Loeb's Lorenzaccio feisty, but full of hot air

Linguistically and metaphorically speaking, The Loeb Experimental Theater's Lorenzaccio is quite the mouthful. With live feed videos, single actors taking over multiple character parts to shrink the cast (hence the fused-name title), a meandering plot, and a nearly three-hour run time, it is quite an exhaustive undertaking.

So much so, that it's almost understandable how the director forgot that it is the audience, not the script, which fuels a performance. Not surprisingly, the overwhelmed audience, who had had their minds obliterated by the sheer mass of work before them, could only provide scraps of laughter and applause to nurture the performers.

Such is the dilemma with the fluidity of director Jay Scheib's, Lorenzaccio. This is one of those plays where the director holds all the cards, even though it was written and adapted by others, Alfred De Musset and Paul Schmidt, respectively.

While the play takes place in 16th century Florence, the set resembles a modern college campus, complete with the typical bad Chinese restaurant. The modern dialogue combined with antiquated ideas of royalty is discordant from the beginning. This frayed foundation is tugged further loose by multiple plot lines all spinning towards both catastrophe and intersection. Rarely is it clear which characters are which, let alone who they are related to.

Like an Elizabethan morality play of the same era, Florence represents all that is evil in the world. Florence is often humanized, referred to as a "beloved whore," both dirty and full of sin, led by its main villain, the Duke Alessandro Medici, played menacingly by Adam Zalisk. Thankfully, the "whore's" leader, the errant Duke, is not given a charming symbolic nickname, although given his sexual behavior, it is not difficult to imagine what it would be.

Nonetheless, while the entire city despises him, no one dares to disobey him, leading to even more debauchery. And thankfully, with the live video feed on stage, if seeing scantily clad Florentine women scampering around on stage from a whole eight rows back was too far -- there were close ups available on an unavoidable big screen TV.

One of the more ingenious aspects of the television set was its manipulation of time. Often, there would be one striking image from the scene prior left on the screen, on pause, while the next scene took place. That way, one was able to watch where the play was heading while simultaneously seeing where it had been.

This neat feature aside, the use of the live video feed proved to be more problematic than brilliant. Uncomfortably, the way the play most often sought to draw the audience's attention was through the rather cheap feeling of lust. Never did it delve into to the deeper realms of humanity, the realms the script appeared to be appealing to amidst the chaos: feelings of courage and justice.

Finally, in a singular moment of righteousness, one of the characters decides that she must take action against the Duke's majestic pimpness, carrying on this way and that -- as if now, two hours into the play, we poor theater goers still care.

The show played strikingly similarly to that of Baz Luhrmann's tedious 1995 film adaptation "Romeo + Juliet." In both productions, the artistic anomalies drew attention away from the subject at hand.

Perhaps, I'm being too critical. But after seeing the sheer lavishness in which the production was put on, and especially after reading the program notes crying about the depth of apathy around the nation and our youth's lack of activism, I only wonder why the producer did not make contributions to Headstart, or likeminded political groups as opposed to mounting this muddled mess.

In their defense, the production's historian Scott Wilson plainly states in the program notes that this play as originally written was over two hundred pages, with five full acts, and approximately 87 speaking roles. But even then, after we admit that their task was harder than most, when the lights rise at its conclusion the difficulty of the work is irrelevant: a play is a play is a play.