BRECHT FORCES YIN ONTO YANG
A strong, often infuriating, truth about the protest plays of Bertolt Brecht is how much the socialist playwright pushes the plot beyond the ending: He ends up accusing the audience of failing to finish the tale. It’s not really over, he cajoles or threatens, until we furnish the future. How dare we assume that a happy ending is anything more than just a current incident to be followed by a questionable outcome?
Alas, most audiences crave answers, not questions, by story’s end, certainly not the cry of helplessness that concludes The Good Person of Szechwan. But that’s as good as it gets in Cor Theatre’s spirited updating–via a translation by Tony Kushner and a hip hop, break-dancing remount by director Ernie Nolan.
Given this provocative, often powerful, play, the uncertain resolution is entertainment enough. By then we’re drawn into Brecht’s politicized parable, the story of Shen Te, a whore turned tobacco merchant, who discovers that goodness doesn’t pay in a capitalist world. No, with a little help from three itinerant and indifferent wandering gods, she learns the cost of charity and the solution: She will develop a male alter ego named Shui Ta, a hard-hearted/headed cousin. Like Brecht’s anti-heroine Mother Courage, Shui Ta drives hard bargains and seeks bottom lines. “He” also knows how to evict or employ the assorted parasites, crooks, deadbeats and freeloaders attracted to Shen Te’s sudden good fortune.
Reset in a very contemporary Chicago ghetto, where the poor prey on each other and the rich reap the divide-and-conquer profits, Cor’s The Good Person of Szechwan only pays lip service to the Chinese folk tale that fuels its 1941 source. Energized with uncredited, pop-up rap anthems that deliver cynical messages like “St. Never-To-Be (Day)” and the “Defenselessness of the Good,” the crowded Red Orchid stage bursts with Cor’s rambunctious 12-member, colorblind ensemble. Young and game, they’re as ripely raw as Brecht’s “epic theater” demands.
The two hours that follow center on the Jekyll/Hyde split personality of Will Von Vogt’s gender-bending Shen Te: Indulging in rapid-fire costume changes, Von Vogt creditably distinguishes his kind-hearted Shen Te (not, as she first appears, a drag queen but a real woman who can get pregnant) with the cut-throat-competitive Shui Ta, a male predator to balance the female nurturer.
Suitable support comes from Chris Brickhouse as Sun, a feckless aviator who tries to gull the smitten Shen Te out of her literal gift from the gods. Both narrating and sending messages from the author, Dawn Bless fleshes out Wang the Waterseller who haplessly sets up the gods’ bet that a good person can still happen. Nik Kourtis is Shu Fu, the rich baker who courts Shen Te and briefly lets her repurpose his abandoned warehouses into homeless shelters. Lea Pascal is a rascally, opportunistic landlady.
All the more effective when barebones-basic, Brecht’s ethical talespinning delivers its still-current goods. Inequality in the service of the 1% is a fact of life in Donald Trump’s divisive America: It’s too easy to be too good to last long. If developing a shrewd second self is not the answer, Brecht queries, we need to give Shen Te’s altruism a decent future. And not just on November 8th.
photos by Matthew Gregory Hollis
The Good Person of Szechwan
Cor Theatre
A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells St
ends on September 11, 2016
for tickets, call 866.811.4111
or visit Cor Theatre
for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago
