Dupes of Hazard
- Jonathan Kalb
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
The farcical premise of Rajiv Joseph’s play Archduke—just opened at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre—is that the young men who sparked World War I by assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand were actually starving, terminally ill consumptives bribed and duped into becoming suicidal terrorists. The madman manipulating them, in Joseph’s fantasy, is a warmongering Serbian Captain, played by the famously deep-voiced Patrick Page as an over-the-top domineering war-mongerer straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Slyly resisting this mega-macho head case, with his unsubtle homoerotic interest in the boys, is his daft and browbeaten cook Sladjana, played by the indomitable Kristine Nielsen with her full repertoire of marvelously wacky gawks, double-takes, and cheeky fist pumps.
Archduke was originally commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum in the wake of Joseph’s major hit Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo—a Pulitzer nominee that starred Robin Williams in its 2011 Broadway production. Archduke was written in the runup to the 2016 election and premiered at the Taper the following year in a production also starring Page. The play is Joseph’s earliest effort to recreate the madcap whimsicality of Bengal Tiger, but it doesn’t quite get there. It lacks the comic bounce and political bite of the earlier play.
Nevertheless, when it first appeared, with U.S. troops still dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, Archduke did seem a worthy runner-up. Joseph was revisiting the same seriocomic concerns, imagining the crazy escapades of credulous and corruptible low-level grunts against the backdrop of great-power barbarism. His 2015 play Guards at the Taj plied the same path.
Unfortunately, Archduke arrives in New York under very different political circumstances. The second Trump administration is much more gravely frightening, and a farce like this, built on the blindness of dimwits, can’t count on the same well of sympathy. America’s great-power barbarism is now being turned on itself, with indiscriminate ICE raids, flimsy judicial persecutions, attacks on fair elections, rollbacks of civil rights, and more, as we all well know. None of that is funny. Our real dupes and useful idiots have now led us to the brink of fascism.
At least Archduke has landed in the hands of a New York director who knows how to tap the power its comic devices do have. Page and Neilsen aside (both invaluable), it’s Darko Tresnjak who provides the chance for this production to rise above its iffy satire.
A play as deeply reliant on slapstick gags and physical comedy as this needs a director to conceive a lot of it before rehearsals begin. That is Tresnjak’s strength. The timing and props of the routines, the look and postures of the gags, all of it he can imagine ahead of time like a musical score, complete with rests, crescendos, and decrescendos. He also finds or commissions actual music perfectly attuned to his imagined worlds.
This is so effective in Archduke he makes it seem easy. I’m thinking of the crack timing of a table scene where the boys (Jake Berne, Adrien Rolet, and Jason Sanchez, all gifted newcomers) stuff their faces while listening to a tedious lecture on Serbian pride, the snappy movements in a chapel scene where the boys pop up from hiding places at enticing offers of cherries, the hilarious mugging in a fiasco assassination rehearsal, and a chase-scene sendup on a train timed to parodic James Bond music (no credited composer, alas!). All this and more rushes and whirs for two hours with the smooth inevitability of fate—no small achievement with a play as absurdly contrived as Archduke.
Another key perception by Tresnjak is that a breeze of sincerity is necessary in this work to get us to care. Thus, the horny, hungry, dimwitted boy trio, constantly urged toward violence for a cause they don’t comprehend, let alone support, actually grow on us over the evening. In the end, we hope they’ll stumble and bumble their way out of their trap. Interestingly enough, the play has been given a new, vaguely hopeful ending for its New York run that builds on this sympathy and that I’ll refrain from spoiling.
There’s a vague similarity between Archduke and Bertolt Brecht’s Man is Man, as it happens. Man is Man is a darkly comic play from 1926 that depicts the methodical transformation of an ordinary, nebishy civilian into a ruthlessly homicidal soldier, and many see it as the work that transformed Brecht into a major political writer. Archduke doesn’t really merit a sustained comparison to Brecht’s play, but that it provokes a passing one is a credit to Tresnjak and his splendid cast.
By Rajiv Joseph
Directed by Darko Tresnjak
Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre