"The Arsonists' at the Fringe (1st review)

Max Frisch's The Arsonists is a simple play, and revealing the plot won't spoil the theater experience. A town (unnamed) is beset by fires. Homes, a fine restaurant, the circus— all have burned to the ground, killing people in the process.

The modus operandi of the two arsonists is the same each time: They wheedle their way into residences or commercial establishments as guests or workers and then set their fires.

Gottlieb Biedermann is the prey we follow in this drama, and the action takes place in his house. Yet far from being an innocent victim, he finds himself abetting the bad guys.

Hunger to be liked

The Arsonists is also a complex play. It's partly an apologue, a kind of allegorical story, suggesting that those who pretend to moral virtues they don't possess are doomed to pay dearly for their hypocrisy. Biedermann thinks of himself as open-minded, above class distinctions, generous, honest. Yet ethically he is empty; he has treated an employee so poorly that the man committed suicide.

At the same time, Biedermann wants to be seen as sociable, even helpful, so his response to his visitors, as he gradually understands their purpose, is to invite them to dinner. "Then they'll be our friends," he assures his wife, Babette. But Josef Schmitz and William Eisenring, the arsonists, see through his pretensions to shared bonhomie.

To the playwright Frisch, appeasement is the wrong way to deal with evil. As the chorus of firefighters points out in one of its many truth-telling observations, "Hoping that good / Will come from being good-natured,/ He makes a deadly mistake."

Betrayed by his face

The characters in The Arsonists lack great dimension, but neither are they stick figures, at least as they're developed in this production by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium. As Schmitz, Ethan Lipkin, of enormous girth, is an explosive presence (no pun intended), yet he seems to shrink in size during certain moments of contrition.

Mark Knight, as Eisenring, the brains of this criminal pair, is alternately truth-telling and joke-telling; his beady eyes and sneering mouth betray his motive at any moment, but Biedermann can't read it.

Kirsten Quinn, as Babette, reacts to events with perfect timing and frantic pitch. Liam Castellan's Biedermann is a bundle of nerves, less convincing as a brutal businessman but better as a man who doesn't want to die in a fire.

Only human

The chorus is deployed in the classic Greek fashion, guiding the audience via a higher level of discourse; in the script, its words are written as poetry. It is philosophical: "It's only human/ To talk about fate. / Fate means we don't need to ask/ Why the city is burning/ No need to ask how the terror began."

It is judgmental: "If you spend long enough/ Looking into the future/ What you foresee/ Will finally happen:/ Stupidity dressed up as fate,/ Always stupidity/ Blazing and burning/ Until it can not be put out."

And it repeatedly expresses everyone's worst fear: "Woe unto us."

What was the evil?

Analogies to Biedermann's situation flood the mind. Max Frisch (1911-1991) originally wrote this drama as a radio play in 1953, and it was translated for the British Royal Court stage in 1961. Although Frisch, a Swiss, wasn't specific about what the evil stood for, commentators suggest he was referring to fascism or the atomic bomb. An American of that era might have thought of the pervasive escalation of McCarthyism.

The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium uses a 2007 translation by the British writer, satirist and political commentator Alistair Beaton, who offers some contemporary possibilities for the evil: climate change, personal and corporate greed, and the loss of individual liberties in the fight against terrorism and radical Islam.

Precisely because the play leaves the options open, it remains a rich stimulant to reflection. If the Idiopathic folks chose this play any time in the past two and a half years, why would you not read Biedermann as Barack Obama, well-meaningly trying to negotiate policy with adversaries explicitly focused on destroying his presidency?

Maniac cab driver

But the most accurate interpretation of The Arsonists is probably more down home, dealing with an everyday event: someone afraid to show he's afraid or, better yet, too embarrassed to stand up for his own self-interest.

This uncomplicated conclusion occurred to me on the cab ride home as the driver careened through Philadelphia streets, around double-parked cars and PECO work vans and vehicles that dawdled for just an instant after the traffic lights turned green. My wife and I could have taken the brave route and asked him to slow down, or continued to defiantly let him risk our lives by just sitting there in silence. Instead, we chose a middle path, like two little Biedermanns. We put on our seat belts and tried not to make too much noise when they clicked in.♦


To read another review by Gresham Riley, click here.