 'War With the Newts' by Next Theatre: Sick of greasy humans, the newts take over the world
Chris Jones
Chicago Tribune, May 24, 2010
3 1/2 Stars
As spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico engulfs helpless amphibians in the Louisiana marshes, there is something deeply delicious about attending a show that ends with newts smashing up human civilizations to create more protected coastlines so that a triumphant nation of salamanders may thrive.
Environmental concerns weren’t top of Karel Capek’s satirical list when he penned the science-fiction story “War With the Newts” in 1936. The prescient Czech writer — who could see some gathering storm clouds — was going after European flirtations with elitism and fascism, and getting in some well-timed licks at American racism, global anti-Semitism and general human selfishness. But as you watch the world premiere of this very arresting and distinctive Next Theatre adaptation, created by Jason Loewith and Justin D.M. Palmer and deftly directed by Loewith, you can’t help but see the work as an elaborate metaphor for the come-uppance that surely awaits our exploitation of the only known world in which we homo sapiens can survive.
“War With the Newts” is a fascinating, gutsy and intensely creative show that precisely evokes the era and style of Kapek’s creation. Loewith was the co-author of “Adding Machine,” which became an off-Broadway hit, and this piece similarly suggest a sense of sepia-toned fatalism, rather is if you are watching an Eastern European newsreel from this fervent era fused with both a note of silent comedy and a slice of contemporaneous, fascistic, science-fiction pulp.
The precision of the visuals — many of the intentionally sparse and atmospheric scenes are staged like moving sculptures — collides against the sudden intensity of the acting.
Steve Pickering, who plays the fellow who discovers the intelligent and thus malleable newts in the first place, seems to be playing a buttoned-up sea captain. He arrives at the home of the wealthy industrialist G.H. Bondy (played with malevolent complexity by Will Zahrn) with a proposition involving savvy newts who’ve been taught to wield knives and procure pearls. But there is more to Pickering’s character than meets the eye — Pickering gives his man given these sudden bursts of terrifying energy, raising the stakes and making this show as much about European pre-war rivalries and class struggles as the sci-fi rise of an alternate amphibian race. Capek would have been delighted at the multifarious echoes.
This isn’t the easiest work to translate to the stage. But Loewith and Palmer track us clearly and satisfyingly quickly through events as the trained and exceedingly fertile newts figure out that their skills and potential numbers outrank those of their oppressors, and that they’d rather call the shots than take them from dry-land above.
Much of the story is told from the perspective of Povandra (Joseph Wycoff), the industrialist’s doorman, who first lets the captain into his boss’s home and thus feels responsible for all that ensues when man goes dabbling with newt. Wycoff, in fine fettle, fully shows us one of those ordinary men beloved of the literature of the era, at once complicit in the evildoings of those who control their lives and yet equipped to stop them, if only they knew what best to do. The domestic scenes with Povandra and his horrified wife (Jennifer Avery) anchor and enrich the show.
Since this piece uses a subterranean aquatic world that would be unrealizable in the Next Theatre Company’s small Evanston home, Next is staging the piece inside the borrowed Mullady Theatre at Loyola University. It’s not the warmest or most intimate space in the world, but it also fits the starkness of the style of this intentionally fractured and alienating world created by designer Collette Pollard. Loewith forges quite a spectacle, with a boat coming up from below, human realms rising and falling, newt-friendly rain and a few other well-chosen scenic effects.
As exquisite as many of these visual ideas feel, I don’t think Loewith quite knew what to do with the newts themselves. One time-honored sci-fi tradition is never to show us the aliens at all, which might have worked here. Instead, Loewith uses a very few newt puppets created by Michael Montenegro. They’re amusing and imaginative creations (one shows up in a vaudeville act, a further Capek demonstration of the endless human capacity for exploitation), but they feel too few in number and they’re merely glancing blows at newtdom.
Thanks to some brilliantly imaginative collaborators, you have all kinds of things to feel and ponder, but never a sufficiently full visual sense of slimy forces amassed, ready to take over the world and keep those oily humans out of their way
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 Chicago Tribune feature: Staging sci-fi? These shows succeed
"War With the Newts," which you must see, is an exquisitely detailed show and it is clearly dedicated to revealing that Capek (who wrote science fiction before anyone really saw the genre as a separate entity) was one prescient dude.
Chicago Sun-Times: Goodbye, cruel world! 'Newts' on the loose
THEATER REVIEW | 'Dystopian satire' appears crystal-ball clear after 74 years
...Loewith's direction of this multifaceted production is compelling...With its talk of ecological disaster, financial meltdown, colonialism, religious fanaticism, social unrest, military buildups and an overall sense of global upheaval, it could have been penned this week.
WBEZ Chiago Public Radio: Dueling Critics: Battle With The Newts
unbelievably contemporary . . .underneath the fansiful story is more about basic truths with of our relationship with the environment . . . just like oil beneath the seas this is about the exploitation by humanity of an underwater resource . . . its also about the Walstreet meltdown . . . it remains completely contemporary and urgent, its very intellectually exciting show.
Listen Here
Chicago Stage Review: Review ***
Next Theatre’s World Premiere of "War with the Newts" is a wildly ambitious, extremely fascinating and ultimately entertaining theatrical adaptation.
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