Playwright: George Brant. At: Red Tape Theatre at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, 621 W. Belmont Ave. Tickets: 847-738-6919; www.redtapetheatre.org; $25. Runs through: June 16
George Brant's look at U.S. values opens itself to a number of interpretations: it could conceivably be read as a caveat on inhumanity engendered by wartime unease, parochial boredom or exclusionary capitalism. Then again, maybe it's a romanticized sermon on the moral superiority of those dwelling on the fringes of societyor perhaps a southern-gothic creepiness along the lines of Ray Bradbury's The Circus of Dr. Lao. When your playwright is the mischievous author of Lovely Letters and Night of the Mime, you never know.
What we know is that our saga begins with Charlie Sparks, now an old man in a hospital, whose dying memories are of that fatal day in 1916 that his circus arrived in the sleepy town of Erwin, Tenn. During the parade meant to lure customers to the next day's show, the lead elephant breaks drill, drawing a physically painful rebuke from its inexperienced riderwhereupon the animal turns on her abuser, killing him. The circus troupe declares the handler's death an accident, but the citizens of Erwin call it murder, demanding that the offender be executed. Sparks is reluctant to sacrifice his star attraction, but eventually capitulates to his customers' wishes.
That's one version of the legend, anyway. As with most such incidents, accounts differ widely, growing ever more nebulous with each retelling. Brant's verbal montage weaves the diverse reports into a volatile tapestry of human behavior, augmented by a rustic orchestra whose members roam through the action supplying incidental music reflecting the dramatic ambience and intensifying the impact of the more spectacular scenesnotably, the condemned pachyderm's slow and ugly hanging, suggested by evocative choreography coupled with ingenious manipulation of objects stimulating our imaginations to the awe engendered by the magnitude of the atrocity in progress.
The tragic scope that this Red Tape Theatre production could have generated is unfortunately diminished by its configuration to an arrangement seating the audience not only on opposite sides of the arena-like playing space, but elevated on galleries high above the floor. This forces unmiked actors to repeatedly direct their voices away from half of their audience, so that even when vocalizing straight for the rafters, many important textual details are rendered unintelligible. If this concept's purpose was to replicate the limited vantage of eyewitnesses to the original event, it also cheats us of fully comprehending the occurrence under scrutiny, much as a similarly myopic view did the bloodthirsty mob of a century earlier.