STAGE REVIEW
'The Robbers' a theft of the audience's time
By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic
The present production of Friedrich Schiller's "The Robbers" demonstrates that it's possible to experience traveler's anxiety without going anywhere.
Director Markus Wessendorf sets this 200-year-old German classic in an airport waiting area filled with edgy students and militaristic security guards. Instead of making the antique plot line and translated dialogue easier to follow, however, the staging gimmicks ultimately become annoying. We lose patience waiting for the characters to repeatedly pass through security.
'The Robbers'
"The Robbers," first produced in 1781, was Schiller's first play and opened the door to challenging ideas of personal liberty and a style that came to be called "storm and stress." As a reluctant army surgeon at the time — a career that duplicated his father's — Schiller was forbidden to continue writing by his superiors. The play's success prompted him to slip out of the military and change the direction of German theater.
Not surprisingly, then, "The Robbers" is about a principled outlaw, Karl Moor, who rejects his father and forms a forest band of robber-revolutionaries who loot and murder in a na•ve quest for personal and political freedom. Karl is undercut by his power-hungry brother Franz, who discredits him, steals his girlfriend and plots to kill the old Count, their father.
Scot Davis plays Karl as a disaffected youngster in the early scenes, where the contemporary trappings are more successful. When Karl gets a letter, it arrives as e-mail to his laptop computer and finds him in a coffee shop. But in the later scenes Karl morphs into a raging lunatic in a bad Rasputin wig and beard.
Jeremy Pippin plays evil Franz in cowboy boots and a twangy Texas drawl that muffles too much of his dialogue. Blake Kushi as the Count struggles under pounds of make-up, the echo chamber of a body mike, and a resurrection scene that has him rise from beneath the stage in ghostly gray.
Annie Lipscomb as the girlfriend is so attractive with her dancer's bearing that we wish she were in another play.
Meanwhile, there are two acts to endure in which a classic German drama is visually construed as a confrontation between terrorist extremists and President George W. Bush, while waiting for a delayed flight to Los Angeles.
Scenic designer Kelly Berry opens the Kennedy Theatre main stage clear to the back wall, creating a goal post perspective on a football field. The metal detector is set on the 50-yard line and the immediate end zone becomes an desert filled with rotating boulders.
Stage microphones are set up in the sand, where actors deliver monologues like it's open-mike night in the Sahara.
