Fire!

This play is written in smoking lava about a world that tastes like ashes.

Fire!, which ended Brandeis University's repertory season last week, scorches the stage with grief, fury, desire and despair. Framed in a set of huge bronze cubes appear the archetypal woman as mother, wife and slut and the arche typal man as son, father, husband and lover. They are not there to be joined to gether but to be rent asunder. "We must love one another or die," wrote W. H. Auden. Fire! proclaims that love is dead, God is dead, and man is dying. The playwright is a onetime actor now living in Europe who has adopted the pseudonym John Roc; he is a demi-Beckett who does not await Godot but screams at the heavens precisely be cause they are empty. He is sometimes pretentious, often confusing, and lavish with lavender words, but his drama rips into an audience with volcanic force.

Two propositions set the play's anguished tone. One derives from Christianity, and the other from Greek mythology. Both involve modern man's reversal of his traditional beliefs and show how present desolation, ironically, was born in past faith. Expelled from the Garden of Eden, man was bereft; expelling God from the cosmos, modern man is equally bereft. The legendary Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give men life, light, art and wisdom.

But Roc's Prometheus -- here called Jason -- brings fire as a consuming vengeance to burn each human heart to a cinder and finally reduce the earth it self to an ember. Since Jason also doubles as a Jesus figure, there is a persistent and annoying ambiguity as to which identity is being invoked at any given moment.

For much of the evening, Jason (Pe ter MacLean) also seems to be Lucifer, ranging between brazen malice and wily seductiveness. He has summoned into session a kind of miniature parliament of seven representative humans, and he wants to wring from them a unanimous vote for fire. Sometimes he uses verbal third-degree tactics, evocative of the rapid-fire non sequiturs gunned at each other by the characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

At other times, he opens a kind of panderer's box, tempting men and women to act out the vices of flesh and mind that have always been part of humanity's lot. In graphic dumb show or coarse double-entendre, incest, rape, sodomy, masturbation, sadism and masochism are all depicted or evoked on stage.

Gore spatters the play. At one point, men in surgical masks carve open a character's belly and remove a huge, bloody rat. The scene is bafflingly elusive, distinctly emetic, but a marvelously theatrical way to ring down the first-act curtain.

Like victims in a torture chamber, the characters howl "Fire!" when they have been flogged past the endurance and exposure point and have come to believe that neither heaven nor earth offers any solace for the penance of being born. Each is a burnt-out case when he calls for the cauterizing extinction of fire. Mortally sick with guilt, boredom and self-disgust, a sexual pervert votes for fire. Lacerated with a lust that fails even to arouse others, a whore (Janet Ross) votes for fire. Only Jason's archfoe Marco resists. Marco (David S. Howard) believes in reason, a tidy universe with a place for everything and everything in its place. Either through stony resistance or reined-in passion, he becomes a catatonic invalid in a wheelchair. Immobile, vulnerable, mocked by fate, he is finally forced to concede that the order of things is not order but chaos. As he utters a strangled yell of "Fire!", the stage fills with red light like a vast, vacant eye socket brimming with blood; the playgoer knows that the end of the world is at hand.

This play demands an exacting professionalism of performance. The Brandeis actors meet the test. With agility, power and perception, they have honored the playwright's intentions and set a mark of excellence for college-affiliated theaters. Director Charles Werner Moore has splashed his stage with violence, tension, rage and sensuality, making Fire! burn with contemporaneity. He has understood what the play is psychically about. It is saturated with the nagging joylessness and angst of modern life--at least as sensed by Roc --the anomie that renders each day fearful, anxious and barren, and the frenetic, annihilative fanaticism that, as Santayana once said, consists of redoubling one's effort after having forgotten one's aim.

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