"Wittenberg' at the Arden (3rd review)

Too much salt, not enough food

STEVE COHEN

Wittenberg is a comedy imagining the convergence of three famous men, Martin Luther, John Faustus and Hamlet, at the University of Wittenberg in 1517. The word play is smart, the premise clever.

But this play misses the chance to be a drama about opposing forces as well. I would have preferred to see an even matchup between the priest who called for unswerving faith in God and the philosopher who made a deal with the devil. Like Robert Zaller, I wanted more of this. Unlike Robert, I’m pleased with the comedy we got.

While the interaction of historical figures resembles Tom Stoppard a bit, Wittenberg’s closest antecedent is the 1993 Steve Martin comedy, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which placed Picasso, Albert Einstein and Elvis Presley in the same Parisian saloon at the same time. Martin wrote this zany work for laughs. (The nearest that Wittenberg comes to Stoppard is its slight resemblance to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which utilized the characters from Hamlet.)

Luther the ambivalent?

Only one of the three men in Wittenberg is a factual historic figure: Martin Luther, the rebellious priest who launched the Protestant Reformation. Luther taught theology at Wittenberg from 1512 until his death in 1546. The fictitious Faustus and Hamlet were placed in Wittenberg by their creator-playwrights, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.

Playwright David Davalos makes Faustus his central character and Scott Greer portrays him with gentle warmth. He mocks religion with a non-confrontational sense of humor. But his counterweight, Luther, receives lesser stature. Luther is said to have been a forceful, single-minded man, but here he’s portrayed as an indecisive priest with plenty of doubts. He seeks advice from his teaching colleague, Doctor Faustus, and Faustus instructs him, as therapy, to make a list of his grievances. These become the famous 95 Theses that triggered the Reformation when Luther nailed them to the church doors in Wittenberg. In this play the nailing on the church doors is not done by Luther and he’s stunned to hear about it, after the fact.

This topsy-turvy distortion of history is mildly amusing because of its absurdity. But it eliminates an opportunity for dramatic conflict between two equally strong characters. Luther is scripted here as a nebbish and a gentle Greg Wood plays him that way. Each of the protagonists explains his philosophy and faith (or lack of), but we don't feel that it's an equal battle because Faustus's personality overwhelms Luther's.

Too many words

Some of the talk does go on a bit. King Francis would not have liked this play. He was the monarch, you remember, who criticized Mozart for writing "too many notes." The words come to a conclusion and the plot is wrapped up when Hamlet receives the message that his father the king of Denmark has died, and he must quit school to go back home for the funeral.

Shawn Fagan is wonderful as Hamlet, an indecisive young man searching for the meaning of life. As a student at Wittenberg, this Hamlet is swayed first by one teacher, then the other. At one point he’s ready to renounce the throne and become a cleric; at another he seems ready to accept Faustus’s admonition to act decisively and live a hedonistic life.

The characters speak in a mixture of Shakespearean English and contemporary American slang. Out-of-context quotations from the Bard create an audience-involving game. You find yourself trying to identify which Shakespeare play contains the line that Luther or Faustus rattles off. These speeches are offset by scenes in which Faustus plays guitar and sings in a campus dive. When he sings the 1956 song, Que sera, sera, it’s a clever homage to a significant line in Marlowe’s play, circa 1600. Faustus there says that sin is inevitable and it is thus implausible that God would punish man for sin: "What doctrine call you this? Que Sera Sera?" And Davalos wrote a great diversionary scene of physical action: a tennis match between Hamlet and Laertes.

Consider this alternative

J. R. Sullivan, an experienced Shakespearian, is a good choice as director and his staging of the tennis match is especially spectacular. Some of the women in Faustus’s life are effectively played by Kate Udall, billed as the Eternal Feminine.

Any reader intrigued by Wittenberg should be fascinated by Aaron Sorkin's current (serious) Broadway drama, The Farnsworth Invention, about the rivalry between David Sarnoff, founder of NBC and RCA, and Philo Farnsworth, an inventor of TV. Much of this play is fiction, as Sorkin admits, because the facts about their feud have been lost. Farnsworth was intensely private; Sarnoff was a man who created his own legend; and no one who knew them remains alive to verify the facts. So Sorkin invented dialogue. The result is a crackling confrontation— the sort of dramatic conflict Davalos could have contrived for Wittenberg.



To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Lesley Valdes, click here.