April 19–26, 2001

Terrible Beauty

Pig Iron’s new work asks profound questions about art and the unspeakable.

by David Anthony Fox

The Art Of Anodyne: The Pig Iron production raises questions about the portrayal of the horrific in art.

Anodyne

Pig Iron Theatre Company at Smoke, 233 Bread St., through April 29, 215-627-1883

An "anodyne" is a source of comfort, a reliever of pain. In the context of the title of Pig Iron’s new theater piece, it describes a moot comfort at best. Anodyne uses a series of images — photographic and live — to probe and question an audience’s relationship to artistic representations of violence. Do we draw comfort from these images, or is our interest voyeuristic? Can art ever really help us comprehend the incomprehensible?

So much of Anodyne should not be revealed that I’m faced with trying to describe it to you in only shadowy terms. But let me say at the outset that it’s an immensely impressive work, intellectually rigorous, the rare theater event that you will remember and discuss long afterward. Do not miss it!

In grappling with artistic depictions of cruelty, Anodyne goes for the jugular and uses a most emotionally charged example: the Holocaust. The audience begins in an art gallery, where we see a series of stunning black-and-white photographs of life in a Polish postwar ghetto. The works are both beautiful and horrifying, and as we wait to be called away for the continuation of the piece, we grow uneasy. Should we be looking at the pictures at all? Are we reconciling our emotions, or simply turning the photographs into chic wallpaper?

The incongruity grows clearer when we begin a literal and figurative descent into a world of live depiction. Here I must be more evasive, but I can say that we are confronted with a series of vignettes that are every bit as beautiful as the photographs, and even more compelling and disturbing. We find ourselves fighting an internal battle — responding to each section with aesthetic appreciation, or succumbing to the story it tells.

Anodyne draws on existing source material, but is very much its own work. It is site-specific, and makes brilliant use of Smoke’s labyrinthine basement. The pictures — all of them — will haunt you long after you leave. But more important, you will continue to ponder a basic question — can art ever be an anodyne?

Everything about the piece — Dan Rothenberg’s direction most of all, but the concept and design work by the Pig Iron company — is superbly cohesive. I have two small cavils. Very occasionally, a vignette will turn too self-consciously theatrical, momentarily losing its thrust. More seriously, I question here — as I always do — the issue of using the Holocaust for emotional button-pushing. In fact, Anodyne uses it for precisely this reason, but that doesn’t entirely exempt the piece.

But these are minor points in the face of a tremendous achievement. I urge you to book tickets soon — this will be the hottest production in Philadelphia, and each performance can accommodate fewer than 90 people. (And, by the way, as I write this, I flinch at the inappropriateness of trying to turn such a serious work into a hit show. It is this power to confound that makes Anodyne such a profound experience.)