THE CLOWN, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at the Lunar Cabaret, and CUT IT OUT!, Caravan/Caravan, Rhinoceros Theater Festival, at the Lunar Cabaret. It was just chance that two of the entries in this year’s Rhino Fest (which closes this weekend) are adaptations of works by Heinrich Bšll, but they play off each other nicely.
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Neither is particularly faithful. Though Douglas Grew and Frank Melcori call their hour-long version of Bšll’s thick novel The Clown “a distillation…not a substitute,” even that’s an overstatement: Bšll’s dry wit and clear-eyed descriptions of postwar life hardly appear in the piece except for a few lines of narration. Essentially this is an expertly performed clown act, though Grew and Melcori do preserve the tone of Bšll’s anomic prose and something of his story, about an alcoholic West German clown whose girlfriend dumped him. Fortunately, Melcori’s sad, resigned voice and Grew’s sorrowful clown makeup are well suited to Bšll’s words. (Over the course of the piece, Melcori and Grew both play the protagonist.)
