Review: Men Without Shadows
By James Hannaham
Village Voice

When your most popular play is a scenario set in purgatory, what do you do for an encore? Jean-Paul Sartre's Morts Sans Sepulture (translated as Men Without Shadows)—more or less a follow-up to his best-known drama, No Exit—also deals with a group of people jailed under impossible circumstances. But while No Exit's concerns are personal and metaphysical, this 1946 play depicts a literal hell on earth—wartime occupation, imprisonment, and torture. Despite its harrowing nature and its frank presentation of the dehumanization war engenders, the play's remounting by the Horizon Theater Rep is utterly timely and very welcome.

Act I opens in a prison cell, among a group of five French resistance fighters captured after their attempt to secure a village goes horribly wrong. The Flea Theater's oblong, dim downstairs space is a perfect stand-in for the cramped attic in which French Nazi collaborators hold their captives. Since the prisoners have no useful information, they're convinced they have nothing to hide and will probably be murdered. The situation becomes more urgent when their leader is thrown in with them, unrecognized by the collaborators. As each member of the group is taken out of the room to be tortured, those left behind speculate about who might crack under the pressure. Subsequent acts take place in the interrogation room, and among the collaborators. What the plot lacks in complexity, it more than compensates for in urgency, impassioned dialogue, and ideas. These unlucky souls are an existentialist think tank with a gun to its head.

The resistance fighters may suffer from an overabundance of Sartre's sympathies as a leftist and former P.O.W., and from some overdramatic turns, but the play is amazingly evenhanded and generous to the Nazi collaborators—who, though they commit inhuman acts (tastefully staged but not robbed of impact by director Simon Hammerstein), are at times more humanly drawn than their Brechtishly brave victims. Their petty rivalries and paranoid behavior would probably be humorous if they didn't occur in the context of the horrors of war. (Sound like anyone we know?)

True to existentialism, Sartre avoids appointing anyone the play's hero, spreading its tough moral choices evenly throughout the prisoners' roles. Sorbier, the first to be tortured, claims subsequently that he would have given up Jean, their leader, but commits a final act of bravery in Act III. Henri, the tough-minded zealot of the group, is ashamed to have screamed during his torture session, and later commits a very ethically questionable act.

The trouble with this bracing, good-looking production—aside from your immediate need for a stiff drink afterward—is mostly one of casting. By design, the play is an ensemble piece, yet everyone in this group has a wildly different acting approach. Sorbier mutters his way through an Edward Norton film, stiff-backed Jean projects like a young Byron Jennings. Henri's diction is at times unintelligible, the coltish François takes the stage direction “pacing” far too seriously. As Lucie, the lone female in the bunch, Hillary Keegin both exhibits a noble restraint and looks the part, and collaborators Jordan Lage and David Wilson Barnes have a marvelous, Strangelove-ly rapport, but nobody has quite the gravitas to pull off lines like “They broke my wrists, they tore open my flesh—haven't I paid for the right to die?” Perhaps that's a good thing, sobriety so tough often comes from years of militarized anxiety, and there's still hope that our country can escape that fate.