Atrocity Stories

Andorra and The Firebugs. Swiss Dramatist Max Frisch dropped a couple of tons of irony on the New York theater last week, but the only one who got crushed was the playwright. Advance fanfare had it that Frisch, highly regarded and much produced in Europe, was the equal of his fellow countryman Friedrich Duerrenmatt (The Visit). Rarely has anticipation been so swiftly disabused.

Andorra, which closed at week's end, was about antiSemitism, chauvinism, responsibility, guilt, and identity. The Firebugs, still flickering, is about action, appeasement, war, and middle-class morality. Like Duerrenmatt, Frisch has a dour and sardonic vision of existence; unlike Duerrenmatt, he is maddeningly repetitive. What he spent more than four hours saying in his ear-bending, double-entry U.S. debut was once compressed by Alexander Hamilton into a single pungent sentence: "The people is a great beast."

People are beasts, in Andorra, for committing or permitting atrocities like the Nazi massacre of the Jews and then disowning responsibility for it. They are beasts, in The Firebugs, for giving arsonists the houseroom and the matches to set the world ablaze while they dunderheadedly pursue business as usual. The paradoxical difficulty is that Frisch hopes to arouse the conscience of the beast after demonstrating at tedious length that the beast has no conscience.

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