Photo by Huthphoto
Ron Menzel as Galileo in Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo
Life of Galileo
★★★★
PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill
German playwright Bertolt Brecht knew what American politics in recent years have proved beyond all doubt: the unique vulnerability of those who’ve realized they weren’t standing on the threshold of a new age after all.
Exertion is followed by exhaustion, and exaggerated hope by exaggerated hopelessness, as Brecht wrote in the foreword of Life of Galileo, after observing, “Glorious is the feeling of beginning, of pioneering … Terrible is the disappointment when men discover, or think they discover, that … the old is stronger than the new… that their age—the new age—has not yet arrived.”
If there’s a taste of wormwood in Brecht’s stinging rebuke of scientific cowardice in the face of monstrous religious certainty and overweening political power, it’s partly because he retrofitted his 1938 script for the Atomic Age. In PlayMakers’ production, after Galileo (an incisive Ron Menzel) mercilessly indicts himself for recanting his heliocentric proof, the doomed astronomer confesses to his estranged protégé, Andrea (Alex Givens), “Had I stood firm, the scientists could have developed something like the doctors’ Hippocratic oath. … As things are, the best that can be hoped for is a race of clever inventors who can be hired for any purpose.”
Vividly costumed by Grier Coleman, in everything from Vatican drag (Ray Dooley’s sinister Cardinal Inquisitor) to mercenary black (guards Anna Longenecker and Ashlei Heffernan), characters from the 1600s skulk amid banks of network servers on Jim Findlay’s high-tech set. The montage of natural disasters on display panels and the quotes from climate-change deniers—including Rand Paul and Marco Rubio—on screens needlessly underline director Vivienne Benesch’s conceit: that some present-day people would be more than happy to take America back to the seventeenth century.
The proceedings are interrupted, if not derailed, by Tristan Parks leading an out-of-nowhere dance-club troupe in a hip-hop “A Foretaste of the Future,” Brecht’s bleakly satirical ballad. But its hypothetical heat never nears the blistering reproof Galileo flings at Little Monk (Rishan Dhamija) when he rises to defend the indefensible.
“Your Campagna peasants are paying for the wars which the representative of the gentle Jesus is waging in Germany and Spain,” Galileo rails. “Why does he make the earth the center of the universe? So that the throne of St. Peter can be the center of the earth!”
When the monk persists in his apologia, asking, “But don’t you think that the truth will get through without us, so long as it’s true?” Galileo roars, “The victory of reason will be the victory of people who are prepared to reason. Nothing else.” Amen to that.
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