Mandragola. Photo courtesy of Apex Theatre______
Playwright: Machaivelli
Where: Apex Theatre at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont
Phone: 773-327-5252
Runs through: July 22
Philosophical conundrums surrounding the concept of fraud lie at the heart of Machiavelli's comedy Mandragola. Lying in order to get what one wants is a bad thing, no? Maybe not. There's nothing wrong with using nefarious means in the service of obtaining beneficial ends, or so Mandragola seems to conclude.
The problem with Apex Theatre's production of the 16th-century comedy is that the audience is never given a reason to care about the ends, or to engage in the machinations of the means. Potentially fascinating questions of morality are lost in shrill, broad acting and forced cheeriness. The young cast works hard to sell the notion that Mandragola is easy breezy fun. But the slapstick, the goofy costumes and the crude humor all seem forced, tools used heavy-handedly in a losing effort to prove that Mandragola is as much about having a summertime good time as it is about intellectual and moral dilemmas.
The plot is simple: Callimaco, a handsome young man, lusts after Lucretia, the pious and beautiful wife of Nicia, an elderly buffoon. With the help of a corrupt priest, a professional mooch and a perky valet-like character, Callimaco drums up a plot to get Lucretia to sleep with him. Amid puerile bits involving urine samples, the odor of false noses that have been used as dildos and other sophomoric attempts at comedy, one character exclaims, 'I'd have to be drunk to go along with this shit,' thereby creating a moment of veracity that surely director Josh Penzell didn't intend.
Then there's the musical element of the piece. The players start off tunefully, providing a prelude of sorts that is both moderately on key and somewhat clever in its rhyming. Alas, shortly after Nicia whips out a pitch pipe and sounds the opening note of an a cappella piece, the singers seem to develop complete tone-deafness. Note to the chorale: Volume is no substitute for being on key.
Also contributing to what amounts to 80 minutes of noisy tedium: A translation that successfully squashes the poetry right out of the text and that mistakes tacky crudeness for clever bawdiness.
One could argue that director Penzell meant for the cartoonish translation and Three Stooges style of acting to be taken ironically. And perhaps, by making his characters as ridiculous as possible, he meant to make a statement about the supreme foolishness of mere mortals. But in the end, you don't care what happens to these one-note characters and you wind up wishing they'd just stop blathering on about their various schemes and just finish them up already.