Theatre in Review: A Man's a Man (Classic Stage Company)

	Stephen Spinella, Justin Vivian Bond, Steven Skybell, Jason Babinsky Martin Moran. Photo: Richard Termine

What's in a name? That's quite a question in A Man's a Man, an early work by Bertolt Brecht in which a simple switch of identity can have profound consequences. Set in India during the dying days of the Raj, it centers on Galy Gay, an Irish porter who is dragged into uniform by a trio of English soldiers and made to impersonate their missing colleague, Jeraiah Jip. As it happens, the masquerade works only too well, with unhappy results that aren't fully conveyed by the above translation of the original title. Another version, Man Equals Man, is more apt, for, as Brecht sets out to prove, individuality means nothing when one is conscripted into the British war machine.

With its confusion-of-identity themes, what amounts to a case of brainwashing, and a background of imperial misadventure, A Man's a Man would seem tailor-made for contemporary audiences. However, it hasn't had a major New York staging in decades. A 1962 revival featured John Heffernan as Galy Gay, with Ken Kercheval (these days, a resident of Dallas), as one of the soldiers who commandeers him and Olympia Dukakis in the flashy role of Leocadia Begbick, the camp-following beer dealer who offers caustic commentary throughout. Around the same time, The Living Theatre took a flyer on it, with Joseph Chaikin as Galy Gay and Judith Malina as Leocadia -- but since then, nothing. This is especially interesting considering that there have been upwards of three dozen Brecht productions in the last 50 or so years.

As Brian Kulick's inventively designed and well-cast production reveals, there may be a reason for this. A Man's a Man is both loose-limbed and enormously didactic; it makes its point early and often while shouldering a lumbering plot structure marked by musical digressions that, however entertaining, constitute so many dramatic dead ends. The CSC staging, employing Gerhard Nellhaus' translation, tries kidding itself. (We are told at the top of the evening not to worry if we don't understand the plot because it is incomprehensible, anyway.) It tries being bluntly honest about its structural oddities. (At one point, someone introduces "a song that does absolutely nothing to advance our plot.") And at times it aims for easy, audience-baiting laughs. (There's even an encore of a famous gag popularized in the '30s musical Jumbo; in this version, Galy Gay, caught red-handed with an enormous fake elephant, is forced to assume a position of faux innocence and ask, "What elephant?")

But even in a staging with attitude to spare, A Man's a Man is of surprisingly little impact, largely, I think, because the people in it don't really seem to matter. Galy Gay may be the ultimate nonentity -- it's a telling idea that he could possibly stand in for Andrew Weems' Jeraiah Jip, who looks nothing like him -- but Gibson Frazier is a (talented) dramatic actor in a role that seemingly calls for a clown who could bring some humor and pathos to the character's predicament. Similarly, it's great to see Martin Moran, Steven Skybell, and Jason Babinsky as Galy's soldier companions, but the parts are interchangeable, a trio of voices for Brecht's text. Stephen Spinella -- sporting a set of muttonchop whiskers that make him look uncannily like C. Aubrey Smith, presiding over an outpost of the empire in some Hollywood epic -- makes little impact as Bloody Five, the hard-as-nails commander who strikes terror in the hearts of his men, because the role gives him surprisingly little of worth to do. When, late in the evening, he turns up in civilian clothes, seemingly unmanned by the loss of his uniform, it's not an especially interesting twist because he was never all that much of a presence in the first place.

Those cast members who are given musical interludes fare better. As the inscrutable Mr. Wang -- the kind of stereotype that would make Brecht a pariah if he were writing today -- Ching Valdes-Aran makes the most of a pensive ballad about the impermanence of life. The number is reprised gorgeously by Justin Vivian Bond, who proves to be a dominating presence throughout as Leocadia Begbick. At first, Bond -- looking sultry and knowing in a bias-cut flowered frock and a dramatically flowing, frizzy coiffure -- threatens to unbalance the production, so strong is the performer's allure. But Bond proves to be a superb interpreter of the songs, and as the second act darkens, with a climax involving a savage military incursion into Tibet, a most valuable member of the company.

The music, by Duncan Sheik, is filled with attractively rueful melodies, so much so that I began to wonder if something more acidic wasn't what was wanted. In any case, the songs go a long way toward making a rather spotty evening much more pleasurable than it might have been. The production design is another plus factor. Paul Steinberg's set -- a green upstage wall and deck plus a series of orange steel barrels that can be made to form a stage or the interior of a train -- is both exotic and theatrical. An additional series of barrels hung from above conceal LED fixtures, which allow Justin Townsend, the lighting designer, to add welcome touches of color to certain scenes; he also provides sharply angled blasts of white light when battle looms and some cleverly conceived chase effects during scenes of gunplay. Gabriel Berry's costumes are necessarily heavy on military uniforms, but she dresses Bond in style as well. Matt Kraus' sound design provides solid reinforcement for the recorded score plus a number of evocative effects.

Overall, a lot of good work has gone into trying to enliven a talky, didactic script, its humors long faded and its bite eroded by time. For those with a strong interest in Brecht, it remains a must-see if only because another chance might not come around for another 50 years. Others are likely to see a script that feels embalmed in the ideas and styles of 1926.--David Barbour