Peace

Aristotle said that a play should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This one has two out of three. Peace begins with brilliant scatology--and brilliant scatology is far more difficult to create than brilliant wit. It ends, in a breath-taking 20-minute sora, with stirring satire--and satire that stirs you is the rarest and most wonderful kind. But the middle, oh the middle, is what they tell me Hasty Pudding shows are like, and second-rate Pudding shows at that. You can say that bad and irrelevant jokes are genuine Aristophanes, but that excuse comes 2,000 years too late.

To explain why I object to the hour that separates the beginning from the end, I shall have to start by disagreeing with the Harvard Dramatic Club's advertising on Peace.

The HDC prospectus says that the Summer Players "feel that with Aristophanes, to be irreverent is to be faithful." This production is not faithful to Aristophanes' irreverence. For Aristophanes, while he was an expert practitioner of the calculated gross-out, also dared to scream insults in the face of public opinion. And that, as he says himself in this play, is what placed him head and shoulders over his fellow comedy-writers.

The HDC version of Peace, in refusing to meet the serious need for political irreverence, in refusing to put its draft card in the fire, becomes a varsity show where the jokes are unusually dirty. A comedy that vows to be faithful to Aristophanes automatically forswears plot and characterization; its whole raison d'etre is then to give the audience a political goose. This production keeps several of the original jokes, topical ca. 421 B.C., without explaining them; and it ignores, for a long stretch, the wealth of current political garbage to scream about. Without any political venom to make it look dangerous, it often looks pretty dreary.

But even when Peace's content is dreariest, its form is dazzling. Director Timothy Mayer is as brilliant as ever at filling the stage with one arresting tableau after another in cinematic succession, and his imagination never fails him in inventing show-stopping sight-gags, which are the life-energy of low comedy. Set-designer Clayton Koelb has shown a genius for translating these sight-gags into usable pieces of stage machinery.

Bradley Burg's score is very much a saving-grace, with its unswervingly melodic line and its sweet harmonies. Mayer's lyrics show signs of being dashed off, except for the last, very beautiful one, and the lyricist doesn't seem to be able to make a rhyme without using enjambement, a device which should always be used very sparingly. The score keeps the show flowing when the accumulation of gag-lines that have fallen flat start to clog it up.

Finally, this is a marvelous cast. Stephen Kaplan is all that an Aristophanesean leading clown should be--self-important, close to the earth, and terribly funny. Tom Babe adds a great deal of skill to a natural talent for comedy, and Dan Deitch gracefully fills the none-too-easy assignment of playing a god who is also a heavy. The chorus, led by Susan Channing, is not, like most Greek choruses, self-conscious and uncomfortably out of place, but perfectly at ease as it stands around the stage reciting, or lounges in the front row of the auditorium. And Lloyd Schwartz makes a marathon of his two walk-ons.