April 25–May 2, 1996

critical mass

The Lower Depths

Temple/Venture at Stage Three, 1619 Walnut St., through April 27, 893-1145.

With nearly three hours, 17 characters and enough drunken philosophy and Russian despair to choke a horse, Gorky's famous play, The Lower Depths, is old-time drama. First performed in 1902 at the Moscow Art Theatre, this play scandalized the public by daring to speak for the dregs of society; its characters are the hungry, the poor, the sick, everybody who is on the skids: the thieves, the alcoholics, the prostitutes, the gamblers. They drink, they fall in love, they brawl, they mock each other and themselves, they curse their lives and they die, almost unnoticed. And through it all, they talk. Boy, do they talk.

The setting is the literal lower depths, some dreadful, filthy, airless cellar where the characters pay to sleep in various bunks and beds. The landlord is a mean-spirited, prissy older man (Robert Christophe), with a young, mean-spirited wife (Lisa Connaughton) who is in love with one of the cellar-dwellers, Vaska (Jason Kolotouros), who is in love with her sister (Jamie L. Hurley), who gets beaten by her desperate sister who wants to escape her hideous marriage.

This may sound like a plot, but in fact this play is not so much a story as it is a panorama of misery and self-deception — what happens to the landlord or the sisters or the thief is in fact no more interesting or central than what happens to the vodka-poisoned actor (Tony Maestrone) or the now-fallen Baron (Brian McCarthy) or the pointlessly scraping locksmith (Jason Winston George) or the honorable Tartar (Jason Nuzzo) or anybody. And that, of course, is both the political point and the theatrical problem; one character blurs into another, and one event — a murder, a passionate kiss, a young woman dying, cheating at cards, etc., etc. — is much like another.

I was tempted to write it off with an easy and dismissive compliment: "excellent ensemble work," which it was. But, as one character says, "How can we pity the dead if we can't pity ourselves?" and this lack of involvement the audience feels with any of the characters' lives distances us from them, making us feel hard-hearted.

Thus, director Dugald MacArthur seems to have accomplished in this production exactly what Gorky was writing against: These miserable people are not individuals but a mass, and thus we don't identify with them, and thus we don't care much about their suffering. This is compounded by the fact that the actors are young, regardless of their characters' ages, the men mostly are about the same height, all have brown hair and moustaches, and all are wearing similar costumes. One of them, Satin (Ford Austin), turns out to be an important, central character in the last two acts of the play, but we haven't been paying enough attention to him.

In fact, the only real characters we register are the landlord and a wandering old man called Luka (Frank X) who brings kindness and tolerance to this hateful world. The reason they seem the only vivid people in this assemblage is that they are played by Christophe and X — who gives a luminous performance — who are the only two experienced, professional actors in the cast. The other odd result of this lopsided casting is that Luka, whose hopeful preachings Gorky thought were "pulp for the toothless," becomes the voice of wisdom in the play.

And because MacArthur has directed his cast in an old-fashioned stilted style of acting, the play feels like a museum piece; as I walked away from the theater, past the homeless, suffering inhabitants of Philadelphia's lower depths, I realized that the play might have taught me something about their lives, but it hadn't.

— Toby Zinman