Stage Light : ‘Firebugs’ Has No Spark

Given a director and cast with energy to burn and the firm discipline of a team doing a high-wire act, Max Frisch’s 1956 play “The Firebugs” could retain its impact for our time.

For a German Swiss like Frisch, just a decade after World War II, this absurdist and metaphoric tale of how a tiny band of arsonists manages to terrorize and control a suburb’s complacency was a response to how the German middle class permitted Hitler to run roughshod over its lives.

Those who caught the Berliner Ensemble’s July visit to UCLA with Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” will recognize the metaphor, which was made much more explicit with the Berliners than in director Brian Pope’s production of Frisch at Eclectic Company Theatre.

The audience likely to go for midcentury European theater--a time and place of amazing, bloodcurdling work--will also connect “The Firebugs’ ” absurdisms and metaphors with the far better known “Rhinoceros” by Eugene Ionesco, an infinitely funnier and more terrifying tale of conformity in the face of evil.

Neither Michael Bullock’s problematic English translation nor the unevenly cast and conceived Eclectic staging helps us get past certain frustrations built into Frisch’s story, which requires one of theater’s stupidest and wimpiest central characters to be as passive as a limp rag.

That assignment falls here to Craig Calman, who plays the besieged bourgeois gentleman, Gottlieb Biedermann, with a lot of pent-up emotion he just can’t let out because it might blow his finely developed facade.

It’s one of those funny concepts that doesn’t play on stage this time. Resembling a young Bert Lahr, his cheeks bulging and his eyes nearly crossing as the arsonists he’s allowed into his home begin to take over, Calman’s performance points toward black comedy without really feeling all that black or all that comic. It doesn’t make up for a feeling that Frisch has conveniently stacked the deck to make Biedermann ridiculously ineffective.

A chorus of firemen right out of Brecht (Daniel Keane, Deborah Burns, John Campana and Shannon Morris) tell us in unison that they’re guardians of the city, but they can’t control fools like Biedermann from allowing mischief to happen. The arsonist Firebugs are literally inflaming the whole burg with a mindless urge to burn; they’re doing it for fun, which angers their one ally, a professor who thinks they should be doing it for ideological reasons and would find a perfect pupil in the Unabomber.

Not even Biedermann’s wife, Babette (Rebecca Gray), or his maid, Anna (Rachel Kann), seems able to repel the Firebugs once they’re inside.

In a weirdly unintended way, we kind of enjoy watching the arsonists. They’re so much more compelling and entertaining than anyone else on stage. Willi (Thomas Craig Elliott) is the ringleader, with working-class oaf Joseph (Biff Wiff) as his partner. They use jokes, grace and sly intimidation to take over.

Fans of Harold Pinter will see in Willi and Joseph the precursor of the outside intruder, which haunts many of Pinter’s plays much more effectively.

In the end, we really don’t care what happens to the Biedermann abode, and we should. Frisch wrote out of angry resignation that the enemy is us, and a powerful staging of his flawed play should burst with this feeling.

Pope and most of his cast, though, go in for a more vanilla approach and don’t sound very much at home with the awkward translation.

We’re left with Elliott and Wiff stealing the show and doing it with style. Also worthy of admiration is Jeff G. Rack’s set, which tips its cap to “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and German Expressionism, the style that predated the Hitler fire to come.

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BE THERE

“The Firebugs,” Eclectic Company Theatre, 5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd., North Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 23. $12-$15. (818) 508-3003. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.