Swamp Rats

By T.E. Kalem

JUNGLE OF CITIES by Bertolt Brecht

The members of the Brooklyn Academy of Music repertory company sometimes seem to have just been introduced to one another at a cocktail party. This is their best stab at ensemble work.

Jungle of Cities gestates the propositions that later became Brecht's babies. Mammon is God. Men and women buy, sell and devour one another, and freedom and free will are mocking mirages. The bleak isolation of existence governs all: "If you stuff a ship with human bodies till it bursts, there will still be such loneliness in it that one and all will freeze."

The locale is Chicago, but no Chicago known to man. The central character, Shlink, a Malaysian lumber dealer, looks like an angular Dr. Fu Manchu. Shlink (Seth Allen) offers to buy a library clerk's opinion of a mystery thriller. The clerk, a romantic idealist named George Garga (Don Scardino), offers to sell Rimbaud's critique, but proudly announces that his own cannot be bought.

Brecht never underestimated the latent power of masochism. One can only kick a stone so many times before one breaks one's toe. Shlink, a wily masochist, turns over his lumber plant to Garga and thus entraps him. Garga must now buy and sell not only lumber but human beings. Shlink and Garga exchange fortunes, trying to out-toy fate. Unfortunately, Director David Jones understresses the Rimbaud-Verlaine love-hate homosexual bond, which is at the core of the drama. At play's end Shlink takes his own life with a vial of poison, and Garga moves to New York--an anambiguous ending if ever there was one.

--By T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.