The Grand Inquisitor

Exiting the ruthlessly simple production currently at New York Theatre Workshop, audience members confessed to one another. “I fell asleep.” “I know. He had such a soothing voice.” When directors dabble in radical reductionism, dozing theatergoers are a major risk. But The Grand Inquisitor, an ascetic retelling of the chapter from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, at least has the courage of its convictions. What else could explain the holy folly of leaving enlightenment up to an audience?

In the parable within the novel, Jesus returns to earth, only to get an earful from a cheesed-off Grand Inquisitor. Bruce Myers plays the priest (Jake Smith sits silent as the listening Christ), scolding the savior for expecting too much of mankind: “Respecting him less, you would have asked less, and that would have been more like love.” Who then was left to satisfy man’s thirst for miracle? For authority? Only the suffering Church.

Dostoyevsky marshals his rebuke to organized religion as beautifully as a legal prosecution, taking as precedent only Christ’s own actions. But legendary director Peter Brook is our god in the theater, and it’s hard not to take this as chastisement for the thirst for spectacle. Brook experiments with the very smallest amount of production that a stage can sustain, and yet the rigor reads as many things—including arrogance. Why make Myers’s few gestures so stultifyingly literal? Sometimes even austerity is self-indulgent. The space should be empty? Fine. But fill it up with metaphor, or a performance that can lead us into temptation. Even J.C. needed something to wake Lazarus up.