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Stage Review: Open Stage creates a fine 'Pandemonium' from Frick's last daze
Thursday, May 04, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
History is written by the winners, but in the case of the Pittsburgh steel magnates who built the regional infrastructure that continues to this day, it isn't entirely clear who won.
We pass Frick Park on our way to the Carnegie Library and Museums, past highways and railroads built to supply the steel industry, on streets built by company workers paid in Frick dollars.
Our expansive arts community is partially funded by bankrolls originally invested by some of the world's wealthiest tycoons, who earned their money by keeping their immigrant work force ignorant and indebted. The legacies of environmental devastation, violent union upheaval and backbreaking labor are an everyday part of Pittsburgh culture.
In the world premiere of Don Nigro's "Pandemonium," Open Stage Theatre offers an intimate glimpse into the dying delirium of one of the men who made Pittsburgh what it is. Henry Clay Frick, the nuts-and-bolts business manager who was both a partner to and an adversary of Andrew Carnegie, was a tyrant and an art collector, a shrewd calculator and a frivolous spender, a heartless employer and a heartbroken father. As his life wavered during his final days in December 1919, Frick slipped in and out of nightmare and dementia. Nigro enters his hallucinatory mind, a melting pot of reality and fantasy, fiction and fact, cold-steel calculation and bizarre dreamscape.
Director Ruth Willis takes full advantage of every square inch of the cramped Hamburg quarters with a multi-tiered set that seems to spiral out from Frick's center-stage armchair. Spooky grays and naked shrubs, vibrant colors, a fog-covered floor and the glow of a stained glass window help to imply the places and times that warp through Frick's troubled mind. People and events progressively overlap as the dying director of the U.S. Steel Corporation confuses pride and pity, denial and responsibility, and the failures and successes of his influential career.
Despite the multi-dimensional dream sequences, Bryan W. Bessor's Frick hangs onto his two-dimensional stubbornness until the fantasies convince him that his culpability in undeniable. Bessor plays it rigidly, long after the consequences of his character's arrogance are apparent, a device that helps to articulate a key component of Frick's personality.
Sounds and images from the Johnstown Flood, which resulted from a host of errors largely blamed on the wealthy owners (including Frick) of the dam built to create a summer oasis for Pittsburgh's wealthy citizens, mix with repeated impressions of the assassination attempt that nearly ended his life. His caretaker daughter mixes in his mind with his intended assassin, another long-dead child, Carnegie, his wife, a prostitute and others.
Nigro never attempts to rationalize or explain Frick's actions and doesn't distinguish between events not chronicled by history or completely contrived. "Pandemonium," in fact, is about the only part of Frick's life that was not chronicled, the delirium of his final days.
Lisa Davis succeeds in a challenging role as Frick's daughter, Helen, the only additional non-fantasy character in the play. As Helen progresses from devoted daughter to scheming and vindictive adversary of her father, Davis' subtlety as an actress becomes invaluable. Her presence of character helps to distinguish between nightmare and reality, and she convincingly turns a difficult corner in Helen's emotional state.
Eight actors play more than a dozen characters in Frick's disturbing hallucinations.
Matt Grana offers comic relief as Rembrandt and a man who loses his head, literally, during the Homestead Steel Strike. Stephen Scull plays Nigro's vision of a compassionate Carnegie. Andy Jamrom is brilliant as Frick's insecure but determined would-be assassin, and Naomi Grodin handles an important and substantive dual role as the assassin's woman and Frick's favorite one-night stand.
In a town that both lionizes and demonizes Frick, Nigro's loose fictionalization could be taken the wrong way by both admirers and detractors.
But framed in the context of the scathing hallucinations coursing through the mind of a dying man, "Pandemonium" is too important to be ignored by anyone.
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Where: Lester Hamburg Studio, South 13th and Bingham streets, adjacent to City Theatre, South Side.