THEATER

Skin and Bone

adapted from The Revenger's Tragedy

directed by Orion Ross

at the Loeb Experimental Theater

through January 16

Leafing through the program for Skin and Bone before the show, I feared the worst. It promised everything I dread in a Harvard production. The play was set in "Italy or nowhere"; "William Shakespear" wrote the additional dialogue. Skin and Bone threatened 100 agonizing minutes of soul-destroying thespian pretense.

But from the moment the curtain was raised, it became clear that Skin and Bone is a production of style. The acting is terrific; the set flamboyant, and the direction, at times, visionary.

The play is an adaptation of The Revenger's Tragedy, a preposterous Elizabethan melodrama. It depicts an Italian ducal court, stuffed to the gills with lecherous courtiers. The action is chock full o' deceit and betrayal, with a healthy dose of gratuitous violence, and lashings and lashings of sexual misconduct. The original (anonymous) author was so out of control that the play ends with only three characters still standing. This production lowers the tally to zero, although the last living soul succumbs, somewhat improbably, to a chronic case of backache.

The cast and crew are entirely equal to the challenge of such an over-indulgent tale. They revel in the play. Modern productions of hardcore Elizabethan shlock tend to degenerate into a protracted joke at the expense of the crude plot. But Skin and Bone avoids this temptation. Rather than 100 minutes of dreary self-parody, the production flings itself into the play with gay abandon. Of course it still appears garish, over-the-top, even absurd; but it is not cast as simply worthless. The distinction may seem subtle, but it makes the difference between a snide exercise in self-congratulation and a vigorous rendition of a difficult, dated play.

Orion Ross directs the play with a scope and insight so engaging that they could only have arisen from his clear vision of his own adaptation. That adaptation is not ideal: it attempts to maintain the original text, but important phrases are "translated" into modern English. Since the important phrases are mainly sexual slang, this sometimes leads to clumsy contrast.

But Ross compensates for any shortcomings in the adaptation with his masterly direction. The audience senses the presence of a single influence guiding the production with confidence. The countless surreal touches, each individual in its humor, share an outrageousness which unifies otherwise disparate scenes. The Monty Pythonesque floweryrobed, curler-toting, cake-gobbling housewife is clearly related in tone to the manic judge, wig askew, smashing his vast gavel against his alpine podium. The same hand is evident in the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee act of Supervacuo and Ambitioso, the bathtub suicide of Lutecia and the conversational blowjob Vindice gives Rapacioso.

The play is full of comic character types, allowing the cast to show considerable talent and style. Jenny Davidson really rings the audience's bell, snorting her way through the production as the hobbling, grunting Luxurioso. In her monologue climbing the stairs at the end of scene 13, she transcends mere stereotype to take command of the whole theatre: the audience is rapt.

Richard Nash plays the Police Officer, Sordido, Antonio and the Duke. Somehow he manages to distinguish between all these roles with startling versatility. His officer is the best Irish copper this side of Sean Connery in The Untouchables.

Vonnie Roemer adds to the list of well-played comic types as a tantrum-prone schoolgirl and as a she-male dominatrix. David McMahon, as Gratiana, pulls off a lurid parody of the indolent housewife, and so it goes on.

The one role that differs from the rest in its scope is Vindice. Tonto Silverado faces an uphill struggle with this brooding, intense character. As the central character, Vindice is less a striking caricature than a constant factor in the drama. But even Silverado gets a chance to produce a brief fantastic comic sketch like the others when Vindice impersonates an ingratiating pimp.

A great deal of the credit must go to Ross, whose direction is evident in the characterization of all the cast. His interpretation is wonderfully imaginative and hysterically funny. But for all its surreal humor, it never loses sight of the drama. The Revenger's Tragedy is a morality play, showing a society ruin itself through its own appetite for destruction. Had he tried to portray that moral void in a straightforward manner, Ross would have failed. The bloodthirstiness of the story is too much for the modern audience. Instead, somewhere in the final scene--with the chandelier spinning, Luxurioso gorging himself on peas and dancers in surgical robes gyrating to the tune of "Supermodel"--Ross's grisly humor gels to express perfectly that spiritual vacuum.