The Thousandth Night

By RITA KATZ FARRELL

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WILMINGTON, Del. A Delaware Theater Co. presentation of a play in one act by Carol Wolf. Directed by Tom Prewitt.
 
Cast: Gerry Bamman (Guy de Bonheur).
 

This one-actor one-acter is about the struggle between conscience and survival. The title alludes to the hook: A man tries to avoid impending imprisonment by entertaining his captors with storytelling. While Scheherazade was trying to save her bod, this man is also trying to save his soul. There is much promise to this premise, and there are some fine moments, but the production overwhelms the story. With rewrites to tell us more about why and less about how, the show could do well on the resident circuit.

The action takes place on a single day in 1943 occupied France, in a bombed-out railroad station 50 miles east of Paris. Guy de Bonheur (Gerry Bamman), an aging, itinerant French actor being deported by train to a concentration camp, escapes when the train is blown up by Resistance fighters. He escapes through a window and into the arms of gendarmes who allow him to stay with them in the warm anteroom of the station until another train is ready.

In rapid-fire and never-ending patter, Bonheur protests humbly that his arrest was a mistake. "I am amusing, yes, but not subversive," he says. The gendarmes accept his offer to amuse them while they wait by acting out stories from "The Thousand and One Arabian Nights." He wrestles open his actor's trunk, rummages for appropriate props and begins. But with each new tale, Bonheur becomes increasingly aware of an underlying theme condemning the brutality and injustice of absolute power.

As he recounts the adventures of sultans and beautiful maidens, Bonheur almost unconsciously inserts asides that, when pieced together, tell another story: how his innocent little theater troupe has been decimated piecemeal by arrests, deportation, execution and his own cowardice. With gallows humor, he recalls, "We were supposed to bring the show to Paris. How were we to know Hitler was opening the same week?"

Finally, as the gendarme audience sits in silence before the recurring image of an SS officer -- an effect created by a train headlight encased in billowing steam -- Bonheur shrugs, saying, "So easy to do nothing. So easy to be afraid," and prepares toreboard the train, a man who has found his conscience and shouts his defiance.

Many of the play's most wrenching moments bring a titter from a large enough segment of the audience to suggest that our ability to distinguish between a bitterly wry comment and a punch line is declining.

Bamman, a founder of the 1970s experimental Manhattan Project, captures Bonheur's desperate attempt at playing for time, and his multicharacter enactments are a tour de farce. What's missing is shading: 90 minutes of unrelenting, overwrought intensity exhausts more than it enlightens us.

But the play would be helped considerably if writer Carol Wolf clarified Bonheur's redemption and cut at least one tale from the script, and if the director, Tom Prewitt, settled on a single accent; Bamman speaks wiz zis sporadic French accent that evokes ersatz Maurice Chevalier and the irony of his alleged Nazi sympathies.

Production elements are outstanding, especially in the opening scene, when an approaching locomotive about to hurtle across the proscenium screeches to a stop , disabled by explosives.

This production is being called a world premiere, but under different titles and producers an earlier version won an award at Edinburgh's fringe festival and another production was a runner-up of the L.A. Drama Critic's Circle.

Set, costumes, Mureil Stockdale; lighting, Glen Fasman; sound, Geoff Zink; music, Peter Flint Jr.; production stage manager , Mark Saxton. Opened Jan. 20, 1996, at the Delaware Theater. Reviewed Jan. 21; 389 seats; $ 35 top. Running time: 1 HOUR, 30 MIN.