Arts & Events

Theater Review: Central Works' 'Mesmeric Revelation' at the City Club

By Ken Bullock
Friday February 24, 2012 - 08:30:00 AM

Beneath a portrait of Marie Antoinette, patroness of the Royal French Academy of Sciences, sits an upright periwigged figure, long coat, embroidered vest, cravat ... The door of the salon opens—and another wigged figure, similarly dressed, steps in the room, as the first's head swivels to fix the second's eye with his gaze—and a tight smile blossoms on both faces ... 

This look of recognition, a perfect tableau, opens, almost summarizes Aaron Henne's 'Mesmeric Revelation,' playing at the Berkeley City Club, in the way G. E. Lessing, the first dramaturge, defined a tableau: "The pregnant moment." 

Henne, whose 'A Man's Home ... ,' a tribute to Kafka's 'The Castle,' was an unusual and welcome addition last year to Central Works' season, has written and directed another play realized onstage through Central Works' collaborative process. It's something different again: a two-hander about the meeting of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of "Animal Magnetism" (and for some, the father of hypnosis), and Antoine Lavoisier, "father of chemistry," at a meeting of the Academy, where the members—the audience, seated in three-quarters round—witness Lavoisier examining Mesmer on his theories of the universal fluid which binds animate beings together, like a forecast of Wilhelm Reich's "Orgones." 

Maybe a two-hander, but the actors playing Mesmer (Joe Jordan) and Lavoisier (Theo Black)—both excellent in 'A Man's Home ...' last year— become a veritable ensemble, once Mesmer—intellectually spurned by Lavoisier—asks to demonstrate his medicine ... with Lavoisier as patient. 

Once the demonstration begins, Mesmer brings out Lavoisier's internal world, showing his foibles, his prejudices—and a kind of inner infinity carried out like scenes in a play—or play-within-a-play. 

The dialogic form of 'mesmeric Revelation,' while witty and erudite, touching on Kant, perhaps Leibniz, condensing much of Mesmer's natural philosophy—and that of his sometimes fractious followers—and Lavoisier's rationalism into a continuous single act play, nonetheless presents a stacked deck in favor of the Austrian Animal Magetism magnate. This sometimes renders what's said arch, even cloying, as a kind of reduction of the very rich intellectual and ideological situations of the time for contemporary consumption, coming close some moments to reducing Lavoisier to merely a cold rationalist and elitist, Mesmer to a populist forerunner of psychology and ecology. 

I'm reminded of another couple of dialogues, arguments of 18th century thinking, one from the times, the other a half century old: 

Diderot's 'D'Alembert's Dream' (1769), in which Diderot—along with Lessing, arguably the forerunner of modern theater—discusses consciousness and materialism with his co-editor of the Encyclopedia, the scientist D'Alembert ... who in the next scene is raving on these topics in his sleep, while his mistress and a doctor at his bedside discuss what he's talking about. Later, he and Diderot resume their discussion. Written after Diderot and D'Alembert fell out—and D'Alembert was furious with his depiction in the dialogue—it was Diderot's favorite of his own pieces, not quite a play, but somehow more than a Socratic dialogue. 

And in 'Marat/Sade' (1963), Peter Weiss' play, made famous here by Peter Brook's film of his stage version, the Marquis De Sade deliberately stacks the deck of the political-philosophic argument he has with the late revolutionary—and ex-doctor and scientist—Jean-Paul Marat, played by a paranoiac patient in the Charenton asylum ... In "Marat's Dream," a crucial scene missing from Brook's film, Marat hallucinates being berated intellectually by Voltaire and Lavoisier (who, like Lavoisier and Mesmer, clashed over ideas), as well as his own parents, finally pushing hallucination aside and returning to his revolutionary writings. Weiss himself said that, though Sade was deliberately given more of the cards in his hand to win the argument, the longer he, the author, lived with the play, the more Marat came out on top. 

(The title of the play's taken from a Poe story, mostly dialogue, in which a mesmerized patient discusses metaphysics with the narrator, something akin to his "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and to themes in Poe's "prose poem" of cosmic science and consciousness, 'Eureka.' Raul Ruiz, the late filmmaker the Pacific Film Archive will memorialize with a retrospective starting next month, once told me he had thought of making a new translation of Poe in French, in the style of Diderot.) 

Though I can't entirely buy the argument—or at least the form it's presented in—of 'Mesmeric Revelation,' the play presents an unusual and engaging evening of theater—of chamber theater, which takes the audience beyond the bounds of the room, just as Mesmer transports Lavoisier by trance—and applaud Aaron Henne, his fine cast, and Central Works for producing his work. (Gary Graves designed the lights, Gregory Scharpen the sound, Tammy Berlin the costumes; Jan Zvaifler produced the show—all of Central Works.) I hope we see more, soon.