
The Arsonists
by Alistair Beaton (A New Translation of Max Frisch's The Firebugs)
The Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5
August 31 - September 18, 2011
Directed by Tina Brock

Director
Tina Brock
Costume Design
Brian Strachan
Lighting Design
Josh Schulman
Scenic Design
Meghan Jones
Sound Design
Aaron Oster
Technical Director
Rajiv Shah
Set Construction
Andy Campbell
Scenic Painter
Colleen Sawyer
Stage Manager
Gregory Day
Sound Operator
Jesse Delaney
Lights Board Operator
Liam Brock
Vocal Coach
Michael Dura
Prop Construction/Assistant Stage Manager
Jahna Ferron-Smith
House Manager/Police Officer
Ari Benjamin Bank
Box Office Manager
Eileen O’Brien
Photography
Johanna Austin / AustinArt.org
This production is made possible in part by generous grants from
The Samuel S. Fels Fund and
The Philadelphia Cultural Fund
The Charlotte Cushman Foundation
The IRC participates in the
Barrymore Awards Honoring Excellence in Theater
Playing time is approximately 70 minutes;
there will be no intermission.
Reviews
Max Frisch's The Arsonists (2011)
"...all acting was spot-on and sardonic. The staging on the small stage was exceptional. The timing was superb."
A. D. Amorosi, Philadelphia City Paper
"...questions personal cowardice and hiding behind the façade of bourgeois etiquette in the face of obvious danger, and ponders why people prefer to live in a state of denial than to act for the common good and their own survival."
Debra Miller, Stage Magazine
"The Arsonists is also a complex play. It’s partly an apologue, a kind of allegorical story, suggesting that those who pretend to moral virtues they don’t possess are doomed to pay dearly for their hypocrisy."
Marshall A. Ledger, Broad Street Review
Director's Notes
September 2011
The Arsonists still burns brightly
Welcome!
The IRC bursts into our 6th season with this regional premiere of Alistair Beaton’s elegant translation of Max Frisch’s 1958 absurdist romp, The Firebugs.
The theme of Max Frisch's classic play -- that private and public morality cannot be separated -- rings even truer today. What is our responsibility to self, to family, to our neighbors and beyond? Why do we choose to ignore glaring red flags in front of our faces, and what is the damage we suffer for that choice?
Alistair Beaton offers these notes on his translation:
“The Arsonists is my title for a play previously known as The Fire Raisers, first staged in Britain at the Royal Court in 1961. When Dominic Cooke and Ramin Gray asked me to come up with a new translation as part of the Court's international season, I went back to the original German text to see how much the play still had to say to a modern audience. In other words, I wondered whether I ought to be doing a straightforward translation or a new version. I was pleased to find that Max Frisch's famous play required little in the way of updating.
We immediately have to ask: what is the great evil we are failing to face up to today? Is it still nuclear weapons? Is it the destruction of our environment through personal greed and corporate plunder? Is it the misery we inflict upon the Third World? Is it the erosion of our liberties in the name of the War on Terror? With a Greek chorus composed of firefighters, the power of The Arsonists lies in the undefined nature of the evil it portrays.Where the play is precise is in identifying what happens when there is a private-public split in a person's moral code. We can't be decent people at home while ignoring the evils of the world. It just doesn't work.
More than a century earlier than Frisch, and halfway around the globe, Nikolai Gogol was writing about the absurdity of the human condition in his native Russia.
I hope you’ll join us in February 2012 once again at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5 for Nikolai Gogol’s Marriage. Gogol’s writing goes beyond tragedy or comedy into a realm that might be called “cosmic farce.”
Earlier this year we had the opportunity to experience Geoffrey Rush playing the lowly civil servant Poprischin in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman at Brooklyn Academy of Music. The language was extraordinary. As was Rush. And while we weren’t able to secure him for the lead role of Podkolyoshin in IRC’s production of Marriage, his playful spirit and interpretation left such an impression that we felt compelled to stage one of Gogol’s works.
Please tell a friend about the IRC and stay connected with our goings on at www.IdiopathicRidiculopathyConsortium.org. It’s your support that helps to keep these works alive for generations to come… they might not be staged otherwise.
See you at the theater.
Tina Brock
Producing Artistic Director
STAGE Magazine
September 19, 2011
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium Set the Fringe on Fire with Max Frisch’s The Arsonists
By Debra Miller
From the moment the audience stepped off the elevator into the lobby of the Walnut Street Theatre’s Studio 5, director Tina Brock thrust them into the irrational world of MAX FRISCH’S THE ARSONISTS. Members of the show’s fire brigade checked tickets next to a sign warning against bringing cigarettes, detonators, and other explosive devices or fire hazards into the theater. Once inside, the brigade chief, well played with mock authority by John D’Alonzo, reminded everyone again that smoking and explosives were not permitted—everyone, that is, except the eponymous arsonists. Such was the relevant illogic of this rapid-fire 70-minute production by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium; absurd, yet eerily familiar, if you’ve been through a random airport screening lately.
Originally conceived by the Swiss playwright in the aftermath of World War II, THE ARSONISTS still speaks to us today, by employing an absurdist/comedic mode to underscore a serious point: ignoring, accommodating, or enabling a homicidal sociopath is never a good idea; it wasn’t with Hitler, and it isn’t now.
Frisch’s 1953 parable about deception and gullibility, misplaced trust and middle-class guilt, and most importantly, about hearing the truth but choosing to ignore it, continues to raise compelling psychological and ethical issues. It questions personal cowardice and hiding behind the façade of bourgeois etiquette in the face of obvious danger, and ponders why people prefer to live in a state of denial than to act for the common good and their own survival.
IRC’s spirited cast brought an appropriate preposterousness to the outrageous proceedings. Liam Castellan was hilarious as the neurotic nerd Gottlieb Biedermann (whose name, in German, ironically alludes to God-loving conventional bourgeois decency)—a hypocritical, ruthless businessman who bullies a devoted long-term employee into suicide, yet is too cowardly to stand up to the obvious threat that stands before him and his community. Kirsten Quinn was equally humorous as Biedermann’s nervous, insomniac, but ever fashionable wife Babette, as easily intimidated as her husband into befriending the firebugs, despite her well founded reservations. Ethan Lipkin and Mark Knight were funny, disquieting, and diabolical as the criminals, who conned their foolish victims with a combination of sentimentality, humor, and unabashed honesty, confident that no one would believe the blatant truth when faced with it.
The stellar design team of Meghan Jones (set), Brian Strachan (costumes), Josh Schulman (lights), and Aaron Oster (sound) created a disturbingly convincing ambiance for the dark comedy. And the brigade of six ineffectual firefighters (D’Alonzo, Monah Yancy, Jaime Pannone, Bob Schmidt, Michael Dura, and Tomas Dura) functioned effectively as a finely synchronized Greek chorus, who collectively addressed the audience with summary comments and bits of wisdom, but in the end, took no more action than the Biedermanns to save their town from annihilation.
If you missed this entertaining and provocative offering, you can catch IRC again in February 2012, when the company returns to the stage with another absurdist classic, Nikolai Gogol’s Marriage–an “utterly improbable occurrence in two acts.”
MAX FRISCH’S THE ARSONISTS (THE FIREBUGS)
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium
August 31-September 18, 2011
Walnut Street Theatre, Studio 5
825 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
http://idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org
Philadelphia City Paper
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2011
ON THE FRINGE: The Arsonists
by A.D. Amorosi
A cozy house with a tight attic filled with petrol cans, an overly watchful (but tuneful) chorus of firefighters, a jittery rich family bent backward to prove they’re at one with the common man, several common man arsonists: That’s the recipe for the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s whack adaptation of 1958’s absurdist social-commentary comedy The Firebugs. From the woe-for-man chorus (bits of Brecht and Marx) highlighted by the elegantly stony faces of the Dura Brothers to the spazzy “Gottleib Biedermann” (Liam Castellan) to the jovial fire starters (chubby “wrestler” Ethan Lipkin, snooty “waiter” Mark Knight), all acting was spot-on and sardonic. The staging on the small stage was exceptional. The timing was superb. I simply didn’t dig the script.
Through Sept. 18, $20, Walnut Street Theater Studio 5, 825 Walnut St.
The Broad Street Review
September 3, 2011
The Arsonists at the Fringe
by Marshall A. Ledger
When arsonists arrive to burn down your house, should you invite them to dinner and try to dissuade them? Max Frisch’s The Arsonists (formerly called The Firebugs), written in 1953, speaks of moral responsibility and action in the face of personal threat. It doesn’t seem the least bit outdated in this Fringe Festival offering.
The Arsonists. By Max Frisch; translated by Alistair Beaton; Tina Brock directed. Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium production through September 18, 2011, at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut St. (215) 285-0472 or www.IdiopathicRidiculopathyConsortium.org or www.phillyfringe.org.
A play about Obama (written before he was born)?
Max Frisch’s The Arsonists is a simple play, and revealing the plot won’t spoil the theater experience. A town (unnamed) is beset by fires. Homes, a fine restaurant, the circus— all have burned to the ground, killing people in the process.
The modus operandi of the two arsonists is the same each time: They wheedle their way into residences or commercial establishments as guests or workers and then set their fires.
Gottlieb Biedermann is the prey we follow in this drama, and the action takes place in his house. Yet far from being an innocent victim, he finds himself abetting the bad guys.
Hunger to be liked
The Arsonists is also a complex play. It’s partly an apologue, a kind of allegorical story, suggesting that those who pretend to moral virtues they don’t possess are doomed to pay dearly for their hypocrisy. Biedermann thinks of himself as open-minded, above class distinctions, generous, honest. Yet ethically he is empty; he has treated an employee so poorly that the man committed suicide.
At the same time, Biedermann wants to be seen as sociable, even helpful, so his response to his visitors, as he gradually understands their purpose, is to invite them to dinner. “Then they’ll be our friends,” he assures his wife, Babette. But Josef Schmitz and William Eisenring, the arsonists, see through his pretensions to shared bonhomie.
To the playwright Frisch, appeasement is the wrong way to deal with evil. As the chorus of firefighters points out in one of its many truth-telling observations, “Hoping that good / Will come from being good-natured,/ He makes a deadly mistake.”
Betrayed by his face
The characters in The Arsonists lack great dimension, but neither are they stick figures, at least as they’re developed in this production by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium. As Schmitz, Ethan Lipkin, of enormous girth, is an explosive presence (no pun intended), yet he seems to shrink in size during certain moments of contrition.
Mark Knight, as Eisenring, the brains of this criminal pair, is alternately truth-telling and joke-telling; his beady eyes and sneering mouth betray his motive at any moment, but Biedermann can’t read it.
Kirsten Quinn, as Babette, reacts to events with perfect timing and frantic pitch. Liam Castellan’s Biedermann is a bundle of nerves, less convincing as a brutal businessman but better as a man who doesn’t want to die in a fire.
Only human
The chorus is deployed in the classic Greek fashion, guiding the audience via a higher level of discourse; in the script, its words are written as poetry. It is philosophical: “It’s only human/ To talk about fate. / Fate means we don’t need to ask/ Why the city is burning/ No need to ask how the terror began.”
It is judgmental: “If you spend long enough/ Looking into the future/ What you foresee/ Will finally happen:/ Stupidity dressed up as fate,/ Always stupidity/ Blazing and burning/ Until it can not be put out.”
And it repeatedly expresses everyone’s worst fear: “Woe unto us.”
What was the evil?
Analogies to Biedermann’s situation flood the mind. Max Frisch (1911-1991) originally wrote this drama as a radio play in 1953, and it was translated for the British Royal Court stage in 1961. Although Frisch, a Swiss, wasn’t specific about what the evil stood for, commentators suggest he was referring to fascism or the atomic bomb. An American of that era might have thought of the pervasive escalation of McCarthyism.
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium uses a 2007 translation by the British writer, satirist and political commentator Alistair Beaton, who offers some contemporary possibilities for the evil: climate change, personal and corporate greed, and the loss of individual liberties in the fight against terrorism and radical Islam.
Precisely because the play leaves the options open, it remains a rich stimulant to reflection. If the Idiopathic folks chose this play any time in the past two and a half years, why would you not read Biedermann as Barack Obama, well-meaningly trying to negotiate policy with adversaries explicitly focused on destroying his presidency?
Maniac cab driver
But the most accurate interpretation of The Arsonists is probably more down home, dealing with an everyday event: someone afraid to show he’s afraid or, better yet, too embarrassed to stand up for his own self-interest.
This uncomplicated conclusion occurred to me on the cab ride home as the driver careened through Philadelphia streets, around double-parked cars and PECO work vans and vehicles that dawdled for just an instant after the traffic lights turned green. My wife and I could have taken the brave route and asked him to slow down, or continued to defiantly let him risk our lives by just sitting there in silence. Instead, we chose a middle path, like two little Biedermanns. We put on our seat belts and tried not to make too much noise when they clicked in.
Philadelphia City Paper
September 1, 2011
Philly Fringe 2011: May We Suggest...
The Arsonists
Fringe stalwart The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium revives an absurdist black comedy about middle-class complacency in the face of great evil. Any similarity to today's lack of attention to climate change, income unfairness, shrinking freedoms and other creeping dangers is entirely intentional — as is the hilarity that ensues when society burns. Sept. 2-4, 6-11 and 13-18, various times, $20, Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut St. —Mark Cofta
Philly Broadcaster.com
August 29th, 2011
PHILLY LIVE ARTS/FRINGE FEST SERIES: THE ARSONISTS
THE BURNING ISSUES OF THE CITY
BY FRANK CASSELLA
“Why do we turn the other cheek and ignore what we know is a train heading straight for a bridge?”
So laments Tina Brock, artistic director of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, who will adapt Max Frisch’s 1958 Absurdist classic, The Arsonists, at this year’s Live Arts/Fringe Fest. The frantic play tells the story of Gottlieb Biedermann (Liam Castellan), a businessman trapped in a town plagued by arsonists. When their gasoline tanks finally tap on his door, his actions come as a surprise to both his wife Babette (Kirsten Quinn) and the audience.
The Consortium, founded in 2006, emphasizes vaudevillian elements and physical comedy to showcase works from the Theater of the Absurd, exclaiming with smirking humility, “We Bring Good Nothingness to Life!” Brock and company search nine months in advance for universal stories with a connecting power to audiences, stressing characters that bare a “crisis of existence.” Regardless of setting or time period, Brock works endlessly to select pieces modern in the issues they address.
“What attracted me to The Arsonists in this age is the question of personal responsibility and where that begins and ends”, Brock explains. “In this play, the main character refuses to see the evil underneath his nose, and what’s more, he invites it in to his home, thinking if he befriends it that surely he’ll be safe.”
Written in 1958, Frisch’s play was a response to the fascist atrocities that had plagued the world over a decade prior. While staying true to the author’s intent, Brock and IRC worked to tweak the production for modern times.
“The challenge for us was to illuminate the themes that are universal, that withstand the test of time and speak to the human condition”, Brock says. “The work is political, psychological and philosophical and it seems that audiences find the in-road that best suits them.”
A looming question of balance lingers over the entire production; there’s Bidermann’s moral conflict, the play’s clash of comedy and tragedy and the aforementioned balance of adaptation.
Brock knows all about balance, in both her artistic and personal life.
Steeped in absurdity, she remains a realist. Her nights are spent immersed in rehearsal, overseeing the production and prepping it for exposure to an audience. By day, she’s a case developer for the National Board of Medical Examiners. “I used to earn my living solely as an actor”, she tells me. “But when my son was born, other priorities took over.”
A template for young artists needing to split their passions and responsibilities, Brock was a co-founder of IRC in 2006 and has since gone on to direct numerous plays for the company.
With 17 performances, The Arsonists is one of the more prolific shows of the Fest; a challenging, vibrant and yes, smoke free performance. To adhere to state laws, the IRC will use electronic candles and prop cigars that give off powdery smoke. So the odds of the Walnut Street Theater burning down are slim. Unless, of course some politically charged hooligan takes a torch to the place.
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium presents Max Frisch’s The Arsonists (The Firebugs). At Walnut Street Theatre-Studio 5, 825 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19107. From August 31st-September 18th. $15. For performance times and tickets, please visit their Live Arts/Philly Fringe event page.
STAGE Magazine
Top Ten Best Bets for the Philadelphia Fringe
August 21, 2011
By Debra Miller
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, MAX FRISCH’S THE ARSONISTS Upholding its mission of preserving rarely seen Theater of the Absurd classics, Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium presents the 2007 English translation of Frisch’s THE FIREBUGS of 1953. The allegorical dark comedy, set in a town experiencing a series of arson attacks, examines personal responsibility, ethical weakness, middle-class apathy, and society’s willingness to accommodate its own destruction when confronted with a great evil. Conceived as an extended parable, the Swiss playwright ambiguously subtitled his original work “a morality play without a moral.” If you can make any sense of this incendiary lack of linear logic, you’ll find it funny, disquieting, and still very relevant. The artistic team for the IRC’s regional premier, performed at the Walnut Street Theater’s Studio 5, includes some of Philadelphia’s most respected designers: Brian Strachan (costumes); Meghan Jones (set); Josh Schulman (lights); and Aaron Oster (sound).
The SPIRIT
Live Arts and Fringe Preview
The Spirit of the River Wards
August 4, 2011
By Jack and Sandy Jacobowitz
THE IDIOPATHIC RIDICULOPATHY CONSORTIUM, @Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5. We always wait eagerly for the next dramatic surprise presented by this outstanding company. IRC now presents the regional premiere of the allegorical and absurdist black comedy, The Arsonists. Using a new translation of Max Frisch’s morality play "without a moral" Director Tina Brock introduces us to an unemployed circus wrestler, his pyromaniac partner, and a hair rejuvenator magnate all led by a Greek chorus of Keystone Kops. The cast of 14 features many IRC veterans from past productions including Liam Castellan, John D’Alonzo, Jesse Delaney, Michael Dura, Tomas Dura, Kristen Egermeier, Mark Knight, Ethan Lipkin, Jamie Pannone, Lee Pucklis, Kirsten Quinn, Bob Schmidt, Monah Yancy and Tina Brock.
August 31- September 18.