Boris Vian's "Empire Builders' at Walnut Studio 5 (2nd review)

Boris Vian's absurdist work from 1957, The Empire Builders, follows the declining fortunes of the Duponts, a bourgeois family being hounded from apartment to apartment by a mysterious noise that takes up residence with them wherever they go. The noise is impossible to bear, not so much because of its volume (which is considerable) as its lack of definition; it doesn't sound like anything, and so it can't be located or dealt with. It's somewhere between an eviction notice and a voice of doom, resolving itself only into a generalized menace.

When the family hears it, it must flee. Father Leon (Bob Schmidt) reassures his unnamed wife (Kirsten Quinn) and their adolescent daughter, Zenobia (Kate Black-Regan), that all will be well at the next address. Zenobia can't help pointing out, though, that each new apartment is smaller than the last. From six rooms, the Duponts come down to three and then two, creating space problems for Zenobia and Mugg, the family servant (Sonja Robson), who at a minimum need beds or at least floor space.

When we first meet the Duponts, they are installing themselves yet again. Their new abode has an extra tenant, however, in the form of a sleeping figure in rags, who is never named or addressed in the play but is called the "Schmurz" in the script.

There's no such word, but schmuck in German means "ornament" and schmutz is "filth." The Schmurz (Tomas Dura) is something of both, ironically in the first sense and literally in the second, since, begrimed and crawling with sores and open wounds, he is a plague object.

Silently cringing

The family chooses to collectively ignore him, but each member takes turns beating, kicking or whipping the Schmurz, with Mugg joining in too. The Schmurz cringes at the blows but makes no sound and no defense. Nor does he budge.

The apartment space begins to shrink, as doors close and refuse to open. The family shrinks as well. Mugg serves notice. Zenobia tumbles from a parapet that mysteriously vanishes under her. The intolerable noise returns, and as Leon climbs to yet another apartment, this time a single room, his wife's cries are heard from behind as she too is borne off.

Leon is left to confront the Schmurz alone. The latter stands now for the first time, still silent but now menacing, as if for a final confrontation. He makes no move, but Leon's fate is clearly sealed.

France's shame

The Empire Builders is very much a play of its time: France's late Fourth Republic. The title may be an ironic allusion to France's crumbling empire in Algeria, Indochina and elsewhere.

The specter of France's Vichy collaboration with the Nazi occupation of World War II hangs over it, particularly the deportation of French Jews. The Duponts are not specified as Jewish, but their plight—driven from place to place, stripped of their possessions and, finally, mercilessly doomed— is clearly reminiscent of the fate of French Jewry.

At the same time, in their willful blindness to their situation and their attempt to displace aggression and anxiety on a weaker scapegoat, the Duponts also resemble the mass of Frenchmen who stood by idly— often profiting in the process— as the Jews disappeared. The Schmurz, too, is an ambiguous symbol in the play, at once pursuer and pursued, and, ultimately, an emblem of the Duponts' fate.

At the mercy of others

If the Duponts evoke the Holocaust, however, they're also a broader symbol of dispossession and decline. The modern bourgeois is, like Willy Loman, ultimately a man with nothing but a suitcase and a smile.

Even at the beginning of the 20th Century, France was still a nation of peasant proprietors. The land was a harsh mistress, but it would be there tomorrow as it had been there today. The bourgeois had nothing under his feet, no wealth but paper, no security but contract. He was thus at the mercy of others, and so dispensable.

That is what is happening to the Duponts: They are being dispensed with. That it makes no sense to them— that it makes no sense as such— is the essence of their situation.

The noise that pursues them refuses to form itself into words— that is, to provide reasons and account for itself. It doesn't even have to give an order: fear accomplishes that. The Duponts dispossess themselves. They are their own undoing.

In America, by contrast…

French theater of the absurd reflected a world turned upside down by two great wars and a catastrophic depression. The modern U.S. economy, by contrast, is a war against its citizens, and anyone who's opened his computer to find he's been fired or his paper to learn that his pension doesn't exist is one of Vian's Duponts. That makes The Empire Builders as relevant today as it was 50 years ago in the France of Sartre and Piaf.

The essence of absurdist theater is that all sentiment is banished; its characters go robotically about their business, or to their doom. Only Zenobia seems to have some sense of what's actually happening, but she too can look no further than the immediate situation.

Essence of absurdity

The cast was briskly directed by Tina Brock, and Michael Dura too should be mentioned, in a comic turn as the Duponts' new neighbor. Tomas Dura as the Schmurz, without a word to say, was a remarkably forceful presence; Meghan Jones's boxlike set was suitably claustrophobic; and Maggie Baker's costumes had the proper touch of zaniness, as well as a John the Baptist severity for the Schmurz.

Plaudits to all for this worthily mounted revival of a play that speaks as urgently today as it did half a century ago. The essence of absurdity— that the ground can be pulled up from under you at any moment in a senselessly mad world— is as relevant as ever.♦


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