Lower D's revitalizes Gorky

Director Jay O’Berski’s modern interpretation of Maxim Gorky’s famous play, The Lower Depths, follows a large group of misfits in a Nigerian homeless shelter—a Real World: Lagos, if you will. Largely improvised by the student actors, The Lower D’s jumps off from the British script with non-PC dialogue, intermittent musical numbers and assorted musings on the human condition. 

Throughout the play, characters enter and exit frantically and dreamily, in wild mobs and ponderous solitude, in self-righteous triumph and deep, palpable dejection. The set ebbs and flows organically and hilariously. A gypsy traveler named Izabel (senior Danya Taymor) is the newest addition to the shelter, and she regales the motley crew with her travels and stories of optimism and spirituality—to debatable effect.   

The large cast is impressively distinct and acts with a nice balance between uninhibited naturalism and not-quite-caricature slapstick. Characters careen from one emotional extreme to another—in one scene, former millionaire Malcolm (junior Will Sutherland) moves from throwing tantrums to professing his love to leaving quietly.

In another scene, a character laments, “What am I supposed to do?” “Lie down and sleep,” a girl tells him, “there’s nothing you can do.” Read: break out in song instead. That is, he takes up his guitar and a frosty-lipped crack addict loitering in the background pops up to belt on cue.

The students’ interpretation juxtaposes Gorky’s lofty existentialism with madcap irreverence that is at once intensely alive and entertainingly meaningful. The direction gives nice attention to all background activity, such as offhand humping in a window upstage or derelicts shooting up behind a draped curtain while an impassioned monologue is delivered downstage.

Come for the wild rumpus, for the intellectual ponderings or, if nothing else, the crack addict’s rap rendition of “Party in the U.S.A.”