Playwright: Aaron Harris Woodstein
At: Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave. Tickets: www.stage773.com; $15-$20. Runs Through: Sept. 9
Rome has no shortage of cautionary tales among its rulers. Famously, Nero fiddled while the city burned, or so the spotty historical record says. In The Fires of Nero: Rise of a Dictator, playwright Aaron Harris Woodstein proposes to plumb Nero's psychological depths, explaining why this young leader brought ruin to his empire.
But when a play starts by quoting Gladiator, and covers 14 years' time in 70 minutes, there is little room for insight or compelling conflict. The Fires of Nero is a portrait of excess that indulges its worst impulses.
Nero ( Nate Hall ) is crowned emperor—or imperator, as he prefers to be called, for reasons never explained—after the death of his stepfather, who was clearly poisoned by Nero's overattentive mother, Aggripina ( Rebecca Sparks ). As musician Paris ( Danny Ferenczi ) and yes-man Anicetus ( Val Gerard Garcia, Jr. ) encourage his worst paranoid impulses, advisor Seneca ( Kamil Borowski ) attempts to temper his spending and poisonous plots. Aggripina ushers in the death of Nero's brother, while his wife Octavia ( Rachel Hancz ) and his mistress Poppaea ( Ellie Campbell ), as well as many men, vie for his affections.
This plot blurb makes the play sound more orderly than it is in performance. Nero may have been a pansexual man whose squashed artistic endeavors and abusive maternal relationship primed him to destroy everyone around him. But the playwright provides no dramatic through-line to flesh out this idea. If Nero is meant to be a contemporary warning about acting as bystanders during unjust rule, the parallels to now just aren't present in the script, and Woodstein undercooks every scene, allowing extended sequences of violence, particularly against women, to stand in for characters' conflict. Historical events unfold with little context, and the mounting number of deaths became funny rather than tragic.
Moments of camp peer out of certain performances, particularly in Garcia, Jr.'s work as a sycophant and stooge. These winks are a relief for an audience struggling to understand why they even need to be in the room for this ill-observed historical regurgitation. But such humor motivates further confusion. Director Seth Wilson asks Sparks and Borowski, both very solid, to play their roles straight, while Hall is encouraged to blow the roof off Stage 773's studio space. The fights, directed by Matthew Perry Smith, feel like they go on forever, thus becoming exploitative. Scenes of intimacy, done by Tori Keeling feel rough and ill-chosen.
The music, directed by Luke McLoughlin and written by Woodstein, fails at scope and dirge-like seriousness, with an early listing off of character relationships to Nero mimicking the opening number of Hamilton. The costume design, completed by Sparks, puts everyone in a collection of shiny and rapidly changing togas, and the less said about the simulation of funeral pyres via orange tulle, the better. The resulting miasma of distracting elements left me exhausted long before Rome finally burned. If Nero is meant as a warning, there are too many bells and whistles sounding for us to hear it.
