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Brand at Red Tape Theatre | Theater review
Director Max Truax brings his uniquely fractured visual sense to Ibsen’s rarely seen tragedy.
Amanda Reader and Cody Proctor in Brand at Red Tape Theatre
Ibsen’s rarely produced 1866 tragedy follows the pilgrim’s progress of its title character, an exacting, idealistic churchman who brooks no moral compromise. The work itself is equally demanding in its original form, running up to six and a half hours. Max Truax’s bracing distillation pares it to two and a half, but his production is no less exigent.
In his all-or-nothing quest for God’s truth, Brand (a flinty Cody Proctor) gains and loses a wife (Amanda Reader), a son and a congregation; he also rejects his dying mother (Lona Livingston) and, it would seem in the end, loses his mind and his life in his pursuit of a strict morality. Brand refuses to perform last rites for his mother unless she gives away her every last penny. When a preening politician (John Arthur Lewis) challenges his commitment to God, Brand sacrifices his son’s life rather than have his own integrity questioned.
Such ethical leaps are tough enough to track; Truax’s shuddery, nightmare-scape production offers no easy ins. Working with scenic designer Michael Mroch to turn Red Tape’s gymnasium space into an artfully apocalyptic bombed-out church, strewn with debris and translucent plastic sheeting, Truax employs many of his favored quasicinematic techniques, flooding the space with fog and playing with perspective and depth of field. But the size of the venue works against him. Where his toying with planes was so jarringly breathtaking earlier this year in Hamletmachine and Woyzeck at the shoebox-size Trap Door and Oracle, respectively, here the audience is spread too widely. Truax’s visuals become as confused as Brand’s morals.
