STAGE REVIEW : STUMBLING VERSION OF EARLY BRECHT

Brecht is too seldom done in our part of the world, and early Brecht is as rare as a condor.

“Early,” as in pre-Berlin, pre-Marxist Brecht--the Brecht who wrote “In the Jungle of Cities,” about Chicago in 1912, from the vantage of Munich in 1922.

These are important dates, since history, time and place were important to Brecht. For this new production at the Boyd Street Theatre, director Mark Bringelson has kept “Jungle” in Chicago, but updated the action to 1958.

The question is: Why?

So today’s audience can relate better to this absurdist drama depicting a primal struggle between Shlink, a Captain of Industry (Nelson Mashita), and George Garga, a lowly bookseller (Kyle Secor)? So the costume budget can be kept down? So post-bop jazz, like Thelonius Monk’s version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” can be used for musical support?

Unlike Shakespeare, Brecht virtually defies updating: The social and political relations contemporary to whatever setting he chose were crucial to his overall design.

Brecht’s 1912 Chicago never existed, just as German novelist Karl May’s Wild West never existed. Both were hyperkinetic, hyper-extended fantasies about a cruel, savage New World envisioned from a distant Bavaria. Yet the corruption of the Garga family, fresh from the prairie, now lost in the jungle called Chicago, is an archetypal American horror story. And when George Garga takes on Shlink, it’s a comic overturning of the self-made-man myth.

So as Brecht got us wrong--as only a literary German who had not set foot in America could--he also got us right. The drama may be ridiculous (this is early Brecht, remember), but the players are mainstream U.S.A.

This is a U.S.A., though, before the world wars, before it lost its innocence. Civilization, in the form of child labor laws and women’s suffrage (Shlink surely hated them both), was just starting to be felt. What any of this has to do with 1958 is anyone’s guess. This is an unwieldy piece of early writing at any stretch. To put further strain on it is to break it.

It is difficult to say what is the greater strain here: the cavalier updating, or the young, inept cast. In a play that tells us from the outset not to worry about motives, we must have actors who suggest motives all the same. What’s in it for George when he challenges Shlink to trade social positions, so that the youngster now runs Shlink’s lumber mill, and Shlink works to help the Gargas?

Secor’s George, at first, suggests a young Jimmy Stewart, all righteous but sympathetic indignation. Shlink may be a threat to his pride.

But as George sees more of the dog-eat-dog world and what makes industry go (mostly fraud and lies), Secor doesn’t show the inner change, the building of callousness. He relies on hollow, doelike eyes, staring off, and lets the rest of the performance go. Secor, recently of “Santa Barbara,” is still acting as if he’s on TV.

But even this is downright gripping compared to Mashita, whose performance is truly vacant. Pay attention to the stakes, Brecht requests, but Mashita makes Shlink’s stakes seem thin and inconsequential: There is no aroma of power in his presence. Director Bringelson is culpable in this, since power is the fulcrum on which “Jungle’s” drama rests. Only Michael Covert as a sardonic Baboon, the pimp, conveys the stakes.

Bringelson hasn’t corralled the overacting (particularly Laura Skill and Betty Ramey as George’s sister and mother, respectively) or poor readings of the text, indicative of a company out of its depth.

We’re reminded of early Actors Gang shows--ambitious and collegiate. Even early Actors Gang ventures, though, showed inventive scene design. The bare Boyd Street stage and a few chairs appear to be an afterthought rather than thought out--and Richard Hoyes’ expressionist lights only call attention to themselves.

Still, the Actors Gang has gone on to make some real, impassioned theater. Before you walk, you stumble. For Bringelson and company, this may be the first step.

Performances at 301 Boyd St., downtown, are Saturdays and Sundays, 8 p.m., until March 15; (213) 629-2205.