STAGE REVIEW : The Stunning Poetry of ‘Bedouins’

For the most curious, challenging, poetic, frustrating, lyrical and astonishing theatrical experience in town, try wandering down to Stages Theatre Center in Hollywood and sampling the first volley in Stages’ 10-year anniversary celebration, “Voices of the Americas.”

It is--but don’t let the term put you off--a concert reading of “Don’t Blame the Bedouins,” the first movement in an orchestrated festival of several works by a young Quebecois named Rene-Daniel Dubois. Mark the name.

Never heard of him? Be the first on your block. Almost nobody south of the border has, and one is again indebted to Stages artistic director Paul Verdier for the introduction.

Verdier and his theater have just won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Margaret Harford Award for making a habit of this sort of thing: introducing Los Angeles audiences to playwriting voices from the non-English speaking world; voices that have never or seldom been heard, locally or nationally, and voices that are usually absurdist, clamoring, raucous, urgent, insistent and, above all, inspired.

Dubois is all of these. Strictly speaking, one can’t say that a new voice is born. He’s been around for almost 37 years, most of them spent in Quebec. But it is certainly new to us, and once you hear what Dubois has written, it’s unlikely you’ll forget it.

“Don’t Blame the Bedouins” (translated by Martin Kevan from Dubois’ “Ne Blamez Jamais Les Bedouins”) is a lyrical cacophony, a precisely orchestrated Tower of Babble, spoken, often simultaneously, in at least six languages (or distortions thereof) and translated from a seventh. It lies somewhere between e.e. cummings and Eugene Ionesco. If this is enough to make you want to bolt in the other direction, read on.

The piece was devised by Dubois as “a scherzo for three individuals with military continuum” or a play for one or more voices. It involves four main entities, and a small army of peripheral ones.

The military image fits, since the play’s funniest element is a set of Sino-Russian military exchanges issued in code (Santa Claus vs. Father Christmas), while another sequence--the most exquisite--is devoted to a parable of opposing armies in a real or fictitious Japan, whose antagonism focuses on a cherry tree, a hummingbird, and a monk with his eye on both as he fishes for the moon in a river.

Clear as mud. Dubois’ synopsis to the solo version suggests that this is happening in the mind of the Narrator, the so-called “military continuum,” kept waiting by someone who stood him up (shades of “Waiting for Godot”).

Played here by Mitchel Young Evans with an adeptness for miraculously juggling six things at once, this Narrator spins an improbable tale. An Italian diva (a Callas-like Grace Zabriskie), is tied to railroad tracks in a desert, while a myopic “beast” gains on her (Tony Carreiro, who is also, at different times, an English tutor and an American youth).

Stranded on a cliff above the diva, a Teutonic leading man (Ken Hanes), who’d like to save her, watches helplessly as two military trains race toward her on a collision course.

This description would seem to reflect nothing so much as a nightmare raging in Dubois’ iconoclastic head. It won’t make the verbal shenanigans and confusing derring-do any easier to follow, but it sets up a framework. For the rest, it is the immaculate timing of Florinel Fatulescu’s direction, the integrated brilliance of these actors, and Young Evans’ virtuosic manipulation of a synthesizer, several languages, and a microphone, that combine to leave one awed and breathless.

Esoteric, yes. Bizarre, yes. But remarkably funny and poetic, even gentle, especially as one adjusts to the strangeness of the idiom and Dubois’ idiosyncratic mix of language and nonsense, sound and humor, and a taste for lampooning unexpectedly steeped in beauty.

Tonight, the Dubois Festival continues with Verdier’s fully staged production of Dubois’ “Being at Home With Claude,” a radically different, more overtly political play that was made into a film that recently drew sell-out crowds when it opened in Montreal. And on Sunday afternoon, Verdier launches a three-performance French-language staging of “Montage,” scenes and snippets from Dubois plays and poetry.

If either of these events come anywhere near the novelty and excitement of “Bedouins” (the title comes from a line in the play), we’re in as much for a shake-up as a treat. Irresistible, either way.

* “Don’t Blame the Bedouins,” Stages Theatre Center, 1540 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. March 16-17, 23-24, 8 p.m. Ends March 24. $12. (213) 466-1767). Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

‘Don’t Blame the Bedouins’

Grace Zabriskie: Michaela

Mitchel Young Evans: Narrator/Military Staff/Sound Effects

Ken Hanes: Weulf Schmitze

Tony Carreiro: Flip/Octave

A Stages Theatre Center presentation. Producers Sonia Lloveras, Kay Tornborg. Director Florinel Fatulescu. Assistant director Rodica Fatulescu. Playwright Rene-Daniel Dubois. Translator Martin Kevan. Lights Sindy Slater. Original sound and music Mitchel Young Evans.