The Actors’ Gang captures the tenor of our strange times with the troupe’s revival of Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, which is set in a German sanatorium, or what’s called an “insane asylum” or “madhouse” for poorer patients. The well-heeled inmates at Les Cerisiers appear to be scientists who have adopted bizarre personas, including: Herbert Georg Beutler aka Sir Isaac Newton (a goofy Brian T. Finney), clad and coiffed in 17th century wig and garb (by costume designer Rynn Vogel); Ernst Heinrich Ernesti as a violin-playing Albert Einstein (Pierre Adeli); and Johann Wilhelm Möbius (a quirky Vincent Foster), who proclaims that he’s regularly visited by the Biblical King Solomon to bestow wisdom.
These mental patients are overseen by the psychologist Doktor Mathilde Von Zahnd, played with grand comic panache by Kate Mulligan, who seems like she’s a female Marty Feldman stepping out of a Mel Brooks movie to make a special guest appearance in the Gang’s zany production. In Act I the (not-so-) good doktor is assisted in her oversight of the upscale psychiatric facility by female nurses, Marta Boll (Kathryn Carner) and Monika Stettler (Jolene Hjerleid). Unfortunately, these attendants have a nasty habit of getting murdered by the asylum’s inmates who have a penchant for homicide. Enter trenchcoat wearing inspector Richard Voss (JR Reed, who looks like one of those Scotland Yard detectives depicted on PBS, in an imported British police procedural) and his team of sleuths to investigate the peculiar, bloody goings-on at Les Cerisiers.
In The Physicists Dürrenmatt seems to be mixing a madcap concoction of genre elements from policiers, espionage stories, the Epic Theatre and the Theatre of the Absurd. It’s noteworthy that The Physicists premiered in 1962, the same year that the first James Bond film was released. While Dürrenmatt likely did not see Dr. No (about another insane scientist and nuclear issues) while writing The Physicists, many of Ian Fleming’s novels had already been published in the 1950s.
By Act II it’s clear that the patients are not who they appear to be, and who they are impersonating in the first act. However, in a masterstroke of irony, Dürrenmatt’s characters commit psychotic acts in the pursuit of purely logical agendas tied to geopolitical machinations. I got a strong sense that Dürrenmatt was, in particular, referencing theoretical physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer plus Theodore Hall, Los Alamos’ youngest braniac. These “geniuses’” brilliance helped produce the atomic bomb. To be fair, Oppie was a leftist Jew who saw himself and the Manhattan Project as being in an arms race with Nazi Germany, and he and his colleagues (with the possible exception of Edward Teller, LOL!) hoped to develop the A-bomb first in order to defeat fascism.
However, as Christopher Nolan’s 2023 epic Oppenheimer dramatized, what the scientists invented was coopted by politicians, policymakers, etc., and control of what Einstein and other physicists had also enabled was taken out of their hands, thus unleashing the nuclear genie upon humankind. The 2022 nonfiction film The Compassionate Spy chronicled the passing of atomic secrets by Hall to the Soviets, presumably to ensure that the U.S. did not remain the sole, unchecked nuclear power.
Along these lines, after nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, starting in 1946 the U.S. went on a nuclear testing spree in the Marshall Islands, irradiating atolls and Islanders alike, and even literally evaporating some islets off of the face of the Earth. In Dennis O’Rourke’s 1986 Half Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age one of Washington’s “atomic guinea pigs,” a mournful Marshallese woman, looks directly into the camera and rather unforgettably laments that Americans are “smart at doing stupid things.” Touché!
BTW, The Physicists premiered at Zurich’s Schauspielhaus, a refuge of anti-fascist theater for German-speaking emigres from the Nazis, where Brecht’s Mother Courage had likewise debuted in 1941. According to SwissInfo: “Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt also started his career at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. Without this radical emigrant theatre neither [Max] Frisch nor Dürrenmatt would have turned into international bestselling authors – and Swiss greats.
The Swiss notion of neutrality permeates The Physicists’ skepticism about nuclear power, which we also saw in the 1959 and 1964 movie spoofs The Mouse that Roared and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Both interestingly co-starred Peter Sellers in multiple roles, including his playing the eponymous mad scientist in the latter. The specter of the scientists having been exposed to radioactivity is repeatedly raised throughout The Physicists. Dürrenmatt’s two-acter with an intermission also has lots of drollery, combining physical comedy with satire, arguably the “lowest” and “highest” forms of comedy.
The Gang’s production of The Physicists comes hard on the heels of A Noise Within’s premiere of Exit the King. Stages are turning to absurdist and similar modes of expression in order to find a way to comment upon the increasingly nonsensical insanity of today’s state of the world under Trump and beyond. As Martin Esslin wrote in his landmark 1960 essay the Theatre of the Absurd: “All they can show is that while the solutions have evaporated the riddle of our existence remains-complex, unfathomable, and paradoxical.” As we all hurtle towards oblivion, both plays show that at least we can have a few laughs along the way – even if the laughter sticks in our throats.
The Physicists included some projections and during the intermission, recordings of theme songs from vintage TV series such as Hawaii Five-O, Mission Impossible, I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched were for some reason played (projection design and sound programming by Anthony Storniolo; sound and music design by David Robbins). Classical recordings, including of Beethoven’s “Kreuzer Sonata” (presumably supposedly played by the Einstein wannabe), are also heard. Brett Hinkley admirably helms his ensemble, in particular the awards-worthy wildly hilarious Kate Mulligan as Doktor Von Zahnd and Vincent Foster as Mobius, who runs the gamut of emotions, which includes murdering Monika (Solomonic wisdom, my foot!) and painfully bidding farewell to his ex-wife who is joining her new husband, a missionary, as he embarks on a mission to the Mariana Islands. The B-29s that dropped their atomic payloads on Japan in August 1945 were deployed from Tinian in the Marianas, Dürrenmatt’s knowing wink and nod to nuclear madness.
According to its website, “The Actors’ Gang mission is to present new, unconventional and uncompromising plays and dynamic reinterpretations of the classics…” And man, have they ever! Co-founded in 1981 by Oscar-winning activist/actor Tim Robbins, The Gang is one of Los Angeles’ best theaters, with a decidedly anarchistic, freewheeling sensibility that has mounted many antiwar, anti-authoritarian plays over the decades, including: Robbins’ 2003 satire Embedded, one of the first major anti-Iraq War productions; a 2006 version of George Orwell’s 1984 reimagined to critique the Bush regime’s use of torture; a 2009 staging of the anti-Vietnam War docu-play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, about the militantly pacifist, prophetic Berrigan Brothers; the 2018 pro-immigrant, pro-refugee The New Colossus co-written by Robbins; a 2020 adaptation of Italian anarchist and Gang mentor Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay? Don’t Pay!; a 2022 rendition of Alfred Jarry’s anti-ruling class Ubu Roi absurdist classic; a 2026 revival of Elmer Rice’s surrealistic, anti-capitalist, anti-automation The Adding Machine; and much more inspired insanity that lampoons and is the stage scourge of the status quo.
This whodunit-meets-espionage-thriller-meets-Theatre-of-the-Absurd is for the more adventurous, philosophically-minded theatergoer who also enjoys a good chuckle at the chuckleheads who seek to rule our destinies. And you never know who you’ll run into at the theater – in addition to Robbins, The Gang’s Artistic Director, two-time Oscar nominee and Emmy-winner Paul Giamatti, attended an opening night to remember and reflect upon.
The Actors’ Gang’s The Physicists is being performed at 8:00 p.m. on Thursdays and Saturdays and at 2:00 p.m. on Sundays through June 20 at The Actors’ Gang Theater, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232. For info and tickets: (310) 838-4264; https://theactorsgang.com/.
Photograph by Bob Turton. Find him on Instagram @bobturtonphotography.
