"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it" – Bertolt Brecht
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It’s seldom that I run across something as difficult to describe as Journeys Among the Dead, Eugene Ionesco’s autobiographical last play. The City Garage’s production, directed by Frederique Michel, is compelling, beautifully paced, nicely performed for the most part, and yet… How do you wrap words around what is essentially an old man’s dream journey to find his mother and confront the guilt and anger that has plagued him since childhood? Simple enough to say, but it doesn’t quite convey what seeing this play is like.
French Novelist Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, a.k.a. George Sand, was at the center of the 1848 European revolutionary movement that gave rise to communism; she was a femme fatale “who changed lovers more often than her shoes” and whose beaux included Karl Marx, Chopin, Schubert, Balzac and Flaubert; she dabbled in lesbianism, left her marriage to a country baron and supported herself through her writings, employing a male pseudonym.
90-odd minutes of watching petty, nasty people with too much money on their hands (and snorting the coke to prove it) getting progressively more drunk and more spiteful. Not exactly my cup of tea, and yet, under Frederique Michel’s beautifully paced direction, it works, and it works well.