In Bucktown, Trap Door Theatre’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo is brave, chaotic, and full of spectacle. Brecht’s 1938 play (with the full name Life of Galileo), written originally in German and translated into English by Charles Laughton, charts the rise and fall of astronomer Galileo Galilei. Under the ever-watchful eyes of the Roman Catholic Inquisition, Galileo searches for scientific knowledge. In doing so, he must find a balance between his moral principles and the life he desires for himself and his daughter, Virginia. Such depictions of fully mortal humans caught up in broad societal change define many of Brecht’s greatest works.
As the titular man, David Lovejoy is quite strong. Hir Galileo feels fully realized, such is the specificity of hir hand and arm movements. Ze is capable of great passion and rage, but also of awe and occasional tenderness. Lovejoy is also—and this will be discussed later—almost entirely naked for much of the production and yet does not for a moment shrink away. Alongside Lovejoy is a strong ensemble cast, including Genevieve Corkery as the mostly silent Virginia and Gus Thomas as Cardinal Barberini, who later becomes Pope Urban VIII. Corkery portrays Virginia with an ebullient youthfulness that starkly contrasts the play’s otherwise serious and heavily masculine energy. Thomas, as Barberini, is brilliant in a minor role; his moment of revelation is rendered beautifully.
But the Brechtian style is more about sweeping narratives and spectacle than it is about character work; this reviewer would argue it pushed back against early 20th-century theater’s focus on naturalism. Trap Door gets Brecht. This is a show so full of spectacle and movement, noise and light, that one cannot help but be snatched and thrashed alongside Galileo. Spotlights flash on and off; a laugh track plays; characters spin and run and point. There are five old televisions on stage playing static for much of the play. The walls are covered, floor to ceiling, in black construction paper. Two scenes are played three times each. Brecht’s poetic, dumbshow-esque scene openings appear projected on one wall. Even if individual choices don’t quite work—the TVs, the laugh track—it barely matters. The point is the chaos and momentum of it all.
And then there’s the costuming by Rachel Sypniewski, or rather the lack thereof. The production’s brave, unspoken, and largely successful conceit is that clothing represents conformity to authority. Galileo opens the play wearing basically nothing, and, by the end of his life, wears a three-piece suit. When the Church tries to get him to put on a shirt, pants, or a tie, he goes along, often shamefully or regretfully, as Virginia watches. Barberini charts a similar progression as he becomes Pope Urban: he wears a suit in the former role, two suits and a pair of shorts in the latter. Galileo’s followers shed their outerwear as they begin to see the truth of the earth’s rotation around the sun.
That all of this movement and light and nudity works is a testament to the direction of Max Truax, who holds it together capably and with real confidence. There is not a moment of Galileo where anyone on stage stops believing for a second in the play’s power, and Truax does not dare do anything halfway. Most riskily and rewardingly, characters essentially never talk to each other. They speak to the audience, they speak to themselves, or they speak to the void, but they do not speak to each other. The isolation of Galileo is palpable, as is the isolation of the deeply religious Virginia. The audience becomes complicit in both sin and discovery.
This is not a perfect play (the pacing is too slow) nor is it an easy one (it marries Brecht with absurdist theater). But it is an undeniably beautiful play, one that fosters in its watchers the same feeling of cautious wonder that Galileo must have felt. At a time when science is once more under attack by those in power, Galileo avoids didacticism, opting instead for spectacle. It is the right choice, and a brave one. It draws you in; it spits you out; it repulses and repels; and yet, in the end, it leaves you wanting more.
Charles Laughton’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo is at Trap Door Theatre through June 28.
