The Empire Builders
by Boris Vian, translated by Simon Watson Taylor
The Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5
January 9 - 27, 2011
Directed by Tina Brock
ACT I
The Dupont’s three room apartment in a Parisian apartment building
ACT II
Two Days Later:
The Dupont’s two room apartment, one flight up in the same Parisian apartment building
ACT III
The Next Day:
The Attic, yet one more flight up in the same Parisian apartment building
Director
Tina Brock
Costume Design
Maggie Baker
Fight Choreography
David Mason
Lighting Design
Maria Shaplin
Scenic Design
Meghan Jones
Technical Director
Rajiv Shah
Sound Design
Kevin Francis
Fight Captain/Stage Manager
Jaime Pannone
Property Master/Stage Manager
Monah Yancy
Lights & Sound Operator
Jesse Delaney
Scenic Construction
Anthony Carpenter, Nathanael Harting and John D’Alonzo
Scenic Painter
Colleen Sawyer
Photography
Johanna Austin / AustinArt.org
The IRC participates in the
Barrymore Awards Honoring Excellence in Theater.
This production is made possible in part by generous grants from
The Samuel S. Fels Fund and
The Philadelphia Cultural Fund
Playing time is approximately 80 minutes; there will be no intermission.
Reviews
The Empire Builders (2011)
"If you're a collector of arcane absurdist theater, The Empire Builders by Boris Vian is a rara avis and one for the life list. If you're inclined toward that European brand of mid-20th-century, heavy-handed metaphor, this latest discovery by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium offers a strong production under Tina Brock's fearless direction."
Toby Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"...this intense and creepy production is tremendously entertaining. Tina Brock’s direction woos the audience with its balance of humor and viciousness."
Jim Rutter, Broad Street Review
"When it comes to theater of the absurd, Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium has it covered. The ensemble, most recently lauded for its woolly take on The Madwoman of Chaillot, looks for the ridiculously complex, sad and tragic ways in which we cope with the crisis of living."
A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia City Paper
Director's Notes
February 2011
“We are racing towards the future at full speed, going so fast that we cannot glimpse the present, and the dust raised by our pounding feet hides the past from us.” -- Leon Dupont, The Empire Builders
Welcome!
The time seemed right for The Empire Builders, French playwright Boris Vian’s absurdly farcical look at our relationship with our biggest enemy -- fear -- and the havoc that ensues from its mismanagement. Written in 1959 and translated by Simon Watson Taylor in 1967, Vian never saw a production of Empire in his short lifetime.
Boris Vian was a writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels, published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan -- parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time. Vian’s highly individual writing style featured nonsensical words, subtle wordplay and surrealistic plots. L'Écume des jours is the best known of these, and one of the few translated into English.
Vian suffered from ill health throughout his childhood and was educated at home until age five. Shortly after his 12th birthday, he developed rheumatic fever, followed by typhoid. This combination led to severe health problems that left him with a heart condition which ultimately marked his death at age 39.
Empire’s family patriarch, Leon Dupont, says, “I always felt sure that it was only the absence of real tranquility that prevented my discovering the origin and basic pattern of things…” and we see him play out the disastrous results of his anxiety and inability to manage his emotional world.
Empire provided a unique opportunity for the actors, designers and director alike to grapple with how to illustrate the many ways we embrace and run from our fear and pain. How it guides us, warns us, shows us the way.
Thanks for sharing your evening with us.
Tina Brock
Producing Artistic Director
February 14, 2011
The Philadelphia Inquirer
by Toby Zinman
"Family's absurdist fare finds a worthy home"
If you're a collector of arcane absurdist theater, The Empire Builders by Boris Vian is a rara avis and one for the life list. If you're inclined toward that European brand of mid-20th-century, heavy-handed metaphor, this latest discovery by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium offers a strong production under Tina Brock's fearless direction.
The set (designed by Meghan Jones) will tell the whole story: An apartment - all modernist angles, doors, and windows - is a family's new home. The family has been forced here, out of a more spacious apartment, by a mysterious groaning noise that terrifies the parents. The noise will recur, and the family will move again and again; its home will be increasingly diminished.
Eventually, the maid (Sonja Robson) will leave, the daughter (Kate Black-Regan) will be locked out, the wife (Kirsten Quinn) will be left behind, and the husband (Bob Schmidt) will find himself alone in a tiny, cell-like room.
My best interpretive guess is that the fearsome noise is time passing, and thus death approaching. Life dwindles. People maintain their bravado as long as they can. There is a silent, bedraggled man (Tomas Dura) who always accompanies the family; his job seems to be to absorb all the family's abuse as members violently hit and kick and stab him. The play could easily lend itself to political interpretations, depending on a director's inclination, although Brock wisely sticks to the philosophical.
The character of the maid is the most amusing, made more so by Robson's superbly stern deadpan as she speaks almost entirely in lists. She warns her employer: "Don't proceed by allusions. Do I ever alluse?" The character of the daughter is the most sympathetic, made more so by Black-Regan's adorable exasperation. She seems to be the only rational truth-teller and the only one who still has memories of the past.
Like most absurdist tragicomedies (think minor Ionesco), The Empire Builders depends on repetition and a lot of speechifying; that the father is a bore who starts out funny and quickly becomes tedious is the play's central problem, since he has the largest role and the most stage time.
Vian's short life - he died in 1959 at 39 - was crowded with multiple careers (engineer, novelist, musician) and seems to be largely unknown to American audiences. Not surprising.
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at Walnut Street Theatre, Studio 5, Ninth and Walnut Streets. Through Feb. 27. Tickets $20. Information: www.idiopathicridiculopathy consortium.org, 215-285-0472.
February 15, 2011
Broad Street Review
by Jim Rutter
Downward Mobility or: For Whom the Noise Tolls
“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a Heaven for?” Robert Browning reminded us. Much the same function is performed Boris Vian’s absurdist work The Empire Builders, now receiving an equally deep and philosophically dazzling production by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium.
Vian’s 80-minute work from 1957 focuses on the progressively desperate plight of the Dupont family: a father and mother, their teenage daughter Zenobia and the maid, Mugg. As the play opens, the Duponts drag their bags and possessions into a four-room apartment, fleeing from a “noise” that has chased them from the six-room space they inhabited a floor below.
Over the next two scenes, the family escapes twice more to still smaller apartments upstairs, leaving behind possessions and family members on each floor until only the father remains. At each level, they encounter a bandaged, bleeding beggar, a silent apparition whom they viciously beat but otherwise ignore. (In the Haussmann-style apartments of Vian’s Paris, the lower ranks of society lived on the highest floors.)
Hitchcockian moments
At the simplest level of interpretation, Empire Builders reads as a straightforward meditation on fear. Meghan Jones’s set design rearranges jutting, angular panels in each scene to produce an increasingly claustrophobic environ. And the Consortium’s eerie production captures those Hitchcockian moments when the noise rumbles through the walls and the family rushes off in terror.
Kevin Francis’s sound design renders the terrifying noise as the rumbling produced by an ocean steamer heard underwater— a deep, grinding creak of metal and ballast amplified and distorted by water. The father later laments the need to keep pace as society races “toward the future at full speed”; as events shape their lives, the family becomes poorer and smaller.
Where is time passing?
Vian fills the long stretches of dialogue with domestic anxiety over Duponts’ distressing living conditions. Father and Mother wonder how best to raise their child (or marry her off); Sonja Robson’s deliciously deadpan maid recites laundry lists of complaints; and the daughter bursts each bubble of her parents’ comforting wisdom with sarcastic remarks (“Where is time passing? Through the eye of a needle? Through the street?”). Meanwhile, Father dubiously reassures his family that the noise is “a symbol, a reference and a signifier, and should not be confused with the noise itself.”
Whenever anxiety threatens, one of the Duponts steps out of the conversation and savagely beats, strangles, stabs or kicks the beggar (Tomas Dura). Does America’s increasingly anxious middle class behave any differently today, berating and blaming immigrants and the poor for America’s battered economy?
Tarantino-style violence
These heady themes notwithstanding, this intense and creepy production is tremendously entertaining. Tina Brock’s direction woos the audience with its balance of humor and viciousness. (I couldn’t contain my laughter at the Tarantino-style violence.) Kate Black-Regan’s daughter sparkles with innocence and humor, and though Bob Schmidt as Father loses steam late, he mostly bursts across the stage like a ball of manic energy.
But most of the enjoyment stems from what the play illuminates, about Vian’s France and contemporary America. Certainly, Parisians felt a similar decline in the security and pride of French nationalism during their Algerian War, when Vian penned this work.
For Americans today, Vian’s play reflects economic conditions that no doubt foment similar anxiety. The Empire Builders is pessimistic and Luddite, yes; but it’s also dazzling in what it illuminates.
March 1, 2011
Broad Street Review
by Robert Zaller
Death of the middle class
Boris Vian’s absurdist work from 1957, The Empire Builders, follows the declining fortunes of the Duponts, a bourgeois family being hounded from apartment to apartment by a mysterious noise that takes up residence with them wherever they go. The noise is impossible to bear, not so much because of its volume (which is considerable) as its lack of definition; it doesn’t sound like anything, and so it can’t be located or dealt with. It’s somewhere between an eviction notice and a voice of doom, resolving itself only into a generalized menace.
When the family hears it, it must flee. Father Leon (Bob Schmidt) reassures his unnamed wife (Kirsten Quinn) and their adolescent daughter, Zenobia (Kate Black-Regan), that all will be well at the next address. Zenobia can’t help pointing out, though, that each new apartment is smaller than the last. From six rooms, the Duponts come down to three and then two, creating space problems for Zenobia and Mugg, the family servant (Sonja Robson), who at a minimum need beds or at least floor space.
When we first meet the Duponts, they are installing themselves yet again. Their new abode has an extra tenant, however, in the form of a sleeping figure in rags, who is never named or addressed in the play but is called the “Schmurz” in the script.
There’s no such word, but schmuck in German means “ornament” and schmutz is “filth.” The Schmurz (Tomas Dura) is something of both, ironically in the first sense and literally in the second, since, begrimed and crawling with sores and open wounds, he is a plague object.
Silently cringing
The family chooses to collectively ignore him, but each member takes turns beating, kicking or whipping the Schmurz, with Mugg joining in too. The Schmurz cringes at the blows but makes no sound and no defense. Nor does he budge.
The apartment space begins to shrink, as doors close and refuse to open. The family shrinks as well. Mugg serves notice. Zenobia tumbles from a parapet that mysteriously vanishes under her. The intolerable noise returns, and as Leon climbs to yet another apartment, this time a single room, his wife’s cries are heard from behind as she too is borne off.
Leon is left to confront the Schmurz alone. The latter stands now for the first time, still silent but now menacing, as if for a final confrontation. He makes no move, but Leon’s fate is clearly sealed.
France’s shame
The Empire Builders is very much a play of its time: France’s late Fourth Republic. The title may be an ironic allusion to France’s crumbling empire in Algeria, Indochina and elsewhere.
The specter of France’s Vichy collaboration with the Nazi occupation of World War II hangs over it, particularly the deportation of French Jews. The Duponts are not specified as Jewish, but their plight—driven from place to place, stripped of their possessions and, finally, mercilessly doomed— is clearly reminiscent of the fate of French Jewry.
At the same time, in their willful blindness to their situation and their attempt to displace aggression and anxiety on a weaker scapegoat, the Duponts also resemble the mass of Frenchmen who stood by idly— often profiting in the process— as the Jews disappeared. The Schmurz, too, is an ambiguous symbol in the play, at once pursuer and pursued, and, ultimately, an emblem of the Duponts’ fate.
At the mercy of others
If the Duponts evoke the Holocaust, however, they’re also a broader symbol of dispossession and decline. The modern bourgeois is, like Willy Loman, ultimately a man with nothing but a suitcase and a smile.
Even at the beginning of the 20th Century, France was still a nation of peasant proprietors. The land was a harsh mistress, but it would be there tomorrow as it had been there today. The bourgeois had nothing under his feet, no wealth but paper, no security but contract. He was thus at the mercy of others, and so dispensable.
That is what is happening to the Duponts: They are being dispensed with. That it makes no sense to them— that it makes no sense as such— is the essence of their situation.
The noise that pursues them refuses to form itself into words— that is, to provide reasons and account for itself. It doesn’t even have to give an order: fear accomplishes that. The Duponts dispossess themselves. They are their own undoing.
In America, by contrast…
French theater of the absurd reflected a world turned upside down by two great wars and a catastrophic depression. The modern U.S. economy, by contrast, is a war against its citizens, and anyone who’s opened his computer to find he’s been fired or his paper to learn that his pension doesn’t exist is one of Vian’s Duponts. That makes The Empire Builders as relevant today as it was 50 years ago in the France of Sartre and Piaf.
The essence of absurdist theater is that all sentiment is banished; its characters go robotically about their business, or to their doom. Only Zenobia seems to have some sense of what’s actually happening, but she too can look no further than the immediate situation.
Essence of absurdity
The cast was briskly directed by Tina Brock, and Michael Dura too should be mentioned, in a comic turn as the Duponts’ new neighbor. Tomas Dura as the Schmurz, without a word to say, was a remarkably forceful presence; Meghan Jones’s boxlike set was suitably claustrophobic; and Maggie Baker’s costumes had the proper touch of zaniness, as well as a John the Baptist severity for the Schmurz.
Plaudits to all for this worthily mounted revival of a play that speaks as urgently today as it did half a century ago. The essence of absurdity— that the ground can be pulled up from under you at any moment in a senselessly mad world— is as relevant as ever.
February 9, 2011
Philadelphia City Paper Picks
by A.D. Amorosi
The Empire Builders
When it comes to theater of the absurd, Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium has it covered. The ensemble, most recently lauded for its woolly take on The Madwoman of Chaillot, looks for the ridiculously complex, sad and tragic ways in which we cope with the crisis of living. "There is release and a freedom in that," says IRC producing artistic director Tina Brock, who'll oversee the company's new take on late French poet/playwright Boris Vian's 1959 epic The Empire Builders. "Another theme often dealt with in absurd works is the problem of communication — how language can be inefficient and insufficient as a tool. What's funny to me is the minutiae that becomes monumentally important to these characters.." In Empire, a family unable to embrace their fears create a Tower of Babble to outrun it instead. Yet fear awaits them at each step. Anxieties worn on their sleeves, they make a mess of everything. Brock puts it into perspective: " Empire is part Family Guy, part Addams Family, part Roadrunner cartoon with a dash of Samuel Beckett and John Waters thrown in." Absurd, indeed.
Through Feb. 27, $20, Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut St., 215-285-0472, idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org