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• "Rebel without a Cause" Review

  • Civic brings 'Rebel' to the stage

    Friday, April 23, 2004

    BY JENN MCKEE
    News Special Writer

    In 1955, "Rebel Without a Cause" made James Dean a star. As the new kid in town, Dean, as Jim Stark, befriends a girl named Judy and a boy named Plato while confronting a whole new set of judgmental peers. Wearing a (now iconic) red jacket and a brooding expression, Dean embodied the loneliness, frustration, and alienation of adolescence.

    And although the film's melodramatic elements threatened, at times, to deflate its impact, the seriousness with which Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo committed to their tortured characters makes it eminently watchable still. In addition, the fact that these actors lived in the time of the story made the fashions, the attitudes, and the language feel genuine.

    But a few problems arise when the classic story gets translated into a stage production nearly fifty years later. Suddenly, the dialogue feels stiff and dated, and the Ann Arbor Civic Theater's actors (perhaps understandably) seemed, on opening night, surprised to find the words of a foreign, long-dead language in their mouths.

    There were exceptions, of course. David Keren, playing Jim's too-lenient father, seemed convincingly at home in his role as a hen-pecked husband, and his posture and inflection punctuated his powerlessness.

    Perhaps most notable, though, was the ease with which Aaron Rabb, as Goon, adopted the play's brand of slang and made it seem not only natural, but timeless. Furthermore, his body language expressed male adolescent ambivalence perfectly. Though only featured in one scene, his stage presence leaves a lasting impression.

    Goon is just one in a gang of toughs, however, and a gaggle of poodle-skirted girls often tag along with them. The women's costumes (designed by Alix Berneis), though they echo each other closely, brighten the stage with splashes of color and the style of this bygone era. The men's costumes, meanwhile, are too precisely identical, so as to resemble a uniform. Though clothing fads certainly cause young people to look alike, this is only an illusion..

    Finally, one-note characters, so typical in the realm of melodrama, create great difficulties when adapting this story for the stage. Ray (David Melcher) is a cop who co-opts the lexicon of the adolescents he tries to reach out to, spouting Mike Brady-esque aphorisms often; Jim's father (David Keren) is a wimp who wears an apron and cooks; and Judy's father (Joe Koob) is a cold tyrant. Such characters seem too simple to be believably human.

    The play does, however, clearly establish how America struggled, by way of its art, to come to terms with Sigmund Freud's then-shocking theories about sexuality and family. Jim (Nick Kittle) detests his father's social impotence and cowers to his strong-willed mother (Debra Thomas); Judy's father, meanwhile, recoils harshly from Judy's repeated attempts at affection; and Plato (James Stevick) wishes out loud, again and again, that Jim were his father. This heavy reliance on Oedipal patterns reflects a society desperately searching, after World War II's end, for answers to existential questions.

    And that's the useful, intriguing thing about watching "Rebel Without a Cause" with the hindsight we're now afforded. Knowing that the Beats - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, etc. - were about to be sprung on an unsuspecting mainstream ("On the Road" was published in 1957), and that disenchantment among young people had already begun to seep through the cracks, we must now see the title as ironic. For only the emotionally distant adults in the play fail to see a reason to rebel. The adolescents, and the audience, know only too well that there's a cause.

    "Rebel Without a Cause continues at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Washtenaw Community College's Towsley Auditorium, 4800 E. Huron River Drive. Information: (734) 971-2228.