BWW Reviews: Barrington Stage gets Mixed Report Card for BASHIR LAZHAR

Barrington Stage is presenting the American premiere of the Canadian play Bashir Lazhar a story about the complexities of life as an immigrant, father, teacher and conflicted human being. It is based on a monologue written by Évelyne de la Chenelière, a Canadian actress who has appeared in nine films and written half a dozen plays which have been popular in French-speaking Quebec, where cultural differences are a major subset of life. Her play, Bashir Lazhar, has its head in these intellectual differences, even while its heart is in the human condition. Lazhar, a schoolteacher, finds himself in trouble with the school authorities for unorthodox teaching methods, even though they are born of a good heart and more helpful to the students than official policies.

The premise of the play at Barrington Stage Company is that a teacher has committed suicide in her own classroom, a horror the children discover returning from recess. A substitute teacher is hired to take her place, and is expected to help them cope with their loss by pretending everything is normal. Lazhar, the replacement, has suffered his own losses. The subtext is that both he and the children are dealing with grieving. He is expected to keep the focus on the positive, even as the morbid realities keep poking through - sometimes in a student's essay, sometimes in a flashback.

The work has received a number of Canadian productions and they have been startlingly Kafkaesque, noir affairs where blackboards go from wall to floor to downstage, where the teacher is somewhat unhinged, writing in chalk on his suit, and with moments that clearly veer between sanity and feelings of impending doom.

This production is the plain vanilla, literal version. It is rendered in antiseptic whites, not blacks and greys, its interpretation of the words are more literal than symbolic. The relatively young production team did not take many chances that might have elevated the work from interesting to chilling.

As Bashir Lazhar is Juri Henley-Cohn who plays a well meaning teacher convincingly. But we discover that Lazhar is a bit of an impostor, never having actually been employed as a teacher in his native Algeria. In an early scene we see how he smooth-talks the school officials with his sincerity and charm, and ends up in front of a class of 10 and 11 year olds. As the play opens we see him practicing his welcome to the students, revealing his inexperience as a teacher, and his tendency to approach it as an actor, not an educator. We watch Henley-Cohn don and discard multiple variations of playing a teacher, and then doing it in what has to be one of the most imaginative tour-de-force performances of the new season.

As the tale unfolds in a series of short scenes darting forward and backwards through time, the play in its translation by Morwyn Brebner tells its story using elements of the films such as Pulp Fiction, Memento and Run Lola Run. playing with time and narrative. Whether the problem is with the Québécois literary roots of the play, or its final construction as a theatrical piece, it simply does not cohere as solidly as might be expected. There are great deficiencies in the script itself, leaving far too many questions unanswered, and making the viewer piece together the overall picture like some three dimensional chess game that ends up with nobody the winner.

For large segments of the latter third of the play, the floor is littered with items from earlier scenes, requiring Henley-Cohn to step over the clothes, papers, phone and Canadian flag in scenes where they have no business appearing. These items were totally distracting to the audience, and their unwanted presence can clearly be laid at the feet of director Shakina Nayfack who should have solved this continuity problem long before opening night. This in turn begs the question of whether, in the rush of the impending season, new plays get sufficient rehearsal time to work out all their kinks. So many of the new works we see in the Berkshires in the summer are not as ready for prime time as their producers would lead you to believe. Adding to the problem were a number of relatively new faces in the lighting, sound and set design portions of the production, young artists who have impressive credentials in second tier production roles, being given a chance to take charge.

WIth the two dozen or so entrances and exits of Bashir Lazhar, each one suggesting a change of scene, there are changes of lighting and sometime sound cues given. These switches happened at the speed of light, the play hurtling along like a meal at a restaurant where the next course arrives before you have finished the first.

In an age of 90 minute plays, we now have the even speedier 80 minute play, made possible by giving the transitions between scenes less clarity and focus. Bashir leaves the classroom, the lights change a little, he comes back in a second later, turns a desk around, and we are in a new scene. But we are in the same classroom, everything is the same. Some projections might have helped, or a portable scrim. The scene changes simply did not work to establish the new location.

Impatience is a sign of our modern times, but not having a few seconds to dim out a scene, and bring up a carefully thought out different lighting plot for the next but simply doing a quick light change is lazy, and undermines the story telling. Likewise, much was made of the "score" for this production, once called "incidental" music, but today developed into some sort of film-like soundtrack with a repetitious leitmotif (Sound Designers should watch Wagner's The Ring Cycle to see how it really works) and buzzy sound effects. Some good ideas there, but in need of more musical complexity. When the repetitious theme - which played endlessly even before the show started - was in the deep background, it was about perfect. And during a climatic scene in which Lazhar loses his family, the sounds conveyed the tragedy effectively as appropriately harsh and unsettling. Well done. People had a visceral reaction to it.

In all fairness, in his program notes, director Shakina Nayfack points out that the script came to them as a 20 page monologue with only the barest of stage directions. All the action on stage was worked out by the director, Juri Henley-Cohn and the design team in only a few weeks. The end result has its problems, but considering the hard task of turning a monologue into a full theatrical adventure, the production team has brought this play a long way from its raw state. Given the complexities of the plot and exposition, it certainly needed at least another week of rehearsal to flesh out all its details, and still one more of previews to test out the best way to present its scene changes and soundtrack. And to pick up the props left on the floor which finally disappeared as the final scene was winding up the play.

Barrington Stage Company presents Bashir Lazhar by Évelyne de la Chenelière, translation by Morwyn Brebner, Shakina Nayfack - Director and Associate Producer, Brett J. Banakis - Scenic and Costume Designer, Robert Brown - LIghting Designer, Anthony Mattana - Original Score and Sound Design, Stephen Gabis - Dialect Coach, Jeff Roudabush - Director of Production, Paul Vella - Production Stage Manager, Charlie Siedenburg - Press Representative with Juri Henley-Cohn as Bashir Lazhar. 80 minutes with no intermission. MAY 22-JUNE 8, 2013. At the St. Germain Stage at the Blum Performing Arts Center, Linden Street, Pittsfield, MA.

(Photo by Scott Barrow)

To post a comment, you must register and login.