Repertory: Fire!

This play is written in smoking lava about a world that tastes like ashes.

Fire!, which ended Brandeis University's repertory season last week, scorches the stage with grief, fury, desire and despair. Framed in a set of huge bronze cubes appear the archetypal woman as mother, wife and slut and the arche typal man as son, father, husband and lover. They are not there to be joined to gether but to be rent asunder. "We must love one another or die," wrote W. H. Auden. Fire! proclaims that love is dead, God is dead, and man is dying. The playwright is a onetime actor now living in Europe who has adopted the pseudonym John Roc; he is a demi-Beckett who does not await Godot but screams at the heavens precisely be cause they are empty. He is sometimes pretentious, often confusing, and lavish with lavender words, but his drama rips into an audience with volcanic force.

Two propositions set the play's anguished tone. One derives from Christianity, and the other from Greek mythology. Both involve modern man's reversal of his traditional beliefs and show how present desolation, ironically, was born in past faith. Expelled from the Garden of Eden, man was bereft; expelling God from the cosmos, modern man is equally bereft. The legendary Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give men life, light, art and wisdom.

But Roc's Prometheus — here called Jason — brings fire as a consuming vengeance to burn each human heart to a cinder and finally reduce the earth it self to an ember. Since Jason also doubles as a Jesus figure, there is a persistent and annoying ambiguity as to which identity is being invoked at any given moment.

For much of the evening, Jason (Pe ter MacLean) also seems to be Lucifer, ranging between brazen malice and wily seductiveness. He has summoned into session a kind of miniature parliament of seven representative humans, and he wants to wring from them a unanimous vote for fire. Sometimes he uses verbal third-degree tactics, evocative of the rapid-fire non sequiturs gunned at each other by the characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

At other times, he opens a kind of panderer's box, tempting men and women to act out the vices of flesh and mind that have always been part of humanity's lot. In graphic dumb show or coarse double-entendre, incest, rape, sodomy, masturbation, sadism and masochism are all depicted or evoked on stage.

Gore spatters the play. At one point, men in surgical masks carve open a character's belly and remove a huge, bloody rat. The scene is bafflingly elusive, distinctly emetic, but a marvelously theatrical way to ring down the first-act curtain.