When I called down to the office to hear my managing editor tell me: "The Ladies of the Camellias review? No, I don’t think anyone will touch it," I wasn’t surprised. At all. Because if, well, no one reads art show reviews like those with a vested interest in the art show, no one, no one, runs to the theater reviews quite like those in the theater department. And the response usually ain’t pretty. I’ve been backstage in Seaver when an issue of TSL was pissed upon in communal pantomime, I’ve heard professors say they will never again open an issue after reading a critical review, I’ve been yelled at by friends of mine after an ad in this paper referred to the Theater Department as "THE MAN."

You can see why anyone remotely involved with theater here would be reluctant to jump at the opportunity to write on Ladies of the Camellias. One potential writer, after he/she was told he/she could write it anonymously, said "I think [the faculty] would be able to tell it was me anyway." And she’s right.

If anyone in the department didn’t like what they read, they would find out who wrote it. And if you’re looking to get cast in a play, or even if you just have to deal with the faculty of the theater department day after day, you’re not going to risk it. Which is too bad, because this college ought to know how its art is perceived by people who care about that art and those who make it. Instead, the department seems content to make theater for itself, never engaging its role on campus or in any larger context.

It is strange, then, that the Theater Department is so enamored with plays about theater, plays that attempt to grapple with that very dilemma. The Ladies of the Camellias, directed by Leonard Pronko, tells the story of two Actresses, Sarah Bernhardt (Caroline Reck SC ‘00) and Eleonora Duse (Rachel Myers SC ’02) performing the same part in the same play–LADY of the camellias, written by Alexander Dumas (Patrick McMahon (’00)–in the same theater in Paris in the late 1890’s.

They are your typical prima-donnas, and their world is disrupted slightly less than one would expect when a Russian anarchist, Ivan (Jeff Mattlin HMC ’00), storms into the theater and holds the company hostage in exchange for two political prisoners. As if the theatrical incestuosness already wasn’t enough, Cyrano DeBergerac (James Waterman ’01 playing the actor Coquelin) comes flying onto the stage from another performance to save the day.

Most of the action functions as a stage for the good ol’ debate on the merits of "the play." Ivan rails against the excesses of actors and the role of theater as a glorified distraction from injustice: "No one goes on the stage to change the world, Madame. You entertain them and they pay to be entertained. You are an amusement, a luxury, a pastime." This attack allows for the actors and writer to defend their art, as when Dumas declares that "we are not in the business of feeding peoples stomachs but their souls…civilization changes the world, boy, not explosives." It is all really very charming, until mid-way through the second act it begins to feel like an extensive justification for why it is this play is being acted, why it is that we are all sitting here in this dark room watching this spectacle. And once a work of art begins to mak

Ladies of the Camellias is a quintessential Pomona play for reasons other than its obsession with its own merit (check Our Country’s Good). It’s a period piece, the type of which we seem to be particularly fond (Learned Ladies, Threepenny Opera, Dancing at Lughnasa, etc.), replete with historic gags (the young girl apprentice will grow up to be the famous actress Gabrielle Rejane. Who knew!) and extravagant costumes (designed to a perfectionist hilt by Sherry Linnel), and it’s got a few thick accents thrown in for good measure. But undoubtedly its familiarity is tied first and foremost to its cast and the style in which they’re directed.

Jeff Mattlin yells a lot, loud and angry; Patrick McMahon does his suave Orson Welles imitation, all elegance and slightly sinister smile. Damon Vecci ’02 and Greg Conroy ’00 totally conquer the insecure narcissism of the lead male actors, but its not something we haven’t seen them do (Vecci did it well in Antigone as did Conroy in Our Country’s Good.) Caroline Reck is all fluid show-womanship as is Rachel Myers’ Duse (although of a slightly more neurotic brand), while James Waterman flies onto the stage in a costume as oppressive as his stage-presence (that’s meant to be a compliment, JB).

The odd thing about Camellias is that these are all solid performances. Myers and Reck have the pompousness down, McMahon the smooth arrogant gentility. These actors have been working on these roles for much longer than six weeks, and it shows. But while there is real insecurity in Vecci’s Worms and real ego in Reck’s Bernhardt, there isn’t much else.

This would be no small achievement on the part of Vecci and Reck if we didn’t know what these actors were capable of, if we hadn’t seen those subtle moments where 100 emotions read on the face of Reck’s Maggie (Lughnasa) in an instant, if we hadn’t seen McMahon’s distressingly powerful Oedipus at Colonus, which remains the best amateur performance I’ve ever seen. All of the actors in Ladies of the Camellias performed their roles to perfection–but they were asked to do very little with those roles, and it showed.

It could be quickly countered that Camellias demands performances of this kind–that a farce about the egos of the theater must paint those egos in the light of caricature or it won’t have any effect. But it is precisely in self-conscious theater of this kind that the demand on the actors is greatest–not only must a mask of neurosis (if you’re Duse) or a façade of courage (if your Coquelin) be demonstrated to the audience for the play to have effect, but for it to have meaning we need to glimpse the cracks in that façade, the doubt and fragility of those masks. When Cyrano asks in a moment of humble introspection, "what am I doing?" we should see, for an instant, his doubt–and it could be powerful. Instead, its delivered as just another gag.

I don’t think I’m asking too much of student theater. Yet it would certainly involve risk, and the theater department has demonstrated its unwillingness to take risks in every facet of its management. Two actors were cast in both Camellias and Lughnasa (Waterman and Reck), and they were, of course, perfect for both roles. They were the safe and easy choice. But this is a college theater department, majors are required to audition and work on shows, and very little money needs to be made on tickets–and its not like the cast brings in ticket sales anyway. This is not varsity football, no one is going to resign if a show doesn’t go over well–yet every decision is based on the fear of cracks in the seams.

This appeal to safety isn’t limited to casting decisions, it infects every aspect of the department (and is the reason its hard to get people to write these reviews). Security chooses plays that will come together easily, like Antigone and Cammelias, and then lets the pieces fall in place, for fear that any stretch might prove unsuccessful. The logic seems to be: better to do little and do it well. There is a running joke in Camellias, that a director is someone who "tells the actors where to stand." And one gets the impression that not much else happened in rehearsals. The actors hit their targets, but those targets were placed at, what is for these players, insulting distances. No wonder everyone hit a bull’s eye–they were hitting them at the auditions (I was there). The tragedy is not only that the actors aren’t pushed but that the audience is staying away, and if they’re there, they aren’t thinking: security makes dull dull theater. Do you think its just because the Allen Theater seats more than the Large Studio that there were empty seats at Camellias while the senior recitals last week were sold out?

This reluctance to engage the audience on any meaningful level is particularly saddening in a play that both mocks the trivialities of the theater while demanding it be acknowledged as relevant art. The department managed not to listen to the lines of its own play: Camellias argues that in and of itself, theater means little–the play is irrelevant when it only acts as a vehicle of flamboyant distraction and a stage upon which actors can hide their insecurities behind puffy shirts (I know–I am one.) In the end of the play, the political prisoners aren’t released, for Bernhardt and Duse are considered by the police expendable. And Ivan is exposed as a struggling actor–it turns out the prisoners don’t want to be associated with a "theatrical" person. The joke is, hah-hah, nobody takes these people seriously anyway, and while that doesn’t seem to bother Bernhardt and Duse, it ought to bother us to realize that we don’t either. Cammelias seemed to be content with its own expendability–as was the audience. A play doesn’t hold up the mirror to life simply because it includes a line about "theater holding up a mirror to life," and it isn’t socially relevant just because it jokes about the "distractions of the bourgeoisie." Yet we are satisfied with the illusion of relevant art just as Bernhardt is with the illusion of creation. When Duse asks in the final moments, "How will they know what happened here?" the answer is an easy one: they won’t. It will have been forgotten.