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In producing (I assume) and watching a theatrical remake of a classic film, several questions arise as primary and insistent: why this movie? Why now? Why not a new play, needful as we are of them and they are of space and production? Regarding the translation of film to stage: which themes/scenes/tone/words must stay as essential components, and which can be cast away? Which of these went understated in the original and might now be amplified for new revelation and enjoyment? All these questions kicked around in my mind as the lights went down in the theater and Rebel Without a Cause began. Sadly, I felt quite alone in asking them almost as soon as the actors began to speak. Certainly these questions seemed to go ignored by co-directors Brian Stites, Joshua Coleman and their players. Lines important and trivial were handled with the same emphasis, often rushed to completion as if the moving mouths wanted to close as soon as possible. With no set to speak of, negligible lighting, and a complete absence of sound, words and acting were the only remnants of the original movie that survived this stage treatment, and they, too, came careless and automatic. For those of us who recall without delay the weirdness, the color, the twisted noise of the James Dean classic, disappointment felt leaden and unrelenting. For those unfamiliar with the film, the basic (and forever replicated) story: Jim Stark, a troubled young man with a past, moves to a new town with his family and runs afoul of the law and local thugs. He makes eyes with some success at the girl next door, and finds a friend in an even more troubled classmate. His mother dominates his father and violence calls to him in planetariums and drag races. Try as he might, Jim can't avoid the blade and the film ends with needless bloodshed. The effects of this movie on American culture (cinematic and otherwise) are too widespread for this review, but renting the DVD should settle that; seeing the play does something almost wholly opposite. When comparing a new treatment (in any medium) with its original, we see what became dated in the interval, and what holds true in the present. In the new Rebel, key lines and conflicts do not reflect the seminal quality of the movie: they become complete clichés. Instead of thinking, "Oh, that's where that comes from," be it turned up collars, sneering delinquents, or car chases; we are left with, "Wow, how tired is that?" Lines like "No, I don't even know why I do it," "You think I'm funny?" "Nobody can help me," or "You're tearing me apart!" are important in understanding American adolescence, both the physical-social transformation and the way in which America itself is perpetually adolescent -- rebellious, fickle, self-obsessed, virile, violent. Yet behind nearly every actor's approach in this Barely Balancing Artists Group staging, there seems to be an unimpressed, winking, this-is-an-olde-tyme-bit undercurrent that chuckles at the struggles of an outcast in 1950s America. It's as if we've all agreed going in that Rebel Without a Cause took itself a tad too serious, that Jim's issues are child's play, and not the fundamental problems all of us wrestle with in assimilating into the larger world. Co-director Coleman as Jim is really kinda smug, the bad kids are pathetic, the love interest is shallow, and the cops are laughable. We wouldn't want to be Jim and we wouldn't bat an eyelash if some guy threatened us in this tone. The lack of sympathy with the film and its characters is the fundamental flaw of this play. What's also a shame: we could use a revitalized Rebel. Maybe not a carbon copy, complete with '50s clothing and tunes, but an update that returned to the real questions: what is there to rebel against? If an individual refuses to join a group, what drives that choice? What do we fear in growing up? On a political level, what are the forces represented in the domineering mother and the cowardly father? How would this change in the present? How is "being-a-kid" made a cynical, sanitized idea by marketers and advertising agents who prey on young people's need for identity and "fitting-in"? What do we lose when we trivialize the outsider? As, for instance, what would a Rebel in the modern ghetto look like? 8 Mile? And who was Luke Perry? And there we return to the whole problem of updating this particular film: flimsy copies could fill a new sub-development, but none of them carry the uncanny darkness of the original. The troubling thing about this current Rebel is the lack of attention to that unique depth in Dean and the landscape he traces. I went to the theater wondering things like, how will they do the planetarium scene (my favorite)? How will they do the car chase (certainly not easy indoors)? How will the actor avoid caricaturizing his model? Unfortunately (perhaps in the rush to put on a show for the 50th anniversary of the film and garner the predictable publicity), the company seems to give little thought to these questions, in terms of dramatizing a film and understanding the symbolic importance of it. Instead, we get a hollowed-out reading of an icon who still looms large enough to survive a cartoon copy, but who surely doesn't deserve a haphazard sketch after a half-century of similar carelessness. Painfully, this current production suggests that rebels really are a thing of the past, their causes no longer important. "Rebel
Without A Cause" Copyright © 2005 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
