[ssba]
Fishers of Men
Reviewed by Neal Weaver
The Hudson Mainstage
Through August 30.
RECOMMENDED:
Rick Segall’s epic solo-drama focuses on the last hours of Jesus’ disciple, Simon Peter, later canonized as St. Peter. Condemned to death for refusing to reject Jesus and accept the Roman emperor as a living god, he spends his last night sharing a cell with Marcus Attilius Regulus, a former gladiator who is to be executed for the murder of Bastius, the vicious and deformed honcho of the gladiatorial school. Simon Peter is convinced that he and the cynical, murderous Regulus have been brought together for a purpose, and seeks to convert him to his own love of Christ.
Regulus was born the son of a wealthy Roman aristocrat, who intended him for a place in the Senate, but his ideas proved more humanist than Roman. Also, he fell in love with a slave girl his father fancied. When the father found the two of them in bed, he fell into a jealous rage, punishing the girl with death and castrating his son — later selling him to Bastius to be trained as a gladiator.
In the arena, Regulus gains fame as The Barbarian, because he not only kills his opponents, but castrates them in a ritual of revenge.
Actor-writer-director Segall is certainly ambitious. He tells us a tale as epic as Ben Hur, as perverse and full of blood, torture and religious fervor as The Passion of Christ, and as filled with gruesome deaths in the arena as Gladiator. And all of this in a 90-minute one-man-show. But it’s also a literate, densely written piece, sparked by an authentic religious fervor. Segall takes his material seriously, and he means for us to do so, too.
His performance is the sort for which the phrase tour de force was invented: eloquent, passionate, larger than life, and vividly striking, as he portrays the devout Simon Peter, the vengeful and bitter Regulus, the sadistic and twisted Bastius, and numerous other characters. He doesn’t quite achieve quite all he set out to do (Simon Peter seems at moments to be more a dedicated and peppy youth leader than the founder of the Church of Rome), but what Segall does is impressive.
It doesn’t help, however, that the producers, Matafied Productions, have chosen to use the program notes to tell us how thrilled we’re going to be by the show — a sure-fire way to inspire resistance and throw a wet blanket over the proceedings.
The Husdson Theatre Mainstage, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Aug. 30, www.hudsontheatre.com
Running time: 90 minutes, without intermission.
