Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

The Visit

Saturday, Oct. 29, 2005
10:33 a.m.
It�s really a little too early for me to update, as nothing has happened today (except for being awakened at 6:30 this morning by a wrong number [grrr!] and waiting for sleep to resume its proper place before finally getting up about an hour ago), but I wanted to talk about the play I saw last night.

The Bushop�s drama department put on The Visit by Friedrich D�rrenmatt, a dark tragi-comedy that illustrates how greed overcomes a sense of ethics and personal alliegance in a small town, Gullen, in Eastern Europe. The �visit� of the title is by a very wealthy woman, Clara, who left the town 45 years earlier, married a billionaire, and returns for the purpose of exacting justice. In her entourage are some very strange characters, including a butler who is the former judge of the town court, two convicted murderers (one pushes her sedan chair [she does not walk anywhere as she sports an artificial leg caused by a motor accident] and the other plays guitar wherever she goes), and two blind little fat men (who turn out to be former townspeople as well and eunuchs). The townspeople consist of the mayor, the doctor, the old schoolmaster, the constable, the priest, and the shopkeeper Alfred who was in love with Clara when they were young, but who married the shopkeeper�s daughter instead.

The town at the beginning of the play is in abject poverty. The play opens with the town�s unemployed men at the station watching the trains go by and reminiscing about how this used to be a bustling metropolis, but now only the local train stops here. Everyone is excited about the imminent visit of Clara and they are all hoping that she will drop a few million into the town�s coffers to get them out of the hole of destitution in which they find themselves. When she does arrive (not by taking the local train, but by pulling the emergency stop on the express train as she does not want to have to sit for a half-hour on a milk-run), the townspeople are not quite ready for her. The mayor delivers a speech, the school children perform Edelweiss (it was excruciating!), but she wants to revisit the woods and the barn where she and Alfred trysted when they were young.

Clara tells the town that she will give them a billion dollars--$500,000,000 for the town and $500,000,000 to be divided up between every citizen--on the condition that justice be done. In her room at the inn is a coffin which her goons decorate daily with fresh flowers, and she wants Alfred dead before she will part with a cent. She left Gullen when she was 17, pregnant with his child, having been ridiculed when he had denied paternity, bribing the two blind eunuchs (who became that way after Clara had them hunted down and retribution administered by her thugs) to swear on the stand that they too had slept with Clara. She had ended up in a brothel (the baby girl adopted by someone else, but dead a year later), where she met her first spouse, the magnate (during the course of the play she marries husbands eight and nine,) and vowed revenge. Over the years, she purchased the entire town, including the factories, the outlying mineral-rich lands, and even the streets and houses, and prevented prosperity from taking a foothold. Now she is willing to get Gullen out of this hole, on the condition that someone kill Alfred.

What is interesting from here on in is how the mayor at first refuses her offer, saying there is no way they would stoop to murder, and that they would prefer to remain poor but retain their pride, but over the course of the evening, townspeople change sides. They start buying better quality things, on credit, and are conspicuous by their new yellow shoes. Alfred of course becomes paranoid, thinking they are all out to get him, even attempting at one point to leave town, but is prevented by a crowd at the station platform. Eventually Alfred accepts that he did wrong 45 years back and is willing to abide by whatever happens. The Gulleners have all changed sides now, including the priest (as evidenced by his shiny yellow shoes) and vote that Alfred is to be offed, which is he. Clara puts his body in her coffin and leaves, and the town is now affluent.

As a student production it wasn�t bad, although I think most of the actors lacked the maturity to pull off such heavy roles. Also, the cast was estrogen heavy, without having that many female parts (Alfred�s wife, daughter, and the mayor�s wife, the rest being men), so the only parts actually played by men were Alfred, his son, the two thugs (one of whom is the drama department�s handyman) and the butler. I have a bit of trouble suspending disbelief when I see the mayor is a pretty girl with a beard painted on her smooth cheeks, but they did the best with what they had. The girl who played Clara was amazing. It was she who carried the show.

Anyway, that�s all I wanted to talk about. Have a nice day.

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