Most people remember hearing the story of “Gulliver’s Travels” as children: the tale of a brave ship surgeon who ventures into the unknown territories of exotic lands, people and animals. But The Actors’ Gang’s rendition of the tale is not exactly G-rated family fare.
Instead, the production highlights the social satire of Jonathan Swift’s novel while also shocking the audience with a bawdy humor.
The story begins with ship surgeon Lemuel Gulliver waking up in bonds of thread and surrounded by a group of maniacal little people called the Lilliputians. The Lilliputians’ fantastical costumes illuminated their frenzied personalities. White face paint, bright red outfits similar to clowns and what looked like five white fingers protruding from their scalps emphasized the ridiculousness of their characters.
In an act of political mockery, the Lilliputians engage in petty warfare over a disagreement on how to crack an egg. The scenes of a conflict starting from such trivial beginnings resonated with today’s politics and brought a sense of currency to the show.
Sexual tension also pervaded the production. After a soliloquy in which Gulliver turns down the advances of the Lilliputian females, he briefly runs behind a curtain where shadowy figures engage in sexual unspeakables in a very unexpected, humorous act of sexuality that is sporadically repeated throughout the first half of the play. The scenes were a surprising supplement to Gulliver’s story, but they added to the production’s humor and originality.
Gulliver’s misadventures continue into Brobdingnag: the land of the giants. The production cleverly used puppetry in these scenes to represent Gulliver’s miniature proportions, with Gulliver the actor orchestrating a simple puppet doll. This type of elementary puppetry was effective in portraying Gulliver’s character because of its simplicity.
There is a brief love scene between the miniature Gulliver and Brobdingnag’s queen.
The sexually frustrated queen attempts to use Gulliver as a sex toy; she cradles the Gulliver puppet in her arms, and her inappropriate groping and kissing was knee-slapping.
Later on in the show, the political satire began to miss the mark. A very brief lampoon on Bush and Osama with puppets and projector did not fit into the original tale. It would have been better if the writers had connected it to the plot rather than just splicing it in the show.
And the last two adventures of Gulliver are not witty and entertaining like the preceding acts but are instead rather serious and quite boring.
Gulliver ends his journey in a land where horses are the rulers and Yahoos, a barbaric humanlike species, are their slaves.
The horses are wise, overly serious characters, and their scenes involved prolonged series of silences and slow movements in which they would slowly cross the stage and leave long spaces between dialogue.
This soon grew old, making one long for the lively debauchery of the first half.
But despite the sluggish plot after intermission, the company’s rendition of “Gulliver’s Travels” succeeded in representing the satire of Swift’s classic story with its unconventional theatrical techniques and added bits of raunchiness. “Gulliver’s Travels” maintains the classic aspects familiar to childhood readings but with an adult twist.
““ Vanessa Frigillana
E-mail Frigillana at vfrigillana@media.ucla.edu.