Boris Vian's "Empire Builders' at Walnut Studio 5 (1st review)

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a Heaven for?" Robert Browning reminded us. Much the same function is performed Boris Vian's absurdist work The Empire Builders, now receiving an equally deep and philosophically dazzling production by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium.

Vian's 80-minute work from 1957 focuses on the progressively desperate plight of the Dupont family: a father and mother, their teenage daughter Zenobia and the maid, Mugg. As the play opens, the Duponts drag their bags and possessions into a four-room apartment, fleeing from a "noise" that has chased them from the six-room space they inhabited a floor below.

Over the next two scenes, the family escapes twice more to still smaller apartments upstairs, leaving behind possessions and family members on each floor until only the father remains. At each level, they encounter a bandaged, bleeding beggar, a silent apparition whom they viciously beat but otherwise ignore. (In the Haussmann-style apartments of Vian's Paris, the lower ranks of society lived on the highest floors.)

Hitchcockian moments

At the simplest level of interpretation, Empire Builders reads as a straightforward meditation on fear. Meghan Jones's set design rearranges jutting, angular panels in each scene to produce an increasingly claustrophobic environ. And the Consortium's eerie production captures those Hitchcockian moments when the noise rumbles through the walls and the family rushes off in terror.

Kevin Francis's sound design renders the terrifying noise as the rumbling produced by an ocean steamer heard underwater— a deep, grinding creak of metal and ballast amplified and distorted by water. The father later laments the need to keep pace as society races "toward the future at full speed"; as events shape their lives, the family becomes poorer and smaller.

"'Where is time passing?'

Vian fills the long stretches of dialogue with domestic anxiety over Duponts' distressing living conditions. Father and Mother wonder how best to raise their child (or marry her off); Sonja Robson's deliciously deadpan maid recites laundry lists of complaints; and the daughter bursts each bubble of her parents' comforting wisdom with sarcastic remarks ("Where is time passing? Through the eye of a needle? Through the street?"). Meanwhile, Father dubiously reassures his family that the noise is "a symbol, a reference and a signifier, and should not be confused with the noise itself."

Whenever anxiety threatens, one of the Duponts steps out of the conversation and savagely beats, strangles, stabs or kicks the beggar (Tomas Dura). Does America's increasingly anxious middle class behave any differently today, berating and blaming immigrants and the poor for America's battered economy?

Tarantino-style violence

These heady themes notwithstanding, this intense and creepy production is tremendously entertaining. Tina Brock's direction woos the audience with its balance of humor and viciousness. (I couldn't contain my laughter at the Tarantino-style violence.) Kate Black-Regan's daughter sparkles with innocence and humor, and though Bob Schmidt as Father loses steam late, he mostly bursts across the stage like a ball of manic energy.

But most of the enjoyment stems from what the play illuminates, about Vian's France and contemporary America. Certainly, Parisians felt a similar decline in the security and pride of French nationalism during their Algerian War, when Vian penned this work.

For Americans today, Vian's play reflects economic conditions that no doubt foment similar anxiety. The Empire Builders is pessimistic and Luddite, yes; but it's also dazzling in what it illuminates.♦


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