Cinders ignites dramatic response A dark comedy that burns lasting impressions on audiences

Author: Ben Salkowe

In "Cinders," Janusz Glowacki's dark comedy about Poland in 1981, characters say one thing and do another. The director tells the state he will film a reform school's production of "Cinderella" for a charming piece of socialist propaganda, but he actually intends to make a bizarre documentary of the girls' tragic lives that will win him national acclaim. The deputy head of the reform school tells the director that he wants the best for the girls, but then he manipulates and rapes them by night. The lead girl, Cinderella, tells the deputy head that she does not want to cause drama, but ends up slashing her wrists and collapsing in a pool of blood in the play's final moments. This widespread "doublespeaking" leaves audience members with the confident feeling that the playwright himself must have been "doublespeaking" when he wrote the play. If every simple act or statement is in fact a thin disguise for some cynical truth, shouldn't "Cinders" as a whole have some hidden meaning between the lines?

But "Cinders," as the theatre department presented it just before break, was not a well-crafted allegory. Rather it was a maddening patchwork of disconnected mockeries of the totalitarian Polish state. And what was most puzzling for me was whether Alex Draper '88, the director and visiting assistant professor of theatre, intended to make the production such a puzzle, or whether he just forgot to answer all these questions. The show was provocative and well done, but it left the viewer wondering if this was by accident or design.

But we should backtrack. However baffling the production may have been at times, it was also brilliant. The 19-member cast included an unusual mix of comedic, dramatic and first-time Middlebury student actors. Nearly half the company said fewer than ten words the entire evening, placing the emphasis of the performance on five leads: the school's principal (MacLeod Andrews '07.5), deputy head (Lucas Kavner '06.5), the film director (Bill Army '07) and two girls known only by their names in the school's play, Cinderella (Julia Proctor '06.5) and the Prince (Justine Katzenbach '08.5).

The play follows the directors' attempt to film the girls' production of "Cinderella," interjecting the film with interviews about the girls pasts. But when Cinderella refuses to cooperate, the director and deputy head collaborate to make things "uncomfortable" for her, by framing Cinderella as a squealer.

As the "hot" film director, Army literally "out-smoked" every other member of the cast. The veteran Middlebury actor leveraged his deft handling of the cancer sticks and a command of the stage to create a character that was at once suave, slimy and despicable. Although Army's performance was fully awkward in the beginning - in both voice and physicality he seemed out of place as the smooth westerner who makes the girls swoon - his character took off as the director turned dark with a predatory manner that sent chills through the audience.

As the school's administrators, Andrews and Kavner played the good-bad duo. Andrews was the bumbling fool of a bureaucrat who, however well-meaning and likable, failed to see the deputy head's cruel campaign against Cinderella. Kavner as the weak and detestable deputy head led an incredibly dark but funny scene that comprised the play's most powerful parody of the Polish state. Striding in to compliment the girls on a dreary song they had written about their sad prison lives, Kavner proceeded to piece-by-piece rewrite the song into a cheery salute to nonsensical happiness - all the while telling them it should be them who made the rewrites.

But the most interesting creations were the performances of the reform school girls. Raw and unpolished, they often delivered lines upstage or failed to project, but they were fascinating and they were real. Sporting a punk get-up and a hairdo that registered in at 6'4", Katzenbach literally towered over the rest of the cast as the girls' ringleader. We never quite understood why the Prince was so compliant until she finally said in one of the final scenes that she was just doing what was necessary to get out of the reform school. But Katzenbach's voice, which would turn from innocent girl to grating street-punk at a moment's notice, and her hyena-like laugh, defined her character as both cruel and engrossing.

Proctor's Cinderella was a more complicated character. Although the logical direction might have been for the girl to be the Prince's foil - a likable dissident destroyed by the totalitarian society - Cinderella was often as miserable and unlikable as the "bad" guys. Proctor's intonation struck the detached voice of a loner who had lost touch with the world, but her lines suggested a girl who was in fact more compassionate and in touch with reality than any other character. This clash was only resolved in her gruesome downfall that left many in the audience shielding their eyes as she tore her body apart.

Of the other girls, both Molley Kaiyoorawongs '09 as the Stepmother and Leah Bevis '09 as "Toe-rag" stood out - Kaiyoorawongs for her dry humor and Bevis for the sad conviction with which she polished the Prince's shoes using her hair and spit.

The costuming was, as usual, excellent, but the set felt disconnected from the play. For a play that literally reduces the central character to cinders of a human being and is set in a totalitarian state that is the cinders of a democratic society, the set and lighting only half-heartedly embraced the mood. Either they awkwardly mimicked the action - such as when the backdrop bluntly turned red at the end of the play - or they were completely detached from the production - which would be a good characterization of the IKEA-esque, clean and oddly attractive reform school set that was hardly used by the staging.

Whatever the technical flaws, "Cinders" was the department's boldest production in recent years, but this brings us back to my frustration - the number of unanswered questions the show dumped on the audience's lap. Draper's program offered no explanation for the production beyond saying that it took place in 1980's Poland, near Warsaw. Even in the program's biography of Janusz Glowacki, Draper chose not to mention that Glowacki was a political dissident who wrote the play in exile. And the production hardly gave us more answers: Why the fairy tale Cinderella? Why produce this play today? What is Glowacki trying to tell us? Either there was an intent not to give the audience the whole story, or someone was lazy.

There is an old artistic-philosophical question about a painter who paints a mediocre canvas, sends it by mail and the deliverymen accidentally damage the package so terribly that the entire work is distorted and twisted into some abstract creation that is, actually, more beautiful and meaningful than it was ever intended to be. I am not convinced that Draper and his cast intentionally chose to leave as many unanswered questions as they did, but those unanswered questions were part of what made it so engaging and provocative.