‘Rameau’s Nephew’ Shows That Some Things in Society Never Change--Even Over 200 Years

“If I have to go hungry and homeless, I want no part of your natural order of things!” thunders the street punk in “Rameau’s Nephew,” which opened last weekend at the Odyssey Theatre. “It’s this goddamn economy!”

His 18th-Century clothes are rumpled and torn, his long hair matted and uncombed as he peers through his Melrose Avenue shades. “Everyone keeps telling me how great things are,” he says. “Yes, some people have it all, while others fight over the garbage.”

Hold on. Melrose Avenue shades? They seem out of place, too up-to-date--but so do the words. They come from the pen of 18th-Century French philosopher and encyclopedist Denis Diderot, translated and adapted for the production--with a keen ear for the pertinence of their ideas--by director Andrei Belgrader and Shelley Berc. The shades aren’t the only hint, in this philosophical chess game, that time has brought about few changes in society.

When New York’s Classical Stage Company asked Belgrader to mount a classical play with two or three characters, he was stumped until he remembered that, as a boy in his native Romania, he’d seen a production of “Rameau’s Nephew.”

“Well, that’s it,” he said to himself. “It was one of the best things I’d ever seen in my life.”

Then he realized what an immense work the original was, “a book of huge proportions--I defy anyone to read it--and it really wouldn’t play. Except it’s a wonderful piece. So we had to adapt it in such a way to be interesting for today.”

Diderot “was attacking everyone in sight. The themes are very hot and very now. It says something about the ‘me’ generation more than anything else.” Diderot’s 20-volume “Encyclopedie” itself was banned as a massive propaganda weapon against the morals of the establishment and society of his time--but his ammunition is timeless.

At the Classical Stage Company, the two actors who created the roles, the punk nephew of a famous composer (Jean Philippe Rameau) and his conservative adversary, repeat their stylish and often outlandish performances at the Odyssey. Nicholas Kepros, who also created the role of Emperor Joseph III in “Amadeus” on Broadway (and later played Salieri), plays the wise but hapless victim who continually falls in the younger Rameau’s philosophical traps. Rameau “doesn’t go out of his way to dupe the other guy,” Kepros says with a chuckle. “It’s just that his beliefs are so outrageous, and sometimes contradictory, that it throws the strait-laced character for a loop.”

“He sucks the other guy in a lot ,” actor Tony Shalhoub says with a grin as he scrunches down in his chair. The game between the two continues offstage. Shalhoub’s role, a latter-day intellectual Scapino, is a virtuoso physical and aural explosion, vastly different from the actor’s stint last season as Scoop in the Broadway production of “The Heidi Chronicles.”

“It’s a very risky piece,” Shalhoub says. “I often feel that I’m walking on very thin ice. It’s uncomfortable out there sometimes.”

Both actors entered Diderot’s world gingerly. It isn’t easy closing a 200-year gap. “I resisted it,” Shalhoub says. “Let’s face it, Diderot is not on everybody’s bookshelf. But once we got into it, I started to see the possibilities. Rameau turns logic on its head, and then you see a new logic.

“Even then, we didn’t know what we had until we had people to play to, and all of a sudden an electrical charge happened, and we began to get fed by the audience. We started to work as a trio, Nick and me and the audience.”

The humor helped Kepros. “Andrei’s directorial choices were very astute in adding a Groucho Marxian slant to it. It helped us see the satire. Diderot satirizes greed, corruption, ostentation, public and private morality, I mean things that happen to be in the newspaper every day. The themes he’s dealing with are very topical. Especially as we’ve just come through the Reagan years with the ‘Screw you, I’m all right, Jack’ attitude.”

Both actors helped with the adaptation during rehearsals, and Belgrader quickly gives them full credit. “It’s really an actor’s piece, it really is,” he says.

“Rameau’s Nephew” also gives a bow to Uncle Rameau’s craft. It’s very much like a piece of music, with melodies and themes weaving in and out, allowing the actors to perform what amount to verbal jazz riffs. “It’s so rich with ideas, you can’t get it all the first time,” Kepros says. “It’s like a piece of good music--you get more out of it the more times you hear it.”

Shalhoub says: “The music is in Andrei’s head; he helped us into the orchestration of it. Within that framework, it is like jazz.”

With his ubiquitous cigarette poised like a weapon in its holder, Belgrader smiles shyly at the comparison to a piece of music. “Music is more interesting than theater, most of the time,” he says.

Belgrader came to the United States in 1978 “in search of American cigarettes and great theater.” Did he find it? “There was a time lapse because of lack of information” in Eastern Europe. “I came looking for the ‘60s, but it was the late ‘70s. It was a very strange shock. I went to theaters hoping to see things that happened 10, 15 years before.

“I love theater, but I just think it’s really in bad shape, about 90% of it. A lot of it is very boring. There were more interesting times, like the ‘60s.”

He was looking for a freedom of expression that he hadn’t known in Romania. “There was no political theater in Romania. You’d be in prison the next day. I had three shows banned. It had become impossible. But there was a lot of strong theater in Romania. That’s where people went to get their food for thought, and entertainment, and everything. And I think that gave it strength.”

He doesn’t think that current events always make good plays. “I don’t think it’s helpful. I prefer to hear that on the news. Original thinking is what’s interesting to watch in theater. There are a lot of ‘isms’ in theater that are stilted and didactic, and that exercise quite a bit of censorship. I find that very annoying. Trying to be correct politically is one of the most boring things I can think of. Why would you go to the theater to be preached at?”

Belgrader believes that people can be brought back into the theater, saying: “You’ve got great ideas, but it’s a bore. Then you get flimsy nothing that’s entertaining. I don’t believe those two things have to be divorced. In the good times of theater, those two things run together. When something is interesting and appeals to deep things, people are very responsive.”

He seems to have hit the right balance in “Rameau’s Nephew.” Even with the play’s philosophical flights, during the New York run, “we had a lot of repeat spectators,” he says. “It was sort of like ‘Rocky Horror Show’; people knew a lot of the lines and that sort of thing.”

Coming up for Belgrader in the near future is a production of “Scapino” to be produced at Yale Rep, and he has a keen eye on a new Arthur Kopit play called “The Road to Nirvana.”

Is he concerned with local reviews? He “became very worried when ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ got such good reviews” in New York, he says. “I thought I must be doing something wrong. Then I saw this little notice, not a review, that said, ‘It’s incredibly vulgar and really outrageous, and don’t go see it!’ I thought, “Yes!’ ”

“Rameau’s Nephew” is at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., through Dec. 22. Wednesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 7 p.m., matinees today and Dec. 16 at 3 p.m. Tickets $17.50 and $21.50. Tickets and information, (213) 477-2055.