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A&E Calendar Activities Dining Guide Galleries Games & Hobbies Libraries Meetings Movies Museums Nightlife Out of Town Radio Class Reunions Tempo Home Mail Tribune Wit lifts OSF's `Szechuan' By BILL VARBLE of the Mail Tribune Bertolt Brecht plain scares people. The great modernist's plays are too long, the casts too large, the content too difficult, the style too demanding. Wrong on all counts, at least in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of Brecht's "The Good Person of Szechuan," a sly, stylish romp that manages to be both provocative and fun. Here's the premise: The gods have come to Earth and must find one good person. They find Shen Te (BW Gonzalez), a good-hearted hooker who "sells herself in order to survive." When they reward her with one thousand dollars -- a fortune in the everywhere/everywhen Szechuan of the play -- the complications begin. Shen Te buys a tobacco shop that becomes a capitalist microcosm. Soon she's being used by a family of ne'er-do-wells on the one hand and an avaricious landlady on the other. She's courted by two suitors, each with an agenda. To cope, Shen Te invents an alter ego, a tough, no-nonsense businessman, Mr. Shui Ta (also played by Gonzalez), supposedly her cousin. Ironically, the calculating Shui Ta can handle problems a good person can't. He soon turns Shen Te's enterprise into a center of profit and exploitation. Each time we lose ourselves in Shen Te's plight, Brecht changes channels and brings back the maddening, delightful gods (Robert Vincent Frank, Suzanne Irving, David Kelly), in part a Greek chorus commenting on the action. They signal to the audience that we've left Shen Te's melodrama and entered the realm of parable. But since this is Brecht, the parable is never a simple one. In his "new objectivity," Brecht turned his back on the Expressionism that ruled German theater in the 1920s during Brecht's youth. In his Epic Theater, many of the conventions of the dramatic theater have been discarded. What's afoot is not emotional release but a recognition of the human condition through reason. We may feel that persons, good or otherwise, are being examined like laboratory specimens. No suspense or empathy here, thank you. If the struggle on the mean streets of Szechuan is informed by Brecht's Marxism, it never crosses the line into heavy-handed didactics. We know reckless adventurers like Yang Sun, the pilot, Mrs. Mi Tzu, the landlord, and Mrs. Shin, the gossip. There's even a courtroom scene climax, no less, in which the villain is unmasked as -- a part of the good person! The gods serve as judges, rendering their relationship to the human realm yet more problematical. Why don't they just make the world better? We're told they "never dabble in economics." Beyond that they seem absent or disinterested, cosmic jokers. In the end, cast members give us an epilogue that leaves "all questions open." Indeed, there are few answers. Rather, there are complications wrapped in ambiguities, ironies within ironies. Gonzalez is a charmingly schizzy Shen Te/Shui Ta. Robynn Rodriguez (Mrs. Mi Tzu) and Mark Murphey (Shu Fu) sparkle. Penny Metropulos' direction gives us a Brecht with theatrical street smarts. Doug Langworthy's translation crackles with power. Saranda Branescu's costumes and Riccardo Hernandez's sets are outstanding. At times the actors seemed to be hurrying through their lines, but that's a minor quibble. Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA