Ron Sossi, the Odyssey’s artistic director, directed the West Coast premiere of The Serpent 51 years ago, in the spring of 1970, as the second production of the brand-new Odyssey Theater. He revisited the play in March 2020 as part of the Odyssey’s 50th anniversary “Circa 69” season, only to see the play shuttered five days later by the onslaught of Covid-19.
Now Sossi has remounted that production with a new cast and crew, all of whom work diligently and creatively to breathe life into this complex and challenging work. Written by Jean-Claude van Itallie back in 1968, The Serpent was produced by Open Theater a year later, directed by Joseph Chaikin and Robert Sklar. It was part of the burgeoning off-off-Broadway theatre scene, which arose out of an aversion to commonplace realism. Now movement, chorus, chanting and ritual replaced story and naturalism with gurus like Artaud and Grotowski pointing the way forward. As van Itallie put it, the New Theatre sought to return theatre to its “original religious function of bringing people together in a community ceremony where the actors are in some sense priests or celebrants, and the audience is drawn to participate with the actors in a kind of eucharist.”
In The Serpent, which has been called the “single best piece that the avant-garde theatre has yet produced in the USA” (Harold Clurman), van Itallie uses the Book of Genesis to compare biblical times with modern experience. An ensemble of twelve actors, choreographed by Kate Coleman, carries out the assault on the fourth wall by weaving around the stage in acrobatic fashion, sometimes playing their assigned characters (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Jackie and John Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King), other times playing themselves.
Prominent always is The Serpent (portrayed by five different performers) whom we first encounter in the Garden of Eden, then in the modern world, which is still trying to understand and grapple with violence and evil. This is especially true of the young people in the ensemble who are desperate to cope with humanity’s dark side. In other words, how do we “bite our apple” and respond to it?
Much is mysterious and baffling about the Serpent, but it is packed with humor and sex, as well (with an hilarious mass-copulation scene). The transformational acting style — Brecht’s alienation theories personified — kept me distanced from the characters, but that didn’t prevent me from being caught up in the production’s imaginative and dazzling stagecraft.
