From Bruno Dog to Queen Victoria

SHIPWRECKED
An Entertainment –
The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont
(as told by himself)
by Donald Margulies
Actorstheatre
Herberger Theater Center
Directed by Matthew Wiener
January 22 – February 7
602-252-8497

     Let me begin by stating that Donald Margulies is one of my favorite modern playwrights. His is an incisive voice probing the social mores of our world and often turning them upside down in his quest for truth. So it was with some degree of trepidation that I attended actorstheatre’s current production of SHIPWRECKED. It just did not seem like the stuff Margulies would tackle. How wrong I was!

     The author himself, in the program notes states that “The style of the show is somewhat different. I made a challenge for myself for this to be as spare as possible. There is no scenery and it is for three actors, one who will play the lead. My objective was to write something which was purely theatrical.” You could not get much more theatrical than SHIPWRECKED and both Director Matthew Wiener and lead actor Kirk Jackson have risen to the author’s challenge beautifully! With the barest of sets, props and costumes, this is one of the most stunning productions I have seen in a long while. It is relatively easy to create outstanding technical effects when you are using intricate  equipment, but when all you have on stage is a small raised platform, a few ropes, a couple of large pieces of fabric and some magnificent music and lighting tricks, you must rely on your wits, your ingenuity and some mighty fine actors who can deliver a tour de force while hardly batting an eye. The show takes 100 minutes (with no intermission) and by the end of an hour, I was exhausted watching  as Kirk Jackson, Oliver Wadsworth and Yetide Badaki romped tirelessly all over the stage, the latter two evoking more characters than you could shake a stick at and the former morphing from a mewling boy to a seafaring adventurer. It was phenomenal!

          The energy was amazing as the true story of de Rochemont unfolded. A coddled child, he left home as a teen; signed on to a ship bound for Australia; went through a shipwreck; was marooned on an island with only his faithful dog, Bruno, for company; traveled with lost aborigines to their island where he married and raised a family; then returned on foot and steamer through Australia to his homeland in England first to be admired and raised to exalted status and then to be reviled as a fraud. Through all this the almost balletic moves of Jackson as staged by Director Wiener created for us pictures far more fascinating than the real movement of a whirlpool or monsoon or a ride on a sea turtle. And Badaki was quite convincing in a variety of roles from mother to sea captain to dark skinned beauty. But it was Wadsworth who stood out in my mind as the most versatile of the three actors. As the dog he was cuddly, as Queen Victoria he was pompous, as an aborigine he was properly savage, as an Australian prospector he was very rough and tumble, and as several debunking experts at the Royal Geographical Society, he was absolutely hysterical. This cast was expert in creating a story more outrageous than you could imagine – and yet it was all so believable. So much so that when you finally got to the crux of the plot, it was almost anticlimactic. Perhaps this is the one major flaw of Margulies’ script. It went on just a bit too long. The point to be made is as old as this 19th century tale and yet as new as today’s headlines.

     The lead story today on Sunday Morning, the CBS TV show (which I love to watch for its insights) was all about the fleetingness of celebrity and how today’s paparazzi and countless shows like TMZ or magazines like PEOPLE relish tearing down those who have risen to great heights. How appropriate as a background for SHIPWRECKED! Even back in the 19th Century, there were celebrities whose stories were told in magazines like that of de Rochemont. Whether or not the stories were true did not seem to matter and in Louis’ case, indeed they were not true. He had made it all up. But before he was torn apart by the “experts” (today we call them gossip mongers), he had made fame and fortune his own and was beloved by the whole world. How fleeting is that fame then AND now as we see our heroes broken and torn down almost everyday, be they political heroes, sports and rock stars or actors. This is Margulies’ point and he states it so well. “Who is the bigger fool  - him or us for believing in him? Louis did not deliberately delude his public, but rather he is deluded.” Louis de Rochemont really believed he had experienced all those adventures, not simply copied them from books his mother had read to him as a child. His final words in the play are “I am not deluded, am I?” As the public goes on to devour its next victim, perhaps we should heed that question more intently. Who is the real culprit – those who create celebrities or those who are created? As Margulies says, “Man creates his Gods and just as eagerly destroys them.” If you want to chew on that, go to see SHIPWRECKED!