Playwright: Bertolt Brecht. At: EP Theater, 1820 S. Halsted. Phone: 312-850-4299; $12. Runs through: Oct. 10
"You can tell it's a 20-year-old writing" someone remarked in the lobby before the start of the show. Indeed you can, and when the 20-year-old is Bertolt Brecht in 1918, writing his rebuttal to a then-popular drama extolling versifiers as heroic, virtuous ( and anti-Semitic ) paragons, what you can expect is a braggadocio celebration of the vices attributed to harum-scarum artists throughout time. His parable of two aesthetesone a poet named for a Biblical baddie, and the other a would-be music composerwho drink, brawl, screw girls ( and, it is hinted, each other ) while wallowing in brandy and existential melancholia would be insufferable to watch if EP Theater had not taken every measure to make it interesting, short of re-writing it completely.
Their first remedy is to excise at least 10 of the original text's 21 scenes, reducing the number of auxiliary characters and locale changes, so that David Beaupre's asymmetrical shadow-box setits lines echoing the EP Theater's likewise Escheresque interiorfluidly transports us through squalid attics, pastoral riverfronts and several kinds of taverns. The second is to bring in a duo calling itself The Loneliest Monk as a stageside orchestra providing near-constant musical accompaniment on cello, guitar and percussion that not only heightens the emotional underpinning of each individual milieu, but also prevents the stretches of straight-from-the-journal bardic effusion from halting the action right in its poetry-slam tracks.
Co-directors Hunter Kennedy and AJ Ware are not about to let audience members listen to the concert while ignoring its spoken-word counterpart, howevernot when angst-ridden rebellion expresses itself in precisely the kind of extravagant passion that youthful actors relish. And so, from Craig Cunningham and Shawn Pfautsch as the nihilistic butt-buddies to the quartet of actresses portraying the sniveling damsels they seduce and abandon, the ensemble embraces their play's cruel universe with a full-throttle commitment devoid of self-conscious posturing.
It's not enough to wholly redeem a genius playwright's faltering first scribblings, noteworthy only to illustrate his improvement later in his career. And vision fatigue generated by the EP space's chronically unreliable lighting-circuitry may lead spectators to lose a few moments of the first act. But you're unlikely to ever see Baal performed on a stage anywhere, and for certain, you'll never see it done with as much fury, intensity and imagination as in this South Side hobbit-hole of a playhouse.