Review
Boston Globe
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Wednesday February 7, 2001
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Karamazovs Keep Objects, Humor Flying
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By RICHARD DYER
Arts STAGE REVIEW
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The Flying Karamazov Brothers in ''L'Universe'' Presented by Broadway in Boston/SFX and FleetBoston Celebrity Series At: The Wilbur Theatre last night (continues through Feb. 11). "L'Universe" presents the Flying Karamazov Brothers as jugglers, comedians, musicians, scientists, and lunatics in a program that mingles physics and foolery, science and silliness, sleight of hand and slip of tongue. Their antecedents in this endeavor are varied - vaudeville, the Marx Brothers, "Your Show of Shows," and the Juilliard String Quartet, which hardly depends more on timing, precision, and ensemble than this fabulous foursome does.
This new show evolved in collaboration with the Media Lab at MIT, which has given Paul Magid, Howard Jay Patterson, Mark Ettinger, and Roderick Kimball some new toys. High tech works alongside primordial theater effects. There's shadow-play straight out of ancient Javanese puppetry, but on the same screen the Brothers are playing volleyball with a computer-generated, spinning Earth.
There's a lot of talk, maybe too much, about science, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and universal field theory, and the Flying K's dress up as Aristotle, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, who looks and talks like Groucho Marx.
Fortunately there's a banana peel underneath every highfaluting foot. Einstein carries a violin and threatens to play "Memories" from "Cats," but fortunately doesn't. "Sacred ancient Indonesian instruments" are mentioned, and a toilet plunger appears. "Shall we plunge ahead?" is the question, and guess where it goes.
There's a lot of crosscultural verbal dexterity - "Every activist is matched by an equal and opposite reactionary." "It's time to abandon the stage," someone says, and soon there's a band on the stage, although no one plays well enough for anyone to stop thinking that the musicians should start to juggle their instruments.
Another musical interlude is high tech. The computer has divided the stage into pitches. By their body movements the performers control tonal quality, volume, and duration, so what looks like a Keystone Kops sequence in slow motion is also creating the music. Another good bit has the jugglers rolling balls along an electrified table and bouncing them off the floor to create a rhythmic percussion ballet. The Brothers use their juggling clubs as mallets to play a variety of specially-constructed percussion instruments in an even more delightful number. Best of all is a sequence in which three of the performers intertwine their limbs to play guitar, pennywhistle, and to juggle simultaneously - you can't tell whose hand is doing what.
Nothing may be sacred to the Brothers K, not everything is comic. An elaborate set of pendulums swing across the stage; the tuned metal bells sound like Tibetan prayer bowls. The performers may rotate their hammers the way movie cowboys twirled their 6-shooters, but they move among the bells like monks, and the overtones sound like the harmony of the universe.
The real magic of the show lies in the basic skills the performers learned as buskers in the California streets a quarter-century ago - an interaction that is both thoroughly practiced and apparently spontaneous; a complete easy, familiar, and intimate relationship with the audience.
And, of course, the juggling. There is some scientific gloss - at one point the roles of the jugglers are coded in their clubs, which change and exchange colors as the roles switch. But the best theater arrives in the low-tech improvisational "jazz juggling" in which the performers respond spontaneously to each other and no one knows what's going to happen next and the clubs fly in a kind of cosmic visual dance. In this show, juggling is not only an action but a metaphor for the way the universe operates - it brings order out of chaos, and accidents happen.
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