Theatre in Review: Sawbones and The Diamond Eater (HERE)

	Thomas Leverton and Erika Rolfsrud in Sawbones. Photo: Richard Termine

The distinguished costume designer Carrie Robbins has recently turned her hand to writing plays, and for this evening of one-acts she has selected quite a pair of yarns. (They are billed as true stories, taken from the writings of the late R. D. Robbins, MD.) She has also rounded up a solid group of collaborators for these very different stories about doctors in extremis. But the overwhelming impression left by the evening is the difficulty of dramatizing material that is essentially anecdotal; both plays feature plenty of comings and goings but very little drama.

Sawbones, the first piece, is a tale of the Civil War set in a field hospital in Virginia in 1862. It begins with Elmer Cobb, a young rebel soldier, getting a bullet in his leg; while he writhes in agony, he is scooped up by Jebidiah Wall, a black Union soldier whose job is to rescue the wounded; more correctly, he is tasked with recovering the Union wounded. The appearance of Elmer in a Union camp is controversial, to say the least -- a disgusted sergeant responds by spitting at Jebidiah -- and, because no one else will volunteer, Jebidiah is drafted to assist Dr. Cordell Cuttaridge in amputating Elmer's leg. This scene, vividly detailing what major surgery was like on the battlefield in the days before modern medical technology, is thoroughly hair-raising.

But as it turns out, the play is just beginning; Sawbones is really about the consequences of that operation, which play out over three decades and two continents. I dare not reveal what they are, but it takes two narrators and tons of exposition; suffice to say that the lives of Jebidiah, Elmer, and Dr. Cuttaridge play out in very different ways. It isn't all talk; there is another, equally harrowing operation -- a breech birth delivery -- later on, although it is accompanied by a series of melodramatic events that, at the performance I attended, evoked unwanted laughter from the audience. But Robbins violates the first rule of playwriting, which is to show rather than tell. Sawbones is the kind of story that, delivered in conversation over drinks, would leave its auditor properly astounded. In the theatre, it becomes a long-winded tale lacking a central dramatic conflict.

The grislier aspects of Sawbones are nothing next to the details of The Diamond Eater, a tale of survival in a Nazi concentration camp. The title character, Avraham Millstein, is a Jewish jeweler who has managed to hide 15 superb examples of his trade on his person -- or, rather, in his person, since he repeatedly swallows them, then passes them, then swallows them again. When an epidemic of dysentery hits the prisoners, he is forced to go through this process several times a day. It is Avraham's bad luck that he is chosen to take part in a bizarre medical experiment, commissioned by Dietz, the camp's commandant, in which a kidney from a gypsy is to be transplanted into a Jewish subject. (The most horrifying aspect of this scheme is that the Jew is to be opened up again weekly, to see if the kidney functions correctly.) It is Avraham's good luck that the physician assigned to the procedure, Dr. Kutterman, is a Jewish prisoner with plans of his own, plans that acquire heightened importance when he finds those diamonds residing in Avraham's gut.

The problems of The Diamond Eater are pretty much the same as those of Sawbones: The story is largely narrated rather than acted out and the resolution comes not from anything to do with the characters but with the deus ex machina arrival of the US Army. There's also a question of exploitation; the details of The Diamond Eater are not for the faint of heart and don't need to be underlined, but here their treatment is nerve-janglingly overwrought. Furthermore, there is something distasteful about the horrors of the Holocaust being trotted out in order to dress up what is little more than a story with an O. Henry twist.

Overall, the decision to pair these two plays results in a long, ponderous, grimly unpleasant evening spiked with squirm-inducing surgical details; for one thing, I learned far more than I ever wanted to know about the horrible smell and look of putrefying flesh.

Under Tazewell Thompson's direction, there are a number of good performances. As Sawbones' Jebidiah, Gregory Marlowe is gifted with real presence, even when delivering textbook lines such as "Some people just plain hate us and I ain't got no time for hate." The look on his face when, during the operation, he stares down at Elmer's leg speaks volumes. He also evolves credibly into a far more educated person, thanks to the beneficence of Dr. Cuttaridge. Erika Rolfsrud is appealing as Miz Cora, the saloon owner who takes up the story after the war is over, filling us in on the ironic details of Dr. Cuttaridge's death. (She is, unfortunately, made to appear in The Diamond Eater as Dietz's blond doxy, who watches the kidney transplant and gets sexually aroused by it.) Eric Kuttner is thoroughly convincing as Avraham, recounting the horrors of the camp. Timothy Roselle does his best with the role of Dr. Kutterman, but he must contend with a long monologue -- about female prisoners at Riker's Island who swallow razor blades wrapped in tape as a way of procuring a pleasant night's sleep in the prison infirmary -- which could be cut without a moment's thought.

The set designer, Brandon McNeel, has set Sawbones against a lovely drop of the Great Plains (the second half of the play unfolds in the Midwest) but he hasn't been able to avoid a lengthy, show-stopping (in the wrong way) changeover in the middle of the play. His set for The Diamond Eater is dominated by a curtain of vertical plastic strips -- like those you see in car washes -- which serve as a surface for Robert Figueira's projections, a series of starkly effective black-and-white sketches of the death camp. Jorge Arroyo's lighting skillfully carves out scenes from the large playing area, adding to the mood of each scene. Erik T. Lawson's sound design is a complex and solidly achieved array of effects, including gunshots, barking dogs, birdsong, horses, moving trains, a cacophony of bells, and many others; too bad he also provides reinforcement for Scott Munson's original music, which underlines each scene with Hollywood-soundtrack swells in Sawbones and horror-film tropes in The Diamond Eater. The costumes, by Robbins, are predictably excellent.

Robbins is not the first designer to make a late-in-the-day career change, and she has earned the right to do so. There is talent and some theatrical sensibility in Sawbones and The Diamond Eater, but to get to the next level she is going to have to think more critically about the material she chooses. She may have become a playwright, but on the basis of these plays she is yet to be a dramatist.--David Barbour