The Brig
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Herbert, Greer, Nash
Photo by Enci
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By Ben Miles
Playwright Kenneth H. Brown has created a unique drama. It's an autobiographical footnote from his experience as a United States Marine. But that's not what distinguishes the play. What does make The Brig remarkable is that Brown has crafted visceral and vivid theater out of the brutal monotony of a military stockade. It's March, 1957. In Japan, at the base of Mount Fujiyama, sits a U.S. Marine Corps installation. Within the complex there is a brig. This is where errant marines are sent to pay penance for minor infractions, requiring 30 days or less of incarceration.
Here are some of the rules of the brig: No person may speak at anytime except to his guards; no person shall sit down; each time a prisoner returns from outside, he shall be searched by a guard. These few dictums (like The Commandments, there are 10 in total) don't seem especially draconian, in print. However, it doesn't take long to catch onto the unstated, unwritten rules, the subtext of subjugation underlying the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Prisoners are regularly administered punches to the gut by khaki-clad guards. If a "maggot" (the guards' preferred sobriquet for the crew-cutted inmates) should be so unlucky as to slip, trip, or get tongue-tied, the hard-nosed jarheads that are the keepers of the petty convicts find themselves quickly perturbed and mercilessly violent.
In one intense encounter, a prisoner loses grip of two small shovels he's asked to transport. The humiliation and cruelty that the jailor unleashes onto the clumsy wrongdoer appears entirely out of proportion to the mishap. But so it goes. In another instance, a guard observes that the facility is way too dirty. In a masterful directorial sweep (kudos to auteur Tom Lillard, who played Prisoner # 2 in the original 1963 New York production), we see 10 prisoners water down, and then scrub, from top to bottom, the entire penal unit. Splashing gallons of sudsy fluid from huge tin buckets onto the cold green and gray interiors of the cell block (a chillingly evocative set design by Julianne Elizabeth Eggold), the inmates, for their efforts, end up drenched and dripping, while the guards' uniforms remain spotlessly dry.
Though written over a half-century ago (1957), The Brig gives perennial insight into the peculiar mindset of militarism blended with jurisprudence. Like the old joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron, The Brig makes one wonder whether or not military justice is also a contradiction in terms.
A tight ensemble of twenty thespians (including Andrew Greer, convincing as Prisoner # 2, the author's alter-ego; Austin Herbert as the ominous and ironically named Corporal Grace; and, Jeff Nash as the double-binding guard, Tepperman) pull together like putty to put on this physically demanding performance piece. It's as if Michael Flatley's Riverdance has somehow become intertwined with Orwell's 1984. The actors, working as transposable parts in a monochromatic whole, mesmerize us with the subtle and not-so-subtle rhythm of dreary daily routines in a G.I. lockup. Synchronized stomping and mind-numbing marches, along with arbitrary and maddeningly one-sided confrontations, comprise a day in the lives of these military miscreants.
The Brig is not for the soft-of-soul, nor faint-of-heart. It's a cringe-inducing scenario. Nevertheless, Brown's conceit is legitimate and gripping theater. A theatre of cruelty is what drama theorist Antonin Artaud would have called it.
The Brig is a production of The Living Theatre of New York, and continues through March 30 at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. Show times are Wednesday - Saturday at 8 p.m. Matinees are at 2 p.m. on Sundays. The Odyssey Theatre is located at 2055 South Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles. For reservations, dial (310) 477 - 2055. For more details, visit www.odysseytheatre.com.
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