The Sound and The Schmurz

The stage is empty, in semidarkness. Suddenly, in a huggermugger of stumbling hurry and shouted directions, a family spills out of a stairwell, dropping luggage and household possessions all over the room, and collapsing in relief. Obviously a close thing, whatever it was. The lights come up as they freeze -- father, mother, daughter and Negro maid--while into the tawdry room and out through the theater comes a dreadful ululation of voices.

This is "The Sound," from which they have fled their previous apartment downstairs--an apartment where, it seems, they had more rooms and possessions. But only Daughter Zenobia (Meg Foster) acknowledges this; Mother and Father refuse to admit that anything has really changed. Zenobia, too, is the only one who mentions the existence of It--a silent creature, swathed in slings and bandages, who skulks along the floor, in corners and under tables, and is intermittently kicked, whipped, stabbed, slapped and kneed in the groin by both husband and wife, without provocation or comment.

This is the basic situation of The Empire Builders by Boris Vian, which opened off-Broadway last week as the French playwright's first New York production, nearly a decade after his death at 39. Vian, who was also a novelist, poet, composer, translator, jazz trumpeter and engineer, obviously owed much to the work of Franz Kafka. Ordinary, everyday characters are beset and beleaguered by fantastic circumstances beyond their control--neither exactly allegorical nor neatly symbolic --which fill them with dread. As the play progresses, The Sound drives the increasingly unsettled father into even smaller and poorer apartments. The members of the menage disappear one by one, until he is left alone with his battered, tacit adversary, known (in the program) as The Schmurz. What is The Schmurz--the awful awareness of one's own death? Is despair The Sound that drives this man into an ever-narrowing corner, where he babbles of flowers on his windowsill and dons his old uniform to fight he knows not what?

There are no answers, and the final moments of the play suffer somewhat from a lack of resolution. But the crisp, authoritative acting of Norman Rose as Father and the admirable sets by Lester Polakov that meld the eerie with the ordinary, manage to make the play most satisfactorily unsettling.

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