Review: Play searches for the audience’s “˜Good Soul’
By Kathleen Mitchell
Jan. 14, 2004 9:00 p.m.
“The Good Soul of Szechwan”
The Electric Lodge Theatre
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote his plays with the
intention of fomenting social consciousness rather than simply
entertaining his audience. He regarded the form not as stagnant and
unilateral, but one that should incorporate the spectator as a
“creative element” and produce social change.
In their adaptation of Brecht’s “The Good Soul of
Szechwan,” the Ipanema Theatre Troupe and The Lab
Entertainment Group, under the directorship of Gulu Monteiro,
assume the playwright’s revolutionary philosophy to both
entertain and emotionally stir the audience in this beautiful and
absurd production taking place at the Electric Lodge Theatre.
“The Good Soul of Szechwan” opens with Wong the
water-seller trying to find a resting place for three gods who have
descended from heaven to find one good soul. When all the villagers
refuse to take them, the gods find their grail in Shen Te, a
prostitute who sends away a customer in order to accommodate the
divine visitors.
In return for her benevolence, the gods give Shen Te money to
start her own tobacco shop with the stipulation that she continue
her virtuous deeds. When the village drunks, homeless and thieves
come to Shen Te, she, out of the kindness of her heart, cannot
refuse them and their demands threaten to tear her apart.
The entire production smacked of Samuel Beckett’s
“Waiting for Godot” in its nonsensical elements: gods
dressed in white sheaths and red clown noses, choreographed dance
sequences and random magic tricks. For some, these ridiculous
elements may have undercut the play’s gravity; trying to find
goodness in a corrupt world, after all, is no laughing matter. The
total effect, however, brought a sense that even in a serious
world, humans can find laughter, simplicity and silliness.
Throughout the play, the gods walked through the theater’s
aisles searching for more worthy souls, pointed to potential
good-doers in the audience, made them stand and turn, and then
laughed at them. These gestures served to increase audience
participation and endowed the onlookers with more responsibility
than in other plays where the actors’ and the
audience’s worlds exist in unconnected spaces.
“The Good Soul of Szechwan” is not for the
apathetic. The audience plays an integral role in both the conflict
and the resolution. In the closing scenes, one of the village girls
urges the audience to search for goodness in the world for
“there must be a good end.”
-Kathleen Mitchell
