GIVING NEW LIFE TO ‘BARABBAS’

“It’s going to be interesting to see how Americans react to De Ghelderode,” said Norwegian director Stein Winge. “It’s difficult to describe him. He is not a realist, not an absurdist, he’s just himself: a crazy person.”

Winge was talking during a rehearsal break with producer Diane White and designer Timian Alsaker about Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode’s largely unknown 1928 drama, “Barabbas.” Winge is staging it at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where it opens Thursday. The play chronicles the last days of the thief Barabbas--and of Christ, who ultimately fulfills the reprobate’s death sentence on the cross.

“It’s about the evolution of (a man) from brute to a person who begins to realize spiritual things--and their power,” said the Norwegian-born Alsaker. “So it’s not as much a religious play as a meeting of the forces of action and spirit.”

“Barabbas wants to change people from the outside: revolution, fighting the government,” added Winge, a resident artistic director at the National Theatre in Norway, who, last year directed the LATC’s controversial “Three Sisters.” “He has all the charisma of a good leader, but he doesn’t really know much. The power he fights is so old, so built-in, it’s impossible to win.”

The power Winge refers to belongs here to the lawmakers (Pilate and Herod) and the priests (represented by Caiaphas, who lobbies for Christ’s death). Yet, Winge said, “They’re not evil. Pilate does what he does to protect his work. In politics, you have to make decisions to preserve the power.”

Of Christ’s trial-by-mob, a potent moment in the play, Alsaker noted, “We wanted to make a combination of Billy Graham and Mick Jagger--one of those meetings where the atmosphere of the place takes over. You see that in football matches, when suddenly the (capacity for) mass hysteria can get out of hand--and that hysteria can be manipulated.

“We’re using political anachronisms and contradictory images throughout,” he added, describing that Pilate appears in white tuxedo and bulletproof vest (a gold breastplate) contrasted with the gloom and filth of the sewers--”the lowest, darkest place.”

The three collaborators stressed that the melding of such stylistic images and ideas has been an ongoing symbiotic process.

“You can’t tread on (your partners’) toes, because the whole project is give and take,” said Alsaker, who, as the Theatre Center’s head of design, was responsible for the settings of last season’s “Three Sisters,” “Nanawatai” and “Boesman and Lena.” “If you come to your work with (a sense of) personal prestige, that really means you only want to confirm your preconceived ideas. And that’s not living theater.”

And it wasn’t what White was looking for when she ventured to Norway last fall to discuss the project with Winge and Alsaker. She believes that the complex texture of “Barabbas,” its eclectic--and at times, horrific--presentation, is well-suited to local theater-going tastes.

“Eleven years ago, Ralph Waite (founder of the Los Angeles Actors Theatre, predecessor of LATC) said he wanted to do plays about the toughness of living. Bill (Bushnell, LATC’s producing artistic director) and I agreed with that then and we’ve never changed. We’ve had this audience for many years; they know what to expect. We have to do material that pleases us and hope it’ll be accepted. It’s the only integrity we have as theater people. If we do what the public wants, we (might as well) do television.”

Agreed Alsaker: “(The work) doesn’t have to be outrageous, but it has to be good. ‘Barabbas’ is a controversial play, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because it takes you by the guts and throws you about, shakes you up. Art is there to activate you, not make you feel more cozy.” Likewise, Alsaker’s job “is not just to make pretty pictures. Because then I would have been a window decorator. A designer is there to serve the play, open it up, make it alive.”

“There’s a certain whimsical quality to the piece (in its staging), a sense of humor,” White added. “Putting this together has been a joyful process, and I hope that comes out in the work.”

For Winge, however, the joy is tempered by ongoing struggles.

“Happy? No, I am not happy. I’m working.” The director paused to qualify. “I enjoy this, but it’s hard. Especially the last 14 days: You and the actors are the most tired, but you must fight that tiredness and not give up, just go on . . . . I suppose we do theater because we love that way of living. After all, it’s not proper work, is it?”