Playwright: adapted by Martin Sherman from the novel by E.M. Forster. At: Vitalist Theatre, in association with Premiere Theatre & Performance, at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-327-5252; $25. Runs through: May 18
If Martin Sherman had not seen in E.M. Forster's East-Meets-West novel an opportunity to offer us everything we have come to expect of such a premise, why even bother to adapt it? All we have to hear is that the setting is India in 1924, and we know that we will encounter stuffy ground-gripping British colonialists and deceptively subservient ( but secretly resentful ) Hindu subjects, among whom will be a virginal Anglo-Saxon girl and a naive Oriental boy whose relationship will affirm the conventional wisdom regarding the attraction of the 'darker races' for the fair tribes.
To be sure, Forster turned this sentiment on its ear: the hapless young man, in this case, is a once-widowed doctor with three children. His cross-cultural friendship is with an elderly English lady of mystical persuasion, and sheer coincidence places him in jeopardy when the latter's bluestocking companion falls prey to a fit of the vapors during a tour of the Marabar caves. Both his own countrymen and those of his alleged victim are reluctant to compromise their convictions, even after the truth is revealed—a response often found in societies chafing under imperialist rule and revolutionary unrest. But where Forster, speaking through the voice of the scholarly Cyril Fielding, takes a detached view of the mutually hostile prejudices at work, Sherman ( best-known for his holocaust romance, Bent ) revels in confrontations reflecting bigotry and injustice, reducing potentially complex characters to superficial spokespersons for 'issues'.
Or so he would have, if Vitalist Theatre director Elizabeth Carlin-Metz had not tempered Sherman's Anglophobic axe-grinding with plenty of the vivid spectacle that has become this company's stock-in-trade: traditional native dance, of course, replete with diaphanous gowns and finger bells. Recitations of poetry rendered all the more mellifluous for being in a foreign language. Craig Choma's scenic design, anchored by a central chest-of-drawers that cleverly unfolds into parlors, mosques, a howdah-equipped elephant and a labyrinth of haunted caves.
Nor are the actors uniformly content to coast on stereotype, Jeremy Clark and Madrid St. Angelo—playing, respectively, professors Fielding and Godbole—setting the scale for a sweeping epic that, though in need of trimming in its final moments, never demands that we squirm in guilty paroxysms of remorse over ancient wrongs, but instead invites us to contemplate the vagaries of human personalities and their power to transcend parochial mindsets.