dramatic context for Isabelle's story. As Isabelle, Teri Madonna has a strong presence and she easily conveys the character's will of iron, but there's an element of transcendence, of real wonder, missing in her performance. Surely Eberhardt was a spiritual seeker, but too often Madonna settles for a kind of self-satisfied smirk that is off-putting. Her singing is fine enough in her normal range, but when she belts, her voice sounds flat and a little grating. Sydney Blaxill is an attractive presence as the young Isabelle, but she has nothing to do; the same is true of Neil Redfield as Slimene, Isabelle's husband.

Lydia Fine's set surrounds the stage with a series of patched-together fabrics, which are also hung over the audience. It basically places us inside a nomad's tent, an interesting and evocative idea. Fine also provided the costumes and the really striking horse puppet, a series of anatomical pieces made of wire and rope. Daisy Long's lighting depends on a series of soft color washes; at times I wanted to see something harder, more angular, in keeping with Isabelle's nature, although I suppose this approach is suitable enough for what is essentially a memory play. Janie Bullard's sound design provides a handful of effects; there seemed to be a little fuzz in the audio system at the performance I attended.

In the end, however, the trouble with The Nomad is it presents the life of its heroine without probing what must surely have been her rich, complicated, contradictory inner life. Swados and Courtney haven't looked inside Eberhardt; they've canonized her. -- David Barbour