Audio By Carbonatix
The dynamic that develops between student and teacher can either strengthen the intellect or destroy it, depending on either party’s ability to distinguish pedagogy from thought control.
Sound confusing? Wait until you enter the landscape of the mind peopled by three “educators” in Fakulty Frolix. The loosely related trio of one-acts, which is being presented by Germinal Stage Denver, explores knowledge’s capacity to empower or paralyze, enlighten or befuddle, clarify or bewilder. Propelled by Ed Baierlein’s tour-de-force performance, the one-and-three-quarter-hour evening is by turns hilarious, intriguing and frightening — especially when Baierlein, who also directs and designs the production, turns the tables during a surprisingly cruel ending that’s laden with sexual and political overtones.
The show’s provocative if heavy-handed finale is made all the more chilling by the benign musings that permeate the first piece, Anton Chekhov’s On the Harmfulness of Tobacco. As the lights rise on the spare office/classroom area that serves as an effective setting for all three plays, the bespectacled Baierlein, clad in an ill-fitting cutaway coat, shuffles on stage and prepares to address the assembled throngs. Try as he might, though, the character of John J. Kreuger can’t seem to focus on the topic suggested by the play’s title, preferring instead to confess his manifold failures. The meek academic tells us that he spends more time cooking meals, killing bugs and catching mice at his family-run boarding school than he does lecturing about lofty principles. Plus, his self-published manifestos (which he feebly tries to peddle to the audience) haven’t exactly been bestsellers. As a result, the beaten-down Kreuger has become more of a mincing intellectual than a great thinker, a self-straitjacketing that Baierlein conveys by blinking his eyes nonstop, twitching his fingers and clutching his jacket’s chalk-stained lapel. Most telling of all, he also exudes a mousy hucksterism that speaks volumes about provincial prigs.
A few moments later, another character enters and informs the teacher that his class is ready. Facing upstage, Baierlein switches jackets (and eyeglasses) and, in the process, transforms himself into the manically precise lecturer of Maria Irene Fornes’s Dr. Kheal. Using his bare hands to wipe away each chalk-scrawled title of a string of philosophical essays — such as “On Poetry,” “On Ambition” and “On Cooking” — Baierlein is at his quirky best. Sneering through a visage that’s haughtier than a gargoyle’s, he punctuates Kheal’s lecture with vulgar tongue movements, pausing now and then to rise on tiptoe, talk about himself in the third person or arch his eyebrows for added emphasis. Although the monologue, which was first presented off-Broadway in 1968, seems like a deconstructionist take on the meaninglessness of words, Baierlein’s superb interpretation raises linguistic issues one moment while lampooning pedantry the next. Or, as an academic might put it, the mystery of creation (“Can you make a clam?”) is juxtaposed with a fifteen-second rhapsody about the essence of Brussels sprouts. It’s a wickedly funny harangue that, as rendered by Baierlein, provides abundant food for thought.
Following a somewhat digestive intermission, Baierlein takes on yet another persona (and jacket). In Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson, he plays The Professor, a middle-aged cad who launches into a torturous exchange of non sequiturs with a perplexed student known as The Pupil (Petra Ulrych). Although a nosy maid, Marie (Carol Elliott), repeatedly warns her boss that the game he’s playing has in the past proved deadly, the professor continues to pepper his comely student with convoluted explanations about knowledge that the college-age woman should have acquired before the age of three. And even though the addled lass can’t come up with the answer to math problems involving single digits, she does solve complex equations with values running into the billions — not, of course, by using her reasoning abilities, but by having memorized all of the possible permutations. Eventually, the professor’s word games become torturous and culminate in a tense episode revolving around a knife that, according to the script, can be either imaginary or real. However, Baierlein goes Ionesco one further by substituting a prop that, were it to vibrate, would lend bawdy meaning to the term “shock value.” Although the presence of Baierlein’s slightly swaying “knife” injects the play’s last few minutes with newfound electricity, his choice to tack on a politically suggestive epilogue provides more astute commentary. Along with Ulrych’s fine portrayal and Elliott’s timely appearances, Baierlein’s brave excursions re-establish the time-honored practice of cortextual fornicating as a favored — and dangerous — intellectual exercise.
