“I don’t read Arabic,” he explains with a tug at his ample moustache when asked if he’s seen the original text of the abstruse volume. “I want to some day.”
The current version of the play, meanwhile, is itself a kind of translation: Magid says “Life” was first written in the tongue of Michelangelo and the Medicis.
Today, though, it’s pure American comic existentialism, stealing a glance away from its navel to plunder decades of pop culture. References to weapons of mass destruction, The Matrix and Popeye abound among more serious moments of reflection.
“I’ve reached a certain age,” Magid says as he pulls at his lustrous handlebar, stretching the last two words with a voluptuously Gallic inflection.
Thus the play casts a cocked eye—and the occasional errant juggling ball—at the many stages of life that follow the epididymis men’s procreative dance. In one particularly revealing number, As You Like It’s “seven ages of man” speech is set to Queenly guitars as the four men take places behind rock instruments.
Though their detailed choreography seems largely second-nature, even the masterful Karamazovs drop the ball from time to time. For those in the audience, this can prove disconcerting.
“I felt stressed out,” says show-goer Chris Denune after Saturday’s performance.
Denune explains that he watched the most complex juggling sequences with a mixture of rapt attention and fear that at any moment, a ball could fall from orbit.
“It’s that age-old thing about juggling,” Denune says.
Still, anyone can see that it takes profound discipline to make as few mistakes as the Brothers do in presenting such an elaborate spectacle.
“I would like to know more about them and their whole philosophies,” says audience member Joan Mullen as she reenters the theater lobby.
But where some wonder, The Crimson found out.
“We feel that juggling is dropping,” Magid says, looking very much like a Zen monk as he smooths his whiskers. “It’s the failure that is important.”
“The thing about juggling is that if you blow it everybody sees it,” he explains further. “It’s a very honest art that way.”
Magid also makes time for an art that’s considerably less honest, though just as much in the public eye—politics. Jokes about stolen elections and trumped-up wars make it easy to discern which way the Brothers will be voting come November. These balls are firmly in left field. But just to make sure, The Crimson inquired as to that most critical qualification for holding high office: Which presidential candidate does Magid think would juggle best?
“I think John Kerry would be better,” he replies with little hesitation and a quick twirl of the ’stache. “George Bush would be too arrogant...[he] wouldn’t have the patience with how much failure it takes to juggle.”
—Staff writer Amelia E. Lester can be reached at lester@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.