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Pilgrim's progress
An old allegory gets new life on the stage
Staff Writer, The Prague Post (February 12, 2003) Hailed as the "father of modern education," 17th-century Moravian theologian and educator Jan Amos Komensky wrote his most famous work, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (Labyrint sveta a raj srdce) in 1623. Now, almost 400 years later, director Daniel Fleischer-Brown and theater company Miloco have brought Komensky's text to the stage with the abbreviated title The Labyrinth of the World. Brown says he was "immediately taken by [the book] as something ripe for adaptation" when the idea was first presented to him by actor Joel Sugerman, a current Miloco ensemble member. The story is familiar to us all, says Brown: a journey from innocence to experience with some bumps and detours, not to mention confusion and misdirection, along the way. "It's an Everyman story," he says, "very Baroque, grotesque, extremely funny."
The main character of the work is referred to only as Pilgrim, or Poutnik. He's led through a series of allegorical worlds such as Work and Academia by two guides: Vsudybud, often translated as Searchall or Ubiquitous, and Mameni, Delusion. Brown describes the characters as the MCs or ringmasters of the evening. Through the adaptation and rehearsal process, Komensky's work was transformed into a multilingual piece -- with large sections in English and Slovak -- somewhere between cabaret and carnival in style. Brown compares Labyrinth with works such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the film The Matrix, which also create fantastical worlds. At the same time, he says, the observations and criticisms Komensky(also known as Comenius) makes about the real world in his text are still apt today. Another important aspect of the performance is music. Written by jazz musician and Miloco musical director Miriam Bayle, the music is performed live using a piano, a saxophone and an accordion almost constantly throughout the show. Even then, Brown says, there is "not as much [music] as I would like." Labyrinth is Miloco's second show since the company began focusing on original derived work. It follows The Encyclopedia of the Dead, based on short stories by late Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis. This has been performed 25-30 times over the last two years in locations ranging from Ireland to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The original plan was to stage five shows over five years in a program called the Labyrinth Project. If all goes well, the next show will be Clown Noir, an expanded version of a piece by Sugerman based on the themes of noir and performed with masks (Sugerman himself is a mask maker). Labyrinth premiered Jan. 16 at a sold-out Divadlo Komedie, even though Brown admits it might not have been completely ready. The actors all have other personal and professional commitments, so it was difficult to get every member to all of the rehearsals, an intense process that gave birth to the performance. Brown says the gaps "inevitably brought in all kinds of problems." A month later, Brown and company have had plenty of time to work out the bugs. And what better way to take in a seminal work of Czech (and world) history than an evening of the kind of theater that only Miloco can deliver?
Matej Novak's e-mail address is
mnovak@praguepost.com
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