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Theatre Journal 57.2 (2005) 284-286



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Hell Meets Henry Halfway. Directed by Dan Rothenberg. Adapted from Witold Gombrowicz's Possessed by Adriano Shaplin and Pig Iron Theater Company, Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Plays and Players Theatre. 18 September 2004.


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Figure 1
Sarah Sanford as Maya Okholovska and Quinn Bauriedel as Marian Walchak in Hell Meets Henry Halfway.
Photo: J. J. Tiziou, courtesy of Pig Iron Theater Company.
Hell Meets Henry Halfway is a departure for Pig Iron Theater Company in a number of ways. The company has received international recognition as an exciting, physically oriented experimental theatre group that has created a number of impressive works, including Shuteye, a collaboration with the late Joseph Chaikin, and Gentlemen Volunteers, which took imaginative advantage of the company's Le Coq training. For this piece, Pig Iron collaborated with Adriano Shaplin, a young playwright and co-artistic director of the Riot Group. The production has garnered enthusiastic reviews from critics in London, Edinburgh, and most recently New York. The result is a performance driven by language and verbal gymnastics with very little of the kind [End Page 284] of choreographic expertise that has made Pig Iron one of Philadelphia's most popular ensembles.

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Figure 2
Sarah Sanford as Maya Okholovska and Dito van Reigersberg as Henry Kholawitski in Hell Meets Henry Halfway.
Photo: J. J. Tiziou, courtesy of Pig Iron Theater Company.

This piece is inspired by and freely adapted from Witold Gombrowicz's gothic novel Possessed, published in serial form in a Polish newspaper in 1939. Gombrowicz used a pseudonym and apparently wrote the piece on a dare to prove he could produce conventional and popular fiction. Production dramaturg Allen Kuharski describes Possessed as the bastard child or "the runt of the litter of Gombrowicz's work." Gombrowicz himself said of the work: "Smuggling the most up-to-the-minute contraband in antiquated charabancs—that's what I like doing." Gombrowicz packs the novel with such Gothic staples as a haunted castle, decaying aristocrats, an underground tunnel, and a mysterious locked room in which a towel trembles "as if shaken by spasms of nausea." All of these delightfully rendered details provide a lurid background for the more contemporary story of a young couple who are violently attracted and repulsed by one another.

Director Dan Rothenberg and playwright Adriano Shaplin have cut much of the melodrama and Gothic environment for their take on Gombrowicz. They concentrate instead on the love/hate relationship between a young minor aristocrat and a man who has been hired as her tennis coach. This reframing provides Shaplin opportunities for creating passionate speeches, and the beginning of the piece incorporates a number of exciting moments in which the actors take full advantage of Shaplin's considerable skill as a writer. The ensemble plays with the tennis motif in several sharp and athletic dialogues in which balls and words whiz by with speed and force. Indeed, Hell Meets Henry Halfway is much more of a "play" than anything Pig Iron has done before. It is language centered and driven by a kind of conventional dramaturgy that focuses on individual characters rather than ensemble creation. The piece does provide enough moments of celebratory theatricality to satisfy the appetite of Pig Iron's growing audience.

The production opens with the clever and imaginative use of a cabinet, which transforms into sleeping berths on a train and then into a number of other small rooms. The cabinet is a strong symbol in the novel, providing the site for the couple's first claustrophobic attraction and representing the repressed nature of their desire. One would have liked to see the entire piece staged in that restricted space. All of the scenes Pig Iron [End Page 285] placed on or in this cabinet were deftly theatrical, including one in which a squirrel is captured and then brutally killed, and an equally brutal copulation scene. When the acting moved out onto the stage area in front of the cabinet it became curiously flat and predictable. This may have been because the mundane box...

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