The Bundle (review)

Since the early 1980s the Irondale Ensemble has been one of New York’s most innovative and socially engaged experimental companies, performing in homeless shelters and prisons as well as in more conventional off-off-Broadway venues, working in educational programs concerned with HIV/AIDS, urban violence, and ethnic tensions. They have also developed an Uncle Vanya Show, performed in the United States and in Russia with the St. Petersburg Salon Theatre, and otherwise offer on the average two spirited and innovative productions each season. Their early works were often freewheeling adaptations of familiar classics, reworked with song and dance, references to popular culture and to current social concerns. More recently they have offered more straightforward productions of challenging works such as Danton’s Death (1993), The Ghost Sonata (1995), and Ostrovsky’s A Family Affair (1995), but always with their distinctive approach.

Figure 1.

Steven Satta and Georgina Corbo in the Irondale Ensemble Project's production of Edward Bond's The Bundle, directed by Jim Niesen, at Theatre for the New City, New York. Photo: Gerry Goodstein.

Although Irondale has previously done three works by Brecht, The Bundle is their first Bond, and given the company’s concerns and skills, it seems a perfect choice. The Bundle is one of the most Brechtian works of this most Brechtian of British dramatists, the first of the plays in which Bond undertook to construct his own version of a “teaching play,” providing a dramatically powerful parable depicting both social injustice and (as Brecht usually did not) its reform. The initiating incident in The Bundle, when a sympathetic ferryman, although near starvation himself, succumbs to the temptation of goodness and takes home an abandoned baby, strongly recalls The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Later situations recall The Measures Taken, and Brecht is continually suggested by the simple, straightforward style, the stark but agonizing life choices, symbolically loaded situations presented to the characters, and the memorable gestic moments. These qualities of the production are particularly shown when Wang, now grown, finds a baby abandoned like himself and rather than increasing his own poverty throws it into the river, its cloth remaining in his hand, or when, in a moment recalling Mother Courage’s silent denial of her son, Wang bites his inside lip so that a drop of blood rolls down his chin as he sits silently watching oppression occurring and knowing that the revolutionary moment has not yet come.

A work of this sort can easily become stiff, didactic, and in its occasional casual brutality even repugnant, but the Irondale Ensemble negotiates a delicate blend of stylization, rough-edged reality, and nuanced detail that brings this difficult work to powerful life and results in one of the richest and most moving productions in their career. Much of the credit must go to director Jim Niesen, and to the stunning setting by Ken Rothchild, which uses Chinese elements—low platforms, tall bamboo poles, hanging flags, and screens, to evoke a whole dramatic world with minimal means. Individual sequences impressively utilized the scenic abstraction of the classic Chinese stage and the simple evocative style Brecht himself evolved from Chinese sources. In the river scenes, for example, a silken cloth spread out on the wooden matting of the stage floor represented the ferry, its movement convincingly suggested by the Ferryman’s pantomime with a long guiding bamboo pole. The rest of the company, seated about the stage and all facing the audience, suggested the river with slow rhythmic movements of long bamboo poles held across their bodies parallel to the stage floor.

Original music was created by Tyler Kent, performed almost entirely on a collection of percussion instruments in one upstage corner and on others carried by the actors. Each half of the play was introduced by a powerful dance and mime sequence performed by the entire company, much of the rhythm of which the company also provided by percussive instruments they carried—long bamboo poles and short sticks at the opening, small bells and...