Mayenburg's unblinking, uncompromising moral satire 'The Ugly One' is a very un-American beauty
Alfredo Narciso, Lisa Joyce Julieta Cervantes
12:58 pm Feb. 21, 2012
In his internationally acclaimed satire The Ugly One, now at Soho Rep. (on through Feb. 26), German playwright Marius Von Mayenburg plays with the theatrical principle that simply calling a character ugly—or beautiful—makes him so.
The fact that the play freakishly transforms the good-looking actor Alfredo Narciso into someone hideous is not so much the point. Rather, the fun—and the force—of Von Mayenburg’s deft absurdist conceit is that, with the precision of a plastic surgeon, he detaches the concept of ugliness itself from any individual human face, thus giving us an opportunity to regard ugliness, and its power, in the abstract.
The audience is seated bleacher-style, and divided in two groups set on opposite sides of the painfully bare, fluorescent-lit stage (designed with wit by Eugene Lee). One cannot avoid scrutinizing the faces of—or being scrutinized by—fellow audience members while watching the plot unfold. Von Mayenburg paces his harsh little parable well: Lette’s quest for physical perfection takes us on a jittery, jolting ride that lasts less than an hour but is packed with unexpected, yet cruelly logical, consequences.
The story begins when Lette, an engineer who has developed a new type of wiring, learns that his boss will not send him to a convention to present his own invention, but will send his unskilled assistant instead. When Lette demands to know why, his boss is surprised.
“You don’t know?” he gasps. “No one’s ever told you?”
Lette’s naïveté is shattered when his boss bluntly breaks it to him: “We can’t stand the sight of you.”
It's the sort of secret paranoia most of us have about some aspect of ourselves or how the world perceives us (Is my nose too long? Do I walk funny? Do people hate my hair?), only here the paranoia we mainly take to be fully in our heads comes tumbling out of the mouths of others.
In the first of Von Mayenburg’s unceremonious scene changes, which allow the action to gallop loopily from one point of conflict to the next, Lette turns around and, mid-sentence, confronts his wife about this revelation of his unattractiveness. Fanny, his wife (Lisa Joyce, who brilliantly executes her three rotating roles) is hardly reassuring.
“I thought you knew,” she frowns. “I’ve always admired you for coping so well.”
“With what?” Lette demands, aghast.
“The fact that you’re unspeakably ugly.”
Lette, who we realize never worried about his image before, decides to undergo radical surgery that will entirely destroy, and then reconstruct, his face. When his bandages are removed, the others are stunned: Lette, they say, now looks incredibly attractive. With his wife—and countless other women—now lusting after him, and his boss eagerly promoting him, Lette’s internal sense of himself quickly adjusts to reflect the hyperbolic approval he is now receiving from the world around him.
In short order he is transformed into a cocky, philandering egotist. But just when he has the world on a string, that string gets cut by the same surgeon who created his new face. The surgeon (Andrew Garman, who also plays Lette’s boss), realizing the face-job he gave Lette has become an in-demand sensation, has begun performing the exact same operation on other patients—including Lette’s own lowly assistant (the amusingly dry Steven Boyer). With beautiful faces everywhere, Lette’s ceases to make him special—even his own wife loses interest and commences having an affair with the assistant (“I only sleep with Karlmann because he looks like you,” she says in her own defense.)
Meanwhile, the randy old socialite who has become Lette’s own mistress (also Lisa Joyce, in a comic turn that rivals Kristen Wiig at her most deranged) now has a slew of other men at her beck and call, all of whom are dead ringers for Lette. Finding himself a miserable clone, Lette begs the surgeon to give him his old face back, but as in all "be careful what you wish for" stories, it’s too late—the surgeon won't do it, and handsome, ordinary Lette must live with the consequences of his misguided desire.
The story of The Ugly One is, indeed, ugly: Von Mayenburg presents his world in a blunt, unsentimental style that does not attempt to apologize for the moral failures of its more or less idiotic people. As such, the playwright’s voice registers as distinctly European—new American plays almost always try to sweeten their bitter observations about humanity with a sugary dose of hopefulness or redemption. (One exception to this rule is the terrific work of Thomas Bradshaw, most recently the writer of Burning at The New Group, who, not incidentally, has been frequently produced and much admired in Von Mayenburg’s homeland of Germany.)
It was exciting, and significant, to glance across the stage and see, among others in the brightly lit audience seating, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, who of all American writers knows best how to deploy this perhaps non-American strategy of unblinking, uncompromising moral satire. Lisa Joyce (who has also worked with Shawn) and Andrew Garman (a frequent collaborator of Bradshaw’s) succeeded most effortlessly at playing the cold, cruel humor of Von Mayenburg’s piece without attempting to soften their roles or lend them any unnecessary sense of emotional depth.
Alfredo Narciso, in the lead role, though, seemed to miss the mark somewhat (and was not helped by the shaky direction of Daniel Aukin, who leans toward whimsy where a more caustic tone would do): in playing Lette, Narciso spent too much time and energy trying to empathize with a fundamentally flat character. To get across Von Mayenburg’s cutting vision, it's not interesting for us to feel Lette’s pain, any more than it matters what we really think of how he looks. What matters is that we perceive how concepts of ugliness and beauty create power dynamics in human society that, ultimately, and bleakly, we are powerless to do anything about.
'The Ugly One' plays at Soho Rep, 46 Walker Street, through February 26. 212-352-3101.
