E-Mail This Article to a Friend Brahmin corner Siddhartha yes, frame no BY IRIS FANGER
	Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a Jungian Fantasy Adapted from Hesse’s novel Siddhartha and directed by Eric Hill. Set by Yoshi Tanokura. Costumes by Marija Djordjevic. Lighting by Carleton Coffrin. Sound by Nathan Leigh. With Jereme Anglin, Chris Bolden, Erin Gorski, Alexander Hill, Joe Jung, Brad Kilgore, John Lysaght, Michael McComiskey, Jill Michael, Andrew Michael Neiman, Brian Sell, and Isadora Wolfe. At the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn Theatre, Stockbridge, through July 31.

What if — those two words that evoke a world of theatrical possibilities — Eric Hill had simply adapted Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel Siddhartha for the stage and left off musing about the connection of the author’s life to his work? What if Hill had stuck to the through-line of the novel and omitted Hesse himself and the intrusive characters fashioned after Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and spouting psychobabble that reduces the pioneering shrinks’ discoveries to sound bytes? Perhaps such an approach would have saved the ambitious but flawed Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a Jungian Fantasy — currently in its world premiere on the Unicorn Stage of the Berkshire Theatre Festival — from the aura of overkill that hovers around much of the performance.

For many who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Hesse’s novel about the Brahmin’s journey from the pride of youth to enlightenment in old age was required reading. Hill brings to the project of transforming the work into drama his personal belief in Buddhism, years of study in Japan with theater-of-ritual director and teacher Tadashi Suzuki, and a devoted cadre of actors trained at the University of Connecticut, where he’s been director of Performance Studies. (He takes over the chair of Brandeis University’s Theater Department this fall.) Suzuki’s emphasis on physical expression — as demonstrated in posture, strong physical images, and descriptive gesture — proves a powerful tool for illustrating Hesse’s central themes through movement and spectacle. Moreover, the sincerity of the ensemble’s 12 members — many of them bachelor’s or master’s candidates and graduates of UConn, along with Alexander Hill, the director’s son, who plays the son of Siddhartha — adds a sense of commitment to the endeavor once the character of Hesse leaves centerstage.

The play begins, however, in Hesse’s study, where the 85-year-old author, confined to a wheelchair, lectures the audience for 20 minutes, or so it seems, about the divide between the artist and the ordinary person and his own identification with the goals of the artist. Jung and Freud, never to be seen again, intrude on his thoughts to make cameo appearances and remind us that, as a young man, Hesse had been analyzed by Jung, who was once a disciple of Freud. Finally, Hesse moves aside as Siddhartha’s story begins. The first actor playing the Brahmin then blends back into the troupe as Michael McComiskey, as the young Hesse, takes on the role. He’s succeeded by the elderly Hesse, who gets up from his chair, strips to bare chest and long skirt, and becomes the aged Siddhartha — all to suggest that the author achieved a wisdom and peace similar to that of his fictional alter ego. But is that true, or pertinent to Siddhartha’s fate?

The dialogue and the narration are taken directly from Hesse’s book, with the latter falling in the main to three goddesses: Shakti, Sarasvati, and Lakshmi, who also perform a variant of Indian temple dances. Isadora Wolfe, as Lakshmi, is double-cast as Kamala, the love of Siddhartha’s life, but she is too young and innocent to convey the charms of the wily, worldly character of Hesse’s imagination. Andrew Michael Neiman is memorable for his presentational style of direct address, first as the folksy and talkative Hesse, then as the mythic hero.

The actors deliver the text with crisp, emphatic diction, and they move through the playing space in a gliding heel-toe stride with bent knees or snap into martial poses, one hand held menacingly above the head, as if they were figures who had stepped onto the stage from an ancient frieze. Hill moves them up and down a huge-stepped pyramid cut by a single door. Yoshi Tanokura’s design furthers the monumental, timeless feel of the events.

If the dramatic device of the aging artist looking back were not so familiar — in Musagète, Boris Eifman’s ballet about George Balanchine at New York City Ballet, and My Life with Albertine, the Off Broadway musical about Marcel Proust, to cite two recent examples — Hill’s framework might not feel so overworked. Hesse submerged his life in his writing; it’s an approach Hill would have done well to follow.