THEATER REVIEW : ‘Bloody Poetry’: Portrait of Genius Without Conscience

In “Amadeus,” court composer Salieri might not have understood why a crude young upstart like Mozart was blessed with a genius that a citizen as upright as himself could never aspire to, but the playwright Peter Shaffer had a few thoughts on the matter.

Mozart’s inability to fit into society was inseparable from his inability to parrot the music that preceded him. He loved his art so far above himself, it was impossible for him to compromise the visions that were in him to write.

Playwright Howard Brenton does not give that much credit to the geniuses who fascinate him in “The Genius,” a San Diego Repertory Theatre offering last year, or in “Bloody Poetry,” now playing through Nov. 9 at the Bowery Theatre.

In “The Genius,” the title character is a quintessential Ugly American cursed with the uncanny ability to devise the most destructive bomb in history.

In Brenton’s “Bloody Poetry,” poets and social revolutionaries Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord George Byron are the brilliant minds who leave chaos and pain in their wake.

Brenton charts Shelley’s and Byron’s paths as if they were the venereal diseases they pass on so casually to their companions of the moment. Their verbal honey and spice makes contact with them pleasurable while they are there; afterward comes the stream of abandonments, the suicides (Shelley’s first wife), the babies that die of neglect (one for Byron and Shelley both in the space of this play).

Ultimately, Brenton proffers no insight as to the wherefores of this odd couple’s historically acknowledged genius. He grants the final word on all their romantic idealism to Mary Shelley, the mistress turned wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

She writes the classic horror novel, “Frankenstein,” possibly, Brenton seems to suggest, as a reflection of the life Shelley and Byron’s monstrous brains had wrought.

The play’s failure to move from fact-based biography--fascinating as the facts are--to understanding of the characters keeps “Bloody Poetry” from greatness. Still, it has moments that soar, thanks to intelligent direction by Ralph Elias, who also drives the action as a Byron who commands as much by sheer charisma as he does by money, fame, infamy and title.

One of Elias’ great strengths as the poet is that his Byron is a cynic who knows himself in all his restless, romantic wanderlust. Don Loper fares less well as the humorless Shelley, who speaks in beauty and walks in ugliness.

Does Shelly know himself? Does he know what drives him from the ghostly apparition of his drowned wife to the arms of his ever-accessible mistress-in-waiting, his second wife’s half-sister, Claire Clairemont?

If Brenton has a clue--which is questionable--Loper certainly doesn’t. He careens melodramatically in this larger-than-life part as if it were three sizes too large for him. The appealing Anne Dauber seems similarly lost in finding what makes Clairemont tick. Is her promiscuity driven by sexual hunger, romantic naivete, sibling rivalry or groupie lust to connect with fame in the only way she knows how?

Erin Kelly brings backbone to Mary Shelley, one of the two characters who watches and learns and goes on to judge. The other, powerfully played by a ragged Mickey Mullany, is the ghost of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, whom he abandoned in her second pregnancy and who killed herself at 21.

The judgments of the respectable bourgeois Doctor Polidori, the official biographer of Byron, are far more questionable, thanks to a deliciously complex characterization by Christopher Redo. Whereas the women’s plaints arise from the heart, Redo’s disapproval of the poets he chronicles stems from the jealous mediocrity of a Salieri-in-training.

Traveling to 19th-Century Switzerland, England and Italy for the world of “Bloody Poetry” is a daring departure for the Bowery, a theater that has made its reputation on its production of contemporary American plays.

It is done simply, effectively and economically, with Kelly Fuller’s suggestive costumes, Erik Hanson’s painted backdrop, Sean La Motte’s soft lighting and the romantic woven texture of Lawrence Czoka’s sound design.

“Bloody Poetry” is an enterprise especially to be admired given that this is the theater’s last show for this space before its move, if money permits, to the Onyx Building, at 860 5th Ave., in early 1989. It is ground well broken, even if it does make this journey, as it is trying to make the cross-town one to come, on unsteady legs.

“BLOODY POETRY”

By Howard Brenton. Director, Ralph Elias. Sets, Erik Hanson. Lighting, Sean LaMotte. Costumes, Kelly Fuller. Sound, Lawrence Czoka. Stage manager, Elizabeth Walter. With Don Loper, Anne Dauber, Erin Kelly, Ralph Elias, Christopher Redo and Mickey Mullany. At 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, through Nov. 9 at 480 Elm St., San Diego.