RCC's 'Madwoman of Chaillot' is impressive

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By Bill Varble

Mail Tribune

How's this for a premise? Greedy oil corporations that don't care what they have to destroy in their endless lust for more profits. How about an Enron-like business model so convoluted top executives don't know what the product is? Stock prices driven ever higher by phony reports?

It sounds like today's headlines, but it issued from the fevered brain of Jean Giradoux in the 1940s. "The Madwoman of Chaillot" is a prescient little morality play that's not often seen these days but does get revived from time to time. Friday night, Rogue Community College's Theatre Arts Department opened an energetic new production of the play.

"Madwoman" is the story of a corporate President (Jesse Boutin) and his henchmen conspiring with a Prospector (Arick Christopher) to get at the oil the latter has discovered beneath Paris, even if it levels the city, and of their defeat at the hands of the "Countess" Aurelia (Jennifer Phillips), aka the Madwoman of Chaillot.

This is an ambitious production, with more than two dozen roles, live music, lights and sound, and a creepy, misty, subterranean passage suggesting the hell hole of medieval mystery plays. The astounding thing is that this cast and crew, working with extremely limited resources, under the direction of RCC's John Cole and Ron Danko, pulled it off, turning a former furniture warehouse into a theater in the round buzzing with energy.

In the beginning, the corporate baddies plot their evildoing as they share wine, cigars and stock market talk (their "higher, higher" reflected by a street juggler's antics). Common people wait on them, play music, clean up, loll about. They are the last of the free people, and so intolerable.

The characters are played broadly, almost as cartoons. Boutin expresses his contempt for the common people by shouting his lines. The characters do not attempt French accents, which seems right. They are speaking their native language, why should we hear an accent?

"Madwoman" is episodic, moving from big scene to big scene. Although the oil plot sets things in motion, the villains do not for most of the play actively move the plot, melodrama-style. Rather, it is a matter of the play's rag-tag band of street characters convincing the Madwoman of the danger represented by the rapacious capitalists.

Musicians, peddlers and other riff-raff act sometimes as a sort of chorus, commenting on the action for the Madwoman and the audience. At other times they step out as individuals. Foremost among them is Ragpicker (Kelley Dixon), who has a couple of key scenes, and Pierre (Morgan Smith), whose romance with Irma (Hannah Tashjian), a plucky waitress, provides the romantic sub-plot.

Phillips is the glue that holds it together. The Madwoman is not bonkers, merely dotty. Phillips plays her as a delightfully deluded, would-be grande dame who will make you think of a faded Mary Poppins, particularly when she grabs an umbrella. Her accent, for some reason, is an indeterminate English one.

The thing with Aurelia is that she's good to the bone, so that she has a hard time grasping the truly evil nature of the President and his minions. Once she gets it there's a climactic and very funny trial scene of the heavies, in absentia, with Ragpicker and three other madwomen from other Paris neighborhoods. There's some very funny business with the invisible, imaginary dog of one madcap and the preposterous legal posturings of another.

"Madwoman" is a strange little fable about a masculine world of power, profits and pimps placed against a feminine world of caring, community and healing.

"I am the law," declares Ragpicker, standing in for the President, long before the Bush administration thought of it earlier this month.

But in this world, if the autocratic hand of Big Money turns us into gray-suited zombies oblivious to music, flowers and love, nothing is so bad it cannot be fixed by a determined woman in an afternoon.

RCC puts on one play a year. It's at the far end of the continuum from Southern Oregon University, where theater is a major field of study, and students put on six lavish plays a year on two terrific stages with help from the likes of Oregon Shakespeare Festival professionals.

At RCC the cast and crew build the stage for each rehearsal and take it down for the next class using the space. Many of the actors have jobs, kids, lives. Yet they have succeeded against the odds in mounting a highly entertaining production of a big, complex ensemble piece that has something to say. Bravo.

"The Madwoman of Chaillot" runs through May 20 at the Warehouse Theatre at Eighth and Bartlett streets. Tickets are $8/$6.

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or bvarble@mailtribune.com.

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