The Justice

Media Credit: Mike Lovett From left, Amy Klesert '09, Equiano Mosieri (GRAD), McCaela Donovan (GRAD) and guest actor Andrew Neiman come together for a scene in 'Siddhartha.'

The version of Siddhartha currently being performed at Brandeis is Prof. Eric Hill's (THA) adaption of the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name. Written between 1919 and 1922 during what the play's guest director, Richard Corley of the Madison Repertory Theatre, describes as a period of artistic crisis in Hesse's life and a period of economic crisis in his native Germany. The novel is, most simply, a retelling of the story of Buddha's life; however, it is also far more than that. To paraphrase poetically Hesse's biographer Ralph Freedman (quoted by Corley in his Director's Note), Siddhartha is an Eastern epic sung by the lips of a German Romantic. It speaks not only to the nostalgic and pastoral longings of a war-weary nation but to the tortured soul of the author himself. As the young Hermann Hesse, played by Ben Rosenblatt (GRAD), reveals in the prelude, "Instead of destroying his personality, they succeeded only in teaching him to hate himself." At the same time, however, "the love of his neighbor was as deeply in him as the hatred of himself." It is this focus on contradiction, on the struggle between the "murderer and the moralist" in all of us that has spoken to millions of readers over the past 90 years. And now in what Corley recognizes to be similarly trying circumstances in this country and the world, we at Brandeis are privileged to have the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a masterful theatrical bildungsroman, "if only we will listen."

Siddhartha opens with a soliloquy by the older Hermann Hesse, played by career actor Andrew Neiman. A meta-meditation on the creative personality, the strong and moving Romantic assertions in the monologue provide a glimpse of the conflicted spirit of Hesse and his historical shadow, the tortured Siddhartha. The audience is drawn into Hesse's personality and, through this life force of the play, begins to visualize the spirit of the drama. Then, suddenly, a curtain behind him rises, revealing the three goddesses (who also help narrate the story) in brilliantly colored costumes standing on stilts and towering over the stage. This magnificent display of costume genius is matched throughout the rest of the play by the quality of the lighting and sound design. The lights, which alternate between harsh white, blood red, deep blue and pitch black, and the sound effects-which include projections of the deep and all-encompassing "Ommm," the soft gurgle of the river and a sharp, cold gunshot-play integral roles in the creation and enhancement of the mood of each scene. Held in counterpoint to the rich costumes, lighting and sound is the simple grandeur of the set, which provides an often stark contrast that highlights Siddhartha's own conflicted internal journey.

The architectural genius of the play, however, lies in its coursing, riverine flow. As each scene courses into the next, the audience (in a transfixed state of mental, if not physical, engagement in the drama) experiences samsara, the process of rebirth, delving simultaneously into the characters and themselves in the realm of the Magic Theatre. Equiano Mosieri (GRAD), who plays the boatman Vasudeva and who most recently delivered equally strong performances in the Brandeis Theatre Company's production of Tea and Flowers, Purity and Grace, comments that, like the river, "everything returns." And it does. We follow young Siddhartha from his luxurious yet unfulfilled life at the home of his Brahman father to his quiet determination to pursue the life of a shramana (ascetic) to his disillusionment with asceticism and his entry into the realm of worldly pleasures to his tragic fall to a gambling addiction and ultimately to his attainment of nirvana, which had been his goal from the beginning. Throughout his trials and seemingly endless wanderings we are painfully aware of the inner conflict tormenting Siddhartha.

Also, while the excellent acting (which was only slightly marred when Neiman stumbled over his lines a bit at the end of the play) and writing were integral in the realization of the characters, the choreography by Sarah Hickler, an assistant professor at Emerson College, played an absolutely crucial role in the emotional delivery of the drama. The flowing arms of the goddesses juxtaposed with the writhing agony of Siddhartha, whose movements-alternating between violent and strenuously controlled-lay bare the desperation of his soul, and the harsh staccato drumming of the ensemble was art at its most evocative.

Like the life of Siddhartha himself, the play is a beautiful juxtaposition of seeming opposites: It is at once ascetic and amply aesthetic, personal and panoramic, romantic and rational. Corley recognized the valuable contribution of Hesse's novel in its core theme of the oneness of creation. From this potentially chaotic cacophony of irreconcilable features he molded a united whole. In so doing, he produced a Hegelian synthesis in a microcosm of a complete, if not wholly contented, nirvana.

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