Pary Production Company the young,
enterprising group that has specialized in mounting local premieres
of avant-garde drama with a strong poetic and literary bent,
on Wednesday night offered its most elaborate presentation to
date, the Chicago debut of Gunter Grass' "The Wicked Cooks.
The staging, which all but overloads
the cramped upstairs auditorium of the Body Politic at 2259 N.
Lincoln, makes use of complex lighting, puppets, filmed sequences,
witty costumes, specially taped sound effects and some ingenious
soft sculpture scenic elements (by Paul K. Basten).
FIRST PRODUCED in Berlin in 1962
(and performed here in an English translation from the German
by James L. Rosenberg), "The Wicked Cooks" is a play
to tax and audience's imagination and a theater's resources.
The first scene, for example, requires
cooks to pop out of an egg, a pile of salt and a snowstorm after
their leader has summoned them with a giant bugle.
To its great credit, the Pary show
brings all this off with zest and imagination, rocketing Grass'
allegory along with the dash of a cartoon epic.
THE PLAY'S philosophical and political
references are many, but its basic action is straightforward
and simple.
A band of cooks, "little men
who want to be big," are in desperate search of a recipe
for a soup they don't know how to make"
The possessor of this secret, they
believe, is The Count, an aristocratic and civilized man who,
though only an amateur chef, easily whips up the soup that is
in such great demand by all who have tasted it.
The Count, finally hounded to death
by the cooks, knows that the recipe cannot be written down in
a formula for the cooks to absorb. It is "an experience,
a way of life" that is beyond them.
BUT THE COOKS, slamming about in
their white uniforms like a gang of Keystone Cops, do not realize
this. Jockeying for power within their own ranks and battling
against competing battalions of cooks, elusive secret.
One small, nervous member of the
group, Vasco (the explorer) has some family and religious ties
in his background. An uneasy recruit to their organization, he
had yearnings for romantic love and marital bliss.
It is Vasco who may be the inheritor
of the secret recipe and it is he the rest of the cooks are pursuing
ass the play ends.
A POLITICAL activist, as well as
artist and poet, Grass filled his play with references to the
history of Germany in the 20th Century. Many of the less obvious
points are going to be lost here, but the essential image --
that of a gang of barbarians trying to acquire the secret of
a good life -- comes through clearly.
This is an extremely demanding show,
and, working with a small budget, director Larry Hart and his
players have managed amazingly well in bringing out both the
horror and the hilarity of the story.
The cooks themselves, perfectly costumed
(by Pat Hart) and made up, are played with expert looniness by
Ray Nelson, Adrian White, Ed Douglas, Gary Houston and Robert
Strom.
Houston, looking like an adult version
of one of the Campbell soup kids, and Strom, as the unhappy Vasco,
are especially impressive.
Allowing for the theater's physical
limitations -- and the discomfort of its hard, squeezed-together
folding chairs -- venturesome audiences will want to try this
bizarre and off-beat brew.
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