First, I have a confession to make: I don't really care for martial arts movies. I don't really care where that tiger is crouching or that dragon is hiding. I don't take great pleasure in kung fu, karate, kickboxing or tae kwon do. I'm not really mesmerized by the mystery of Bruce Lee, and when Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne are mixing it up in The Matrix, I'm impatiently wondering when the plot's going to restart.
I'll even go further: One of the great advantages of being a theater and not a film critic is that I don't have to sit through the interminable fistfights, gunfights, gangster brawls and star wars that are a staple of the celluloid art. While moviegoers are wondering whether the guy with itchy fingers will make Clint Eastwood's day, I'm wondering will Godot come, will Stella leave Stanley, will Romeo wed Juliet, will Oedipus save Thebes?
Oh sure, there are occasionally some important combats in Shakespeare and after, but I'm with Othello: "Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." If I want mayhem, I'll buy a ticket for Road to Perdition (overrated, by the way). When I go to the theater, I'm looking for human truth. And I actually get it sometimes, often enough to make the prospect of a new play still exciting.
I make these admissions in order to explain my disaffection with The Acropolis Project, Jobsite Theater's original work currently showing at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. This is a play that seems specifically designed for 12-year-old boys. It has all the right ingredients: the end of the world, the island full of crazed prisoners, the good guys who must learn kung fu, and the bad guys who already know it.
Then there's the race of enlightened females who must learn to trust humans, and a particularly Enlightened One, with a Polynesian-sounding-name, who arrives at the end to announce that more such plays await.
Remember those old movies that used to play on Saturday afternoons, movies about Hercules, or Sinbad or Tarzan? The Acropolis Project makes the same basic assumptions, has the same basic structure: There are white hats and black hats; they will fight; it will be thrilling. Or maybe the model is Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon or Power Rangers. Whatever it is, it's not meant for adults.
Here's my honest, best attempt to summarize the plot of The Acropolis Project: There's been a terrible war/cataclysm, and all life has been wiped out except on a certain prison island. (How would anyone know this? Maybe other survivors simply lack communications equipment. But I digress.) There are two types of prisoners now roaming free on the island: the good guys — former political prisoners — and the bad guys — everyone else. The good guys are inspired by Dr. Jan Ormann Makariat, a Knight of the Foundation of Universal Sciences. The bad guys are led by the nefarious Swann, bred to be a one-man army.
After Army Ranger Knox Frei bails out of his jetchopper, he meets up with Jan, who persuades him to teach the good guys to fight. But Jan is also in contact with the indigenous people of the island, the Dakini-yab Tana, who speak ponderously, mysteriously (as befits their degree of evolution) and who have the rare ability to do kung fu without actually touching their victims.
Now the dramatic questions:
Will the heroes beat the villains?
Will the Dakini-yab Tana overcome their distaste for human "savages" long enough to make a common cause with Jan and the good guys?
Can anyone defeat the nearly invincible Swann?
Can the audience survive the umpteenth simulated kung fu rumble?
Fortunately, there are some good performances in this puerile exercise. Particularly effective is Mark Wood, who as Knox Frei very much seems like an Army Ranger with skills to impart and a code to uphold. Another fine performance is turned in by Chris Holcom (who with Neil Gobioff and Shawn Paonessa authored the script). Holcom looks 30 years younger than sage Dr. Jan ought to be, but he more than makes up for it by finding the intellectual center of his character and never letting go.
Jason Evans (who also choreographed the many fights) makes an exceedingly nasty Swann, and Paonessa as political prisoner Vankelus is capable of surprising us at least once. Caitlin McDonald as indigenous Tempa is appropriately charming, but that fine actress Sharon Chudnow can't rise above the essentially ridiculous lines she's asked to speak as mystic Islander Aralea. There's nothing wrong with Ami Sallie Corlee's direction, though. She keeps the action moving swiftly and with admirable precision. And Brian Smallheer's multilevel set is useful if not terribly attractive.
By now, I imagine someone objecting to my use of the word "puerile," so I want to explain myself. I think it's Joseph Campbell who says that all important myths address the major transitions in a person's life, from birth through adolescence and marriage to aging and death. And I think the same could be said of all important works of theater: In some ways Hamlet's or Willy Loman's or Nora Helmer's problems are ours in the audience, and as we watch, we learn something about ourselves and our world.
But when watching a play like The Acropolis Project, what strikes me first is how irrelevant it is, how elementary and, therefore, how appropriate for children.
Hamlet has to mediate between his concept of the world's rightness before the death of his father and his sense of the world's wrongness ever since; this is an adult, or at least a young man's problem. Willy Loman has to make sense of his aging, his seeming uselessness and the rebellion of his son Biff; these are adult problems. Nora Helmer has to choose between a marriage that dehumanizes her and a freedom that she's unprepared for; this is an adult problem.
But beating the bad prisoners on Prison Island, having better, faster kung fu moves than the next guy — these are, essentially, the problems of the schoolyard. They matter, really matter — when you're 12.
Later in life, we go to the theater for other reasons.
None of these reasons is addressed by The Acropolis Project.
So even with all its martial-arts energy, it leaves me unmoved.
Contact Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or call 813-248-8888, ext. 30.
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2002.