Bathtub, The

Does 60-year-old Russian satire close on Saturday night? It sure does when it’s as patronizing, juvenile, and moronic as Paul Schmidt’s adaptation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bathtub, staged with all the subtlety of a gang rape by Russian director Ivan Popvski. Apparently, fellow countryman Gennadi Bogdanov spent months teaching the Phoenix Ensemble’s actors Biomechanics -- that is, to move like caffeinated wind-up toys, shout every unfunny joke, and push their bodies into ungainly calisthenics. (Does this mean Meyerhold had the jump on Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty?) I felt sorry for the better actors (notably Fred Velde and Marlene Hodgdon, who actually made me laugh as an ugly duckling, all-business secretary) and chagrin for the rest. 

The Bathtub, which has nothing to do with a bathtub, concerns the inventor of a time-travel machine, his assistant (Cecilia Arana) who hopes to get him a government grant, a lecherous senator (Velde), a starchy army officer, an acquisitive Japanese investor (Cathy Daves), and an emissary from the future (Renee Upchurch). Were it not for the wretchedness that came before -- including a 10-minute, fourth-wall-breaking scripted dialectic in which the players congratulate themselves for doing politically incorrect theater -- a final tableau showing the senator and other slimy characters unfit for the future being left behind on earth would, indeed, be provocative. Then again, when Senator Hum ends the evening by telling us his first order of business will be “to burn this play,” I was ready with a carton of matches and a gallon of lighter fluid.