STAGE REVIEW : ‘Nephew’ a Triumphant Duel-Logue

Everyone loves an eccentric. Especially a wily one. Eccentrics say and do the things others don’t dare. So they’re natural mouthpieces with something controversial to say--a point that did not escape the 18th-Century French writer-encyclopedist-philosopher Denis Diderot.

Diderot used this foil brilliantly in his philosophical novels, “Jacques le Fataliste” (which Milan Kundera adapted for the stage and Simon Callow directed in his own English version at the Los Angeles Theatre Center a few seasons ago) and “Le Neveu de Rameau,” a spirited, satirical discourse on ethics that just opened in a contemporized verbal Ping-Pong match as “Rameau’s Nephew” at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble.

As with “Jacques,” the argument is all. This translation by playwright Shelley Berc and director Andrei Belgrader keeps the setting--a bare stage--in the 18th Century, but addresses itself to the end of the 20th. The characters of what Berc and Belgrader aptly call a “duel-logue” are known generically as Me and Him (Moi and Lui ).

Me (Nicholas Kepros), being the Diderot alter ego, is portrayed tongue-in-cheek as an affluent aristocrat with a cogitating mind who takes a casual interest in the eccentric Him (Tony Shalhoub). Him is a shabby nephew of the staid composer and musical theoretician Jean-Baptiste Rameau. He is a failed-musician-turned-reprobate with great reasoning powers and a uniquely radical logic that fascinates the older, more conventional Me.

They thrust and parry with a certain 18th-Century verve and grace, but also, on Him’s part, plenty of what amounts to any-old-century street smarts. The intent is intellectual discourse, but the tone knows how to get down and dirty. The contrast between the men, Kepros’ gentlemanly reserve and Shalhoub’s unbridled “mix of good sense and lunacy,” lift an ironic mirror up to Diderot’s cynical yet passionate imagination.

The result is a performance of understated style and intellectual nourishment in which Kepros / Me, with his serious eyes, slow takes and droopy mouth, set in a permanent state of dismay and disengagement, plays straight man to Shalhoub’s rabble-rousing Him. The two are ideally pitted, but it is Shalhoub’s uninhibited antics, those of a stand-up comic, that really carry the play.

If one can call it a play. What goes on in “Rameau’s Nephew” is talk, talk, talk, interrupted by a hilarious coughing sequence, one demented refrain on the theme of “I am waiting / No one’s coming” and a spectacular vaudeville turn with the downing of some suspicious thirst-quenchers.

Virtually none of that is attributable to Diderot, and nearly all of it to Shalhoub, with some credit to his director for being smart enough to let him get away with it. None of this comic by-play bears describing, including some nifty touches that may be strictly Belgrader’s (notably the audible use of a tiny bust of Rameau the uncle as a target for Rameau the nephew). But all of the talk in and around the action bears relishing and repeating because the wit and the repartee--definitely Diderot’s with a little edge from his friends--bounce off the stage with a wallop aimed squarely at the 1990s.

Item: What am I, a jerk? Don’t I know how to lie, cheat, swear, manipulate, make promises and break them? . . . What, have a gift like that and go hungry?

Item: In nature all species prey on each other. In society we do the same. It’s called a Service Economy.

Item: I use freedom of speech for all it’s worth; I lie whenever I can.

This is a show you must hear to enjoy--and see to believe.