This carefully crafted and visually interesting staging reveals many nuances of Gunter Grass's first play, written in 1955 when he was under 30 and not yet famous. Flood is casually reminiscent of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, broadly summarizing human experience—from sex, progress and art to devastation and despair—by drawing on Western literary traditions from the Old Testament to 1950s European absurdism. However, the Alchymia production cannot disguise the loose and episodic structure of the work, which betrays Grass's inexperience as a dramatist at that time.
In Flood, an extended family huddles in their home as continuous rain and rising water push them ever higher. Is this the biblical flood? The father is named Noah, and the household includes two fish, two birds ( real ones, singing on cue when the rain lets up ) and two rats. Or is the deluge a stand-in for war? Doesn't matter, as long as it threatens civilization.
The home is peopled by archetypes: an artist, an intellectual, an earth mother, a soldier, a primal female all given a poetic and sometimes witty gloss by Grass ( as translated by Ralph Manheim ) . In a play of small interactions, they all turn inward and never share a collective moment as a family or as a body politic ( another of Grass's perhaps too many points ) . The observant philosophical rats comment, "It's themselves they see, and that's enough for them."
Flood certainly doesn't lack for ideas, and yet it's neither overly cerebral nor talky in director Scott Fielding's understated production. He never raises the decibel level ( there isn't much conflict, anyway ) and emphasizes stage picture, as Flood wends its somewhat elegiac 95-minute way, like a theatrical tone poem.
Grass has written no lead role, so the eight capable performers have nearly equal weight. Moments stand out for how they are staged, not how they are acted. For example, the mandolin tunes of Brian Davis as Leo, the brother-turned-soldier of the family, are an unexpected surprise. They add beautiful texture to "The Rain Song" sung by Leo's sister ( Niki Prugh ) as she discreetly couples with his soldier-of-fortune buddy ( Jason Borkowski ) . It's quite sensual.
Andei Onegin's imaginative multi-level scenic design in the small Alchymia studio is elaborate and busy but uncluttered. It's off-beat skew compliments the absurdist text. Joshua Michaels's lighting cleanly divides, and then softens, the playing areas. Jeff Semmerling's rat masks are clever and cute, as are several of the costumes by a four-person collective.
Flood is not the work that won Grass the Nobel Prize, but it introduces themes that recur in his later work. The Alchymia production demonstrates what can be achieved with intelligence and imagination rather than with dollars.