Theater Review: A Disturbing Examination of Childhood and Control

Five Easy Pieces

Written and Directed by Milo Rau

NYU Skirball Center, Manhattan

March 8, 2019

Spaceman

Written by Leegrid Stevens

Directed by Jacob Titus

Starring Erin Treadway

Loading Dock Theater, Manhattan

March 3, 2019   

Swiss writer Milo Rau (b. 1977) is known in Europe for his political theater, challenging audiences with multimedia provocations on subjects like racism, colonialism, and terrorism. His theater company, International Institute for Political Murder, has produced works about the death of the Romanian dictator Ceausescu (2009), Compassion: The History of a Machine Gun (2016), and now Five Easy Pieces (2016), a challenging, thought provoking work that received its US premiere in NYC this month. Equally disturbing and stimulating, it challenged what we think about childhood and personal freedom.

The play is based on a famous episode of mass murder in Belgium during the 1990’s. Marc Dutroux, “The Beast of Belgium”, grew up in the Belgian Congo during the colonial period; in Belgium as an adult he abducted, raped, and killed 11 young girls. He was released from jail after his initial conviction for rape, and all of his killings then came after the release. The controversy over the Belgian justice system nearly brought down the government, and Belgians know this story as well as Americans know Watergate or 9/11, as sort of a metaphor for the country’s problems, including the legacy of colonialism and a hierarchic government unresponsive to the people. Five Easy Pieces depicts five scenes from the live of the murderer using children 11-15 years old as the actors. The murderer himself is not portrayed, but the kids play grieving parents, policemen, even one of the victims, as an 11 year old actor reads an actual victim’s plaintive letter to her parents written during her abduction. The appearance of the “play” is like a rehearsal, as each scene is overtly “directed” by an onstage adult actor who orders the child actors about, goads them to cry, be more vulnerable, etc. The play is less about the sequence of events of the mass murders, which would have been well known to the original Ghent Belgium audience, but about what we think of and do to children.

The play begins with a prelude where each child actor introduces him/herself, goaded on by the director, whose domineering visage appears on a large screen behind the kids, rather like Big Brother. Here, the theme of childhood spontaneity vs. adult control is introduced. One child sings the Beatles’ utopian song “Imagine” until brusquely cut off by the director in the interest of time. We then see the five scenes, each blocked as a filmed interview, with the principal actors observed by the other kids, and with the director visibly manipulating the camera for closeups. Sometimes the video screen above shows a close up of the child acting, other times they show parallel adult actors doing the same exact lines and motions as the kids are doing. Are children little adults? Are they different? What does it mean for two teens to portray a grieving married couple, or a consoling priest, or a brusque policeman? This all took me back to the oddness of my high school musicals, with heavily made-up teens portraying complex adults, minor seducer/felons like Harold Hill in The Music Man, and manipulators like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. It always seemed a bit strange to me, even when I was a teen. This production brings this queasiness to the forefront. It also has great resonance in an era where parents are accused of both shielding their children from adversity and pushing them too fast into adult settings.

The other main theme  of the play is adults’ control of children. Early in the play one of the young actors says that he likes being a kid because he is free to do as he likes, of course within the bounds his parents sets. What is the right amount of child autonomy or control, and until what age? This question is shown metaphorically throughout the play by the adult director’s constant orders, directions, and emotional manipulation of the young actors. At one point, when a young boy sadly recites the lines of a grieving father who just found out about the death of his daughter, the director wants real tears. The actor says he cannot do it. So the director applies a special makeup to the boy’s eyes that makes him tear up. He says the lines again. The second time through I was much more moved, despite the patent artificiality of the moment. Was I moved because of the acting, or because of the manipulation of the child? Always lurking in the background is what the children are actually portraying--the criminal manipulation of children by a murderer/rapist. Is this just an extreme example of the commonplace manipulation of children that we do every day?

The seven child actors and the adult director were all wonderful. They spoke Flemish, so we looked at supratitles, projected at the top of the video screen, throughout the play. This distracted a bit from watching the stage action, and took my eyes more to the video screen. I think the director intended some of this, as the actual acting scenes were often darkly lit, or in profile, limiting our view of the actual actors portraying their roles. The director intentionally wanted us to move back and forth between the “unreality” of the projected image (whether of the child actor, the parallel adult actors, or of the director himself) and the reality of the acting on stage. This was one of the more effective uses that I have seen of breaking the fourth wall between actors and audience, a characteristic of postmodern theater. While my lack of emotional connection to the history of the actual 1990’s mass murders meant a different experience from that of a Belgian theatergoer, the play, with all of its provoking questions, was fascinating and very disturbing. I will look for work of this actor/director in the future, and hope more of his work comes to the USA. We all could benefit from asking the questions he poses.

Brief Theater Note: Spaceman, a new play by Leegrid Stevens presented by the NYC Wild Project, was a 90 minute monologue by an actor Erin Treadway, portraying a solo astronaut flying to Mars. The play was a mix of familiar stuff from the movies Gravity and 2001 a Space Odyssey, with a little spiritual bit when she sees her dead husband astronaut floating around. More interesting was the set, where her astro-chair was suspended four feet above the stage on a rack jammed with dials, knobs, and flashing lights, chaotically arrayed and looking like they came from an electronics store clearance sale. But if you squinted, it looked really authentic. The sound design was equally great, with rumbles, crashes, asteroids, etc. coming from huge speakers that rattled the small theater (50 seats). It wasn’t great science fiction writing, but it was fun.