Playwright: Mickle Maher
and John Maugeri
At: Red Moon at The Viaduct
Phone: ( 312 ) 850-8440,
ext. 111; $15-$25
Runs through: May 8
A towering old, mahogany cabinet 16-feet high faces the audience, its numerous skewed drawers and windows shut. One by one they open to reveal miniature stages, little shadowboxes in which puppets and five white-faced puppeteers maneuver. An old crank Victrola plays scratchy narration, the voice of a victim telling a tale of psychological horror and murder.
The Cabinet is wonderfully faithful to its source, the 1919 German Expressionist silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which a profound somnambulist in a perpetual trance is made to commit horrible crimes by a mad doctor who is supposed to be his care-giver. Director Frank Maugeri and his astonishing design team ( Margaret Goddard, sets; Diane D. Fairchild, lighting; Janet Ecklebarger, costumes; Lisa Barcy and Scott Pondrom, puppets ) create a black, white and gray world of shadows, steep angles and distorted perspectives that perfectly translate the famous visual style of the original black-and-white film, as well as the sense of something medieval and mysterious.
Of course, the original had no spoken words or music, and this production has both. Scripter Mickle Maher limits spoken narrative to the voice ( Colm O'Reilly ) of the young somnambulist, tragically aware of Dr. Caligari's manipulations but powerless to resist him. Maher's words set the right tone and never are too much. The atmospheric music by Mark Messing often sounds as if played on toy instruments, tinny, distorted, and distant as the somnambulist might hear it. Clock-like chimes make us feel time's suspension as well as its passage.
Perhaps the most interesting achievement of The Cabinet is its replication of cinematic montage. Often, Maugeri uses several of his five little stages to show the same scene in long shot, medium shot, close-up and extreme close-up: the somnambulist moving across rooftops, a close view of his face ( in a puppet design that looks like Adrian Brody ) , an even closer view of his knife-wielding hand.
For all the dazzling craft, however, I was emotionally engaged only occasionally. One marvels at the artistry, the creation of beautiful or bizarre objets, the delightful mixture of many puppetry techniques and toy theater, the ingenuity of it all, but none of that made me feel the story over all. Perhaps it's the slow and deliberate pace that's a Red Moon hallmark ( and may be necessary to manipulate the puppets ) , but I've had a similar reaction to much of the troupe's work over many years. Yet there have been exceptions that have pulled my heart and soul into their aura, such as the moving adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea several seasons ago. The Cabinet doesn't do that; still, few troupes astonish and touch the senses as Red Moon does, and that's good enough.