Buddha: In His Own Words
The Life of the Buddha assembled from the original texts
written and performed by Evan Brenner
off-off-Broadway
Siddartha Gautama, a prince of the warrior class, now known as The Buddha,
lived 2500 years ago. His writings have been preserved in fifty volumes. Evan
Brenner (a Buddhist priest) has selected the material about the Buddha's own
life and distilled it into a ninety-minute monologue: Buddha: In His Own
Words. There are some other characters - Ananda the servant, the charioteer,
the devil himself - but for the overwhelmig bulk of the piece, it's the Buddha
himself who's speaking.
The text is carefully structured. The familiar story of the Prince abandoning
the life of pleasure forms the first act, and the climax is, of course, the
great Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The second act is often weak in this
sort of script, but here it's strong, well conceived, focusing on the Buddha's
ministry. In fact, the story is at its best here, thrust by the drive of the
spread of the teaching and the joy of new converts: "And then there were
six… And then there were sixty-one… And then there were thousands…"
Its fantastic closing passage concerns the revenge of the Slave Prince, a story
that will probably be new to many.
What's more, the writing is elegant. It uses poetic repitition. We hear phrases
repeated like "the four great continents with their surrounding islands
numbering two thousand". We hear sentences like "Wide open were the
doors to Nirvana" and "There is this teaching discovered by me."
Brenner's imbedded the rhetorical devices in the script so that they're not
intrusive.
Like any miracle play, this script's purpose is to teach, and we indeed hear
the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism are repeated a few times. Brenner's expression
of them is particularly accessible, as we're reminded to "let go of the
origin of suffering, which is selfish craving."
Brenner has commanding speech and has a refined sense of gesture. He could be
a first-rate storyteller. But this is a monologue in the first person, and it
cries for an actor's technique, which Brenner lacks. There's no evidence of
the choices actors make. To whom is the Buddha speaking? His best pupil? His
slowest pupil? When Brenner says "I fight on", he shakes his fist,
and the line cries for subtext.
Indeed, the production apparently has no director. The concept is right: Brenner
stands barefoot in colorless clothes, with no set but a chair. But for some
reason, he never takes the lotus position, only a sort of half-lotus. There
are self-contained stories in the script, but they're not defined in the staging.
Worst, his trim, nice-boy haircut is a glaring anomaly on the stage.
But be that as it may. Buddha: In His Own Words is a religious and stage
event, and we're happy to have it. I saw it in previews. It "opens"
on an unspecified date "a few months away", on West 25th Street in
New York. See www.thebuddhaplay.com. It
was born in Cambridge about 18 months ago.
- Steve Capra
February 2008