STAGE REVIEW : MISSED PASSIONS OF ‘BARABBAS’

There are moments in Stein Winge’s staging of “Barabbas” for the Los Angeles Theatre Center when you can actually concentrate on the story.

Take the big scene where Pontius Pilate (Stephen Tobolowsky) asks the crowd which of the two criminals he should free--the frail, bloodied Jesus (Kari Faale) or the hale, grizzled Barabbas (Bill Pullman).

Pilate hopes to stir the crowd’s pity for the weaker man. Instead, the crowd becomes even more bent on seeing Jesus fully degraded. After the scapegoat has been selected, there’s no going back. Indeed, there’s a joy in going forward.

The scene makes the viewer unpleasantly aware that he might well have joined the majority hollering: “Barabbas!” But one voice calls out “Jesus!” It is one of the apostles: Judas (Anthony Geary).

Michel de Ghelderode’s passion play, written in 1928 for the Flemish Popular Theatre, may be a modern masterpiece. Its hero--not Christ, but Barabbas--prefigures the sacred thieves of Genet, who find authenticity in murder. Its form is loose, its language grandiose, its humor low. A prim production would be all wrong.

Winge’s production is equally wrong. As with his direction of “Three Sisters” at the Theatre Center last season, his aim seems to be to overturn the play--to make it dance, at all costs, to his tune.

Winge knows how to station figures on a stage. He and his designer, Timian Alsaker (both on loan from the National Theatre of Norway) provide many striking stage pictures. Rightly, the story seems to be set in purgatory or even in hell, whether the actual setting is Barabbas’ black dungeon, or Pilate’s surgically lit balcony or a lurid carnival across the road from Golgotha.

The smell of the thing is right. It’s the conceits that get in the way--and the casting. Rather than attending to De Ghelderode’s tale, we are constantly invited to see what tricks a clever post-modern director can make it do.

Here are a few of the innovations:

--Pontius Pilate (Stephen Tobolowsky) is played like a rookie cop from Dubuque, Iowa, with hardly enough brains to write a parking ticket. This gets some snickers, but has nothing to do with the script, where he’s seen as a fairly canny bureaucrat wangling his way out of a tough situation. This Pilate also makes his first appearance in a bath towel. That gets snickers too.

--Caiphas (Tim Russ) is played as a black hype-artist who knows how to turn on a crowd with his jive. Since there’s no evidence that anyone in the crowd is black, we don’t know who he’s supposed to be connecting with.

--Kari Faale plays Jesus in the first act and Mary Magdalene in the second act. The intention may be to demonstrate something about Christ’s androgyny. The practical result is that we spend the first act trying to figure out whether the performer is a man or a woman, and the second act trying to forget that we have already seen her in another role. (Tobolowsky also doubles in the second act as a commoner--it takes 10 minutes to see that this isn’t Pilate in disguise.)

--The apostles go around swathed in gauze, like mummies. This is to suggest what cowards they are: how they don’t dare to show their faces to anyone. The effect is of Casper the Friendly Ghost in multiples.

--Bill Pullman makes Barabbas as hip and cool a jailbird as, say, Robin Williams would be in the same part. Again, this gets laughs, but lands Pullman in deep trouble when he has to show Barabbas’ dawning awareness that he’s been played for a patsy. His Barabbas would immediately have seen what Caiphas, Pilate and Herod (a campy Gerald Hiken) were up to, and probably would have cut a deal with them.

That would have made an interesting play, but it’s not the play that De Ghelderode wrote, which concerns a brute who finds a newer, higher kind of “anarchy” in fighting for the rights of the weak and the bloodied. There’s a hint of the Hunchback of Notre Dame in De Ghelderode’s Barabbas and that comes through at the Theatre Center in the mock-coronation scene, which Winge stages with a fine hallucinatory thrust.

But elsewhere this isn’t Christ’s Passion told “from below,” as its author wanted. It’s told from above, with an eye to scoring as many aesthetic mini-coups as possible. Theater this theatrical defeats itself.

‘BARABBAS’ Michel de Ghelderode’s passion play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Director Stein Winge. Producer Diane White. Translation George Hauger. Set, lighting, costume design by Timian Alsaker. Original score Ketil Hvoslef. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Dramaturg Adam Leipzig. Assistant director Jose Luis Valenzuela. Stage manager Jill Johnson. With Bill Pullman, Gerald Hiken, Tim Russ, Cameron Thor, Ron Campbell, Bruce Rodgers-Wright, Anthony Geary, Susan Peretz, Ann Hearn, Stephen Tobolowsky, Kari Faale, Cameron Thor. Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Sept. 14. Tickets $10-$22. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 955-9960.