The Arsonists
Back in the late 60’s when I was still in college, certain plays kept asserting themselves for production. One such play was the Swiss playwright’s play Biederman and the Firebugs. I remember seeing a mediocre student production but the play has always stayed with me. I admired the play’s imaginative way of making its points and the message itself as my contemporaries applied it to Vietnam. The new translation by Alistair Beaton as presented under a new title, The Arsonists, is getting a terrific production at the Odyssey Theatre. The play seems even more relevant than ever, always true of great plays. The play is directed by the Artistic Director Ron Sossi who has a real affinity with this sort of play, and is acted by a special group of actors that get together, usually once a year, to explore a text using the approaches introduced by Grotowski, Chaiken, Brecht, Brook, and Suzuki. The results here are funny, explosive, and affecting.
Biederman and his wife are visited or rather invaded by two strangers who manipulate and threaten by implication the very safety of their existence. The town is being overwhelmed by arsonists who move into their houses, then torch it to the ground. Biederman refuse to acknowledge that these menacing pair of thugs, beautifully realized by baby faced John Acorn as Schmitz and his slimy friend Ron Bottita as Eisenring a waiter. The more Biederman, the timid and affective Norbert Weisser, and his sniveling wife Babette, the always-delightful Beth Hogan, refuse to face the truth the more the audience squirms. We know the intruders are the bad guys but the Biedermans become culpable by their refusal to deal with the reality.
Playwright Frisch probably has Nazism or communism on his mind but the brilliance and sad fact about the play is that it fits almost any period. I couldn’t stop thinking about the tea-baggers, especially the gun carrying kind, the constant intrusion into our lives by the like of Fox News and MSNBC. Cable TV leaves us anxious but we must ignore their dire prophecies in order to get out of bed in the morning and face the drudgery of everyday existence. Ron Sossi orchestrates the play beautifully using the chorus of firemen to underscore the action. These firemen also no the truth but merely linger on the edge reminiscent of the keystone cops. The Arsonists plays at the Odyssey Theatre until May 23rd.