Will Fink

This is all by means of saying that this play bears incredible intellectual fruit. It is, like Beckett, like Brecht, deep in meaning and rich in metaphor. But, also like Beckett and Brecht, it is incredibly hard to stage successfully. And Steppenwolf falls short…And the play itself, I say again, I find fascinating and highly worthy of both praise and production. But, sadly, this particular one falls short. Perhaps in a few years – maybe with some Irish help – the right people will come together and create magic with this piece.

It’s basically Marivaux staging a Moliere-style comedy and throwing in a Commedia del’Arte character to see what would happen. Which yields interesting results. Harlequin (a clown character with roots in the insolent slave in Plautus who perhaps reached his intellectual peak as Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will) is possibly the fondest-remembered character of the Commedia, and certainly shakes things up in a largely endearing way in Changes.

And Wechsler has decided to innovate, to attempt to make the story a parable of America. He wants to layer on a metaphor of the American psyche. Gynt is not a bad candidate: he starts scrappy and naïve; he gets into some heavy things along the way – slave trading, missionary work; on the island with his friends, he seeks to convince them to sell goods and services to the Turks, who are fighting against Greece, the birthplace of democracy. He’s gathered all these riches, then gets swindled out of them. On paper, it seems like it could work

Overall, it’s a funny 80 minutes or so. Very of-the-times – young, hip, bawdy. It’s plenty shambolic, though, and feels more like a living, improvisational performance rather than a set piece of theatre.

Noemi Schlosser takes on Piaf’s role in this production. It opens with her simply waiting, watching time crawl by, measured by cigarette butts in the ash tray. She calls a place her husband frequents, looking for him; he’s just left. No, they don’t know where he was going. His sister calls, asking if he’s there in the hotel with her; she lies, says he’s in the bathroom and can’t talk, sorry.