Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards
Through April 15 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival.
Written by Greg Kotis. Directed by Kip Fagan.
This cosmicomic love and international relations parable has little of the theatrical self-awareness of Kotis’s bestknown script, Urinetown. That
avoidance of style parody turns out to be its saving grace. Structure- and plotwise, however, it skews so alarmingly close to Bram Stoker’s original Dracula that Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards is hard to accept on its own merits.
Not unlike another Humana Festival comedy misfire, The Veri**on Play, this one is way too sure of itself, thinking the audience is keen to its vicissitudes and will follow willingly when it wants to be make a gentler, romantic and world-peacey point at the end.
Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards’ inability to turn on a dime is more due to directorial and environmental incursions. Director Kip Fagan opens the show with grand, obvious physical shtick and chainmail, and plays up every (repetitive) round of cannibal grotesquery in what could indeed be a more tender and evenhanded comic romance about a thousands-year-old man (the Michael of the title, suavely played by Rufus Collins) and what he still believes in. Michael B. Raiford’s scenic design is am opera-scale mix of medieval castles and modern-day city apartment. Why this play, with a smallish cast, minimal set requirements and no major scene changes, gets an overstuffed production on the ATL mainstage is a quandary.
There’s a simplicity and vitality to Kotis’ central idea—what do we do to survive, and what beliefs do we relinquish?—that’s lost in a production which goes for elaborate bow-and-arrow special effects and arch playing, Pythonesque playing styles.
Other easy outs include over-the-top heavy Austrian accents, especially from Micah Stock, who has the Renfrew-esque role of “Sammy,” the odd sidekick who helps procure victims so that he and age-old charming eccentric Michael Siebenburg can live forever.
The play would be all about catching, drugging and eating young women—the whole first half is—if it did not grow a conscience during intermission. But the denouement is nothing but forced, a dues ex machina (dea ex fenestra, actually) which turns into a de rigeur bloody swordfight.
Some of the jokes are stand-alone stitchbusting, and it’s certainly nice to see a comedy for a change that stays in its defined moment and doesn’t break out of itself to make fun of the theatrical conventions it’s chosen. But I couldn’t get around the feel of a propped-up melodrama studded with stay-awake jokes. A better script would have the potential to muster the empathy, suspense AND bad jokes which it clearly wants to.