Anatol and the eternal machine

I've started going to the Aurora Theater pretty regularly, but I decided to skip Annie Baker’s Body Awareness, because I have minimal interest in “hot button” theater, and whatever interest I had in seeing the show dwindled as the talk-show issues piled up in the plot description – women’s body images! same-sex couples with children! children with Asperger’s Syndrome! (or some other trendy syndrome – I know that sounds brutal and dismissive of people struggling with real problems, but in this theatrical context it’s also accurate). I’m not usually drawn to plays by their plots, but you have to start somewhere in deciding whether to attend or not; given world enough and time I might have taken a chance, but of course none of us have world and time enough. Nothing I heard about the play made me regret not going.

I did go to Anatol, an Arthur Schnitzler play newly translated by Margret Schaefer and directed by Barbara Oliver. Many years ago in Boston I saw a production of his best-known play, La Ronde, which is a series of two-person scenes, beginning with a prostitute and a soldier, then moving on to the soldier and his married mistress, then the mistress and her husband, then the husband and whoever he's sleeping with. . . . I’m going by memory so I may not have the personnel and the order of the scenes quite right, but you see how the chain works: we ascend the social scale person by person and betrayal by betrayal, until in the final scene we plunge back into the lower depths, as we see some high-level aristocrat who is patronizing (in every sense) the prostitute from the first scene. Running through all the social divisions and sexual liaisons is the fear of spreading venereal disease – people make social distinctions, viruses do not. In the production I saw the audience moved from one partitioned scene to another, intensifying the voyeuristic quality of the experience. I think having the audience rather than the actors move is kind of a trendy thing now, but it was pretty unusual then. I recall the play being very dark, physically as well spiritually, with a sardonic tone, and sadness beneath.

I had a similar experience of Schnitzler’s work watching Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which was adapted from a short novel by him. I liked the movie very much. I realize not everyone feels that way; my theory was that your reaction to that movie came out of your feelings about sex. If your experience was sunny and positive, you wouldn’t like the movie; if it was tense and troubled, you would. All this is to give you an idea of why I wanted to see Anatol, and what I was expecting from it.

The show was entertaining enough, but much lighter than I expected. Schnitzler wrote a series of short plays about Anatol, a man about town in early twentieth-century Vienna, whose main interest in life is his series of love affairs. Each play centers on a different woman, but his worldly-wise friend Max is a constant presence, counseling and mocking his idealistic friend. We were given six of these short plays, three before and three after the short intermission. Each play is roughly twenty minutes – that is, roughly the length of a sitcom, but it wasn’t only the length that kept me thinking of sitcoms.

There’s also the light tone, with the occasional deeper touch, and the way the characters keep falling into the same patterns as we chuckle in affectionate recognition exactly because familiarity tells us in advance how they will behave. When Anatol invites his current flame to an expensive dinner so that he can break up with her, we already know (or at least, I already knew) that not only will she show up intending to break up with him, but that he will feel not relief but comical outrage. In fact I think I saw that particular story on Frasier. I kept thinking of that show during the performance, possibly because of the hovering spirit of Viennese psychoanalysis. And I was never much of a Frasier fan; episodes frequently had a creamy soft center that I disliked, and I felt that the cultural and intellectual interests of the two brothers were mostly there to be mocked and belittled, as surefire evidence of their pomposity and pretentiousness. But at least Frasier was more consistently funny than Anatol.

Max, who is, in sitcom terms, pretty much the sassy gay best friend, is supposed to be the main purveyor of cynical wisecracks. He constantly purses his lips, cocks the eyebrows just so, adopts a knowing air, contorts his face into a preparatory moue, and otherwise clanks through various mannered machinations in order to squeeze out a weak little squirt of wit. The material just isn’t there; the effect is supposed to be terribly clever and shocking and generally Oscar Wilde-ish, but  . . . well, it's not. Initially I thought Tim Kniffin as Max was giving a terrible, affected performance. Then I realized that I have met people exactly like this – people who spend their lives giving a bad performance , imitating some (usually stereotypical) role they just don’t have the personality or wit to carry off successfully. (Who knows if they ever speak or move naturally, or if they even have a natural nature?) So I then started to think that maybe Kniffin was giving a really brilliantly satirical portrayal. I’m still not entirely sure whether he was terrible or brilliant, but since the result of my mental dispute was that I often couldn’t take my eyes off him, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Delia MacDougall played all six women, nicely differentiating each of them, and if I occasionally found her effects too broad, I think the fault was Schnitzler’s. She was quite poignant as a married society woman who runs into Anatol on the street while he’s trying to buy a Christmas gift for his new, lower-class girlfriend. She has strong feelings for him herself but lacks the daring (or, perhaps, is too clear-sighted) to act on them. This episode was wisely placed right before the intermission; I know it made me decide it was worth staying to see the rest. The actors were just slipping off stage and the mood from this evocative interlude was still hanging in the air when it was promptly shattered by the shriveled bird-woman sitting to my right, who announced, “That was a good one.”

Mike Ryan played Anatol. When he first walked out, I thought, uh, I don’t think so – he was short, stocky, balding, with a pug nose; not at all what I expected from the romantic lead. But he played Anatol with such sensitive charm, such tender sincerity, such endearing idealism and naivete, that within ten minutes I was completely convinced that all those women did, in fact, find him irresistible. (I also won’t rule out the possibility that all those women are less superficial than I am.) That's theater magic!

And that was Anatol, and Anatol. I felt a bit let down by Schnitzler. But when you concentrate on a character like Anatol, a person of privilege, leisure, and cultivation; a person, most of all, of a certain class and income, both of them apparently impervious to shock or loss – when you concentrate on such a person, things are going to slide along on a fairly even keel. Schnitzler's original audience may have enjoyed these love fantasias as a refuge from the world, and it was certainly pleasant enough, but I can get pleasant at home. Is a bit of syphilis or the occasional love-suicide too much to ask for as my evening's entertainment?