The Temptation of Political Theater : ‘Dangerous Games’ and ‘Temptation’ point up the perils of speaking in political tongues

It’s hard to say why politics and plays don’t mix more often than they do. Theoretically, they should be soulmates--the one designed to enlighten us about the other, the whole somehow bound to elevate our consciousness.

Sometimes it works. It has with some of the plays of Athol Fugard (“Master Harold . . . and the Boys,” “The Blood Knot,” “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act”) and those he wrote with John Kani and Winston Ntshona (“Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” “The Island”).

It did with Anouilh’s “Antigone,” written as a symbol of resistance to the German invasion during World War II, and tauntingly performed under the Nazis’ noses. The more indirect the statement, usually the better. But most of the time, the activism behind the work surfaces like a five o’clock shadow.

Perhaps the sheer purposefulness of political theater is too dominant to take a back seat to artistic creation. Docudramas can make effective dramas, but rarely effective art. Agitprop is by definition propaganda on a wartime footing. The war is fought with satirical barbs and is often idiosyncratic.

The giddy irreverence of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, for instance, is special to that collective and no other. The early political actos of El Teatro Campesino were acts of personal defiance--vivid burlesques in the battle between the San Joaquin Valley grape growers and the migrant workers and strikers. They lived and died with the grievances they exorcised.

And then there is another way to go: with pieces that shun documentation and allegorize political events to make them work as art. But, as a couple of perplexing examples on our local stages have shown, even they must exercise great balancing skills or fall short of their aims.

Graciela Daniele’s sado-erotic “Dangerous Games” at the La Jolla Playhouse is a dance/theater piece choreographed to the stunning tango music of Astor Piazzolla. It speaks loudest when it doesn’t speak at all. The moment its angular body language is invaded by William Finn’s soft lyrics the danger evaporates and the game is up.

The fact that these lyrics happen to be shallow augments the problem but is not its cause. Even if they had been imaginative and clever, the explicitness of words is jarring next to the obliqueness of the music and dance. It’s like shining a floodlight on something better left in semidarkness.

As a piece of rigorously physical theater, “Dangerous Games” acts upon our subconscious. Its suggestions of anguish, dominance, violation and pain are acutely visceral. But when it moves into the realm of the conscious mind by explaining some of this through language, ideas shrivel. Even the dance seems diminished and despoiled.

This intrusion of words reduces the already forced analogy of the second half between the desaparecidos (“disappeareds”) of Argentina and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to an elementary, almost childish, level. The more specific and clear it tries to be, the less interesting it becomes.

In almost total contrast, Vaclav Havel’s “Temptation” at the Mark Taper Forum is political theater that never gets specific and relies almost exclusively on dialogue.

Havel’s earlier plays of repression were anchored in nightmarish realism (“A Private View,” and “Largo Desolato,” both seen on the Taper, Too series in 1984 and ‘87, respectively). “Temptation,” on the other hand, takes off on a metaphysical tangent, then gets stuck between the gravity of its issues and the comedic dimensions of a style it doesn’t quite know how to embrace. The flight of fancy belly-flops, and we have another forced analogy--this one with the Faust legend.

Dr. Henry Foustka, who works for a science institute in what appears to be a highly controlled totalitarian state, decides to dabble in the black arts. He succeeds in conjuring up a cunning Chaplinesque devil with smelly feet whom he quickly wants to repudiate. But no luck. As the fellow says, it’s too late to backtrack.

Havel has said that his play is about choice--man’s reluctance to choose between his own private notions of right and wrong and someone else’s. Such as the state’s. And, indeed, when Foustka is questioned by the director of the institute about his unauthorized “special studies,” he waffles. At first he denies pursuing any, then comes up with a pious justification for his “research” that seals his fate.

But while intrigued by the Faustian idea, Havel (who has never had a chance to see how his plays work on stage) has left too many loose ends flapping in the wind. If he wanted to make a statement about universal temptation--the seduction of man by falsity--he hasn’t quite thought it through. Foustka’s motivations are never explained, so that the Faust analogy breaks down almost from the start.

What, is Foustka looking for? A new belief? Or, as director Richard Jordan has even suggested, a soul? Why go to the devil to get that ? It’s an odd reversal of the legend that doesn’t make much sense and without enough condensation of specific thought to generate sailing power.

Havel, it seems, tried to make a political statement without paying enough attention to making a play. There are too many unanswered questions. These scuttle an earlier impression on this writer that “Temptation” might be better than it is.

Jordan, who deflected some of the play’s European creakiness with inventive fillips (parts of this production actually border on the whimsy of Giraudoux), didn’t dig deep enough. He is content to play with surfaces.

To be improved, the Taper’s “Temptation” would have to be rethought, perhaps into a kind of lacerating Grand Guignol rather than the tepid and amorphous semi-comedy it is now. That wouldn’t fix Havel’s potholes, but it would make the play darker and more virulent, which given the way some of the scenes are written, might send a clearer and more theatrical message.

Right now the devil is played as a harmless imp and Foustka as a spineless, upwardly mobile cad with a taste for kinky sex, caught doing naughty things with candles and incantations. It’s hardly a serious indictment. A fiercer and more stylized line of attack would at least lend the play a sorely missed ironic edge.

Significant irony is also missing from “Dangerous Games,” with or without its words. Its first half, “Tango,” has a reasonable dose of satire, but in the more overtly political second half, “Orfeo,” Daniele plays the sex and violence of the villains against the love and lyricism of the victims in a way that tends to neutralize (rather than exacerbate) the situation. Except for a song called “The Joys of Torture,” “Dangerous Games” remains only spottily sardonic.

Last April, British playwright Howard Brenton and writer/activist Tariq Ali hastily co-wrote a much-ballyhooed satire in defense of free speech that was intended as a response to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s threats on the life of “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie.

“Iranian Nights,” as the 45-minute piece was called, was an amusing spin-off of Sheherezade and the “Tales of a Thousand and One Nights.” Despite flashes of wit and the urgency and sincerity of its impulse, it lacked a true ferocity. Without it, the overall effect was trivializing.

The mandate of political theater is to strike a balance between earnestness and irreverence--the need to condemn as well as the need to deride. Its concepts must be lucid even when its methodology is covert. If art and politics are oil and water, how well they eventually mix will depend largely on how carefully one measures the proportions of each--and how skillfully and diligently one shakes them up together.