Theatre in Review: Donogoo (Mint Theater Company)

	James Riordan and Ross Bickell. Photo: Richard Termine

In Donogoo, all sorts of characters go racing off to a fictitious Brazilian town in hopes of striking gold. In unearthing Donogoo, a 1930 work by the French dramatist Jules Romains, Mint Theater Company has mined a lode of material that is considerably less glittering, for Donogoo is a meandering satire that, rather than amusing the audience, threatens to talk off its collective ear.

When we meet Lamendin, the play's protagonist, he is standing on a bridge over the Canal St. Martin in a working-class neighborhood of Paris. "My soul, in general, you know? It doesn't work anymore," he says. Benin, a friend, rescues him from committing suicide and sends him off to visit a Dr. Rufisque, a quack who runs something called the Institute of Biometric Psychotherapy. His bizarre methodology involves hooking his patients up to what looks alarmingly like an electric chair, which reads their thoughts and converts them to numerical data. Rufisque engineers a meeting between Lamendin and Le Trouhadec, an elderly professor of geography at the College of France. Le Trouhadec's career has been stained by scandal; in the course of writing a weighty tome on South America, he identified Donogoo-Tonka, a mining and trade center that, unfortunately, doesn't exist. Brandishing the volume, Le Trouhadec notes defensively, "They expect a scholar to go and verify all by himself all the facts that go into a work this big?"

Lamendin hatches a plot to build Donogoo-Tonka from the ground up, starting an organization called the Universal Franco-American Group. "I will be on site as soon as possible, and using knowledge, and experience as an architect and graduate of the School of Beaux Arts, make an enormous effort to rapidly give Donogoo everything it lacks: highways, public buildings," he declares. Surprisingly, he's not too worried about the fact that there is almost certainly no gold on hand. "All that's necessary for all this modern activity is a pretext: a fùtbol tournament, a casino with a roulette wheel, a miraculous apparition of the Blessed Mother," he says. "From the moment that the crowds begin to flock and business starts to boom, and a new country develops, no one will ask you to cure the sick, or heal a paralytic, or find gold nuggets." Meanwhile, opportunists of all nations head for Brazil, and are extremely miffed to find themselves in a patch of wilderness, so they start building Donogoo-Tonka for themselves, driving Lamendin to try and seize control of the situation.

Time and again, Donogoo threatens to turn into a politically minded screwball comedy -- think Preston Sturges meets George Bernard Shaw -- that lampoons that colonialist impulse. Lamendin, we learn, was a painter who devoted himself to scrupulously following the laws of the Academy -- until, wandering through a hall filled with nearly identical still lifes, he found he couldn't identify his own. Seizing on his new career as a con man with relish, he insists that his lack of knowledge of geography is no problem: "First of all, if I have to use words I won't understand, I try to make a sentence from them that no one else will understand, either." Speaking of the team he intends to bring with him to develop Donogoo, he says, "I could have recruited them through official channels -- the architects, engineers, and the rest. I could have gone that way. But it didn't excite me. Competence is one thing, but we mustn't get in the way of original ideas!"

But the play is afflicted with a lumbering structure -- 23 scenes over the course of two acts -- featuring a legion of characters who come and go with to no particular effect. The entire biometric psychotherapy sequence is a good example of Romains' scattershot approach, allowing him to spoof whatever crosses his mind. Several scenes are barely relevant to the overall scenario, and very few of them end with any kind of a dramatic bang. Most damaging of all, there is very little in the way of conflict. Scenes of Lamendin's campaign alternate with scenes of adventurers running around the Brazilian jungle, establishing their society. When Lamendin finally comes into conflict with these settlers, it results in a big fizzle. It also takes forever to get to the issue of Donogoo, as we follow Lamendin through a series of episodes that add little to the play's overall effect. After a while, Donogoo seems to be all premise and no payoff.

Whether this is partly the fault of Gus Kaikkonen's translation, I cannot say, but it is undeniably true that the script tends to bog down in talk. Kaikkonen's direction tries to maintain a fairly lively pace, but the cast, beginning with James Riordan as Lamendin, often seems unsure how to proceed. The most successful is George Morfogen, who brings a certain mad scientist glee to the role of Rufisque and who also captures Le Trouhadec's spleen and his yearning to be accepted by the Academy. It's rather surprising to see the gifted young actor Vladimir Versailles in a variety of servant and native Brazilian roles. The others struggle with roles that are neither well-drawn characters nor wittily sketched satirical types.

What keeps Donogoo watchable is one of the more cunning production designs to be seen in New York in some time. Roger Hanna's set features blank forced-perspective walls which he and Price Johnston fill with cascades of fiendishly clever animated images. A Metro train appears, a door in the wall opens, the actors enter, the door closes, and the train speeds off. Dr. Rufisque's experiments send waves of crackling electricity dancing across the walls. An actor walks up to a video bookcase and withdraws a real volume. A simple, old-fashioned cinematic wipe takes us from Paris to the Amazon in seconds. Hanna's set also includes a pair of slipstages that further help to pace the action; for example, that bridge over the canal breaks apart as the actors step downstage and the projected backdrop shifts from a view of the roofs of Paris to an evocative streetscape. Reading Donogoo, it seems almost impossible to stage, but Hanna and Johnston make it look easy. Also making solid contributions are Sam Fleming (costumes) and Jane Shaw (original music and sound).

But Donogoo, for all that it promises to amuse and sting, never gets going. At the end of the day, its point is as elusive as Donogoo itself.--David Barbour