The Cenci (review)

One challenge for any contemporary production of The Cenci is realizing Artaud’s theatre of extreme, psychospiritual shock in a modern context, now that Artaud’s theories have been circulating for more than seventy years and have inspired artists as diverse as the Living Theatre and Jan Fabre (never mind the commonplace opinion among artists and scholars, such as Peter Brook and Susan Sontag, that Artaud’s theories are all but impracticable). Another challenge is creating shock on par with the deluge of violence flowing from the seemingly endless “war on terror,” which seems to have provided the impetus for what became the most disturbing moment of Hotel Savant’s recent production of Artaud’s play: when Cenci’s daughter Beatrice undergoes torture for orchestrating the murder of her rapist father. However, if this sequence caused outrage, it was mostly because it quoted directly the by-now iconic imagery of Abu Ghraib without any new framework for critical or ethical analysis, utterly voiding the images of their ability to horrify and reducing them to a kind of visual sound bite. This was the height of directorial easiness; little surprise, then, that this moment’s execution by the young, uneven cast should feel unsure and half-hearted, and ultimately produce a confused, unconvincing effect. Given that this was as close to shocking as Hotel Savant’s production ever came, the group fell short of both these two challenges, especially the first: if shock is to be the barometer, this Artaud felt surprisingly un-”Artaudian,” especially in comparison to Romeo Castellucci’s Hey Girl! which appeared at Montclair State University that same month. I cannot imagine a more misconceived production of The Cenci, with its stylish superficiality, cool, Wagnerian remoteness, and miscasting of a key role.

This Cenci responded to Artaud’s call for a theatre opposed to art for art’s sake with a kind of dance theatre, a purely aesthetic experience: glossy, elegant, more runway show than metaphysical martyrdom. Artaud desired a theatre of the “violently real,” but there was little in this production, from the Viewpoints-like choreography to the labyrinthine scenic design, that felt anything more than superficial. Ramona Ponce’s costume design, for example—chic black urban wear—was symptomatic of director John Jahnke’s larger approach, which, apart from a few drops of stage blood, remained generally as disconnected from the horror, filth, and excrescence of Artaud’s vision of life as a Banana Republic catalog. As such, the production could never hope to transcend its own worship of trendy fashions in eveningwear and directorial conceit—in short, the realm of mere style and stylishness.

If Artaud’s theatre sought violently to collapse the distance between spectacle and spectator, Jahnke’s Cenci dilated this distance in a Wagnerian move, staying both physically and psychically remote— a faraway and unfrightening dream unfolding in occult gestures—when Artaud’s work demands to be experienced with the immediacy of an allconsuming nightmare mistaken for waking reality. (Quite frankly, more than Wagner, the production recalled and felt grossly derivative of the instantly recognizable work of Robert Wilson, who hosted the production for a workshop at the Watermill Center.) Such a misguided interpretation comes as some surprise, given that Jahnke studied at the knee of one of Artaud’s greatest inheritors, Reza Abdoh, whose explosive, AIDS-haunted theatre gave new meaning to “The Theatre and the Plague,” and for whom, as for Artaud, the stage afforded the only means of expression for a self undergoing constant apocalypse. Abdoh’s work, like Artaud’s, was always hot (in flames and signaling); Jahnke’s Cenci was by comparison chilly. Here, one gets no sense of Artaud as the embodiment of modernity’s hysterical convulsiveness; rather, this vision of Artaud was entirely plastic.

The Cenci family (left to right): Lauren Blumenfeld (Beatrice), Anna Fitzwater (Lucretia), Alexander Paul Nifong (Bernardo), and Anthony Torn (Cenci) in The Cenci. Photo: Josef Astor.

Additionally, the casting...