With Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe may have invented the genre of “realistic fiction,” wherein a fabricated author delivers his autobiography. His work may have inspired real-life Louis de Rougemont to relate the Crusoean tale he published serially in The Wide World Magazine beginning in 1898 under the title “The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont[,] As Told By Himself.” The series was a sensation, but a bit of investigative journalism put the lie to Rougemont’s incredible story, and the arc of the rest of his (real name: Henri Louis Grin) life traveled from disgrace to obscurity.
With Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told By Himself), playwright Donald Margulies has brought Rougemont to the stage to recreate unlikely exploits. It’s a bit like how in the early 1880s Robert Ford went on tour with the story of how he killed Jesse James. Except that Ford’s story was true and undoubtedly far less whimsical.
Now an old man, Rougemont (Jud Williford) hobbles forward and prepares the audience to hear his life’s story, then takes on the mien of his frail childhood self, confined indoors by his overprotective mother but transported to exotic locales by her bedside readings. At 16 he leaves home in quest of adventures like those in the books that fired his imagination. He gains passage on a pearling expedition to the Coral Sea. Things get all shipwrecky, and he is stranded on a deserted island with his canine friend Bruno. Years later “aborigines” turn up, and…
If this sounds more than a little like Robinson Crusoe (full title: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates), and if way leads to way in Rougemont’s story with predictability, it’s neither accident nor flaw. Margulies’s play effectively plays with and on a populist style of storytelling, from the progress of the plot through to the evocation of emotions and all the way down to the economical strokes of caricature that depict the characters populating Rougemont’s supposed life. It’s neither deep nor original, and it doesn’t need to be.
What has to happen for Shipwrecked!: An Entertainment to avoid the irony of not being entertaining is what a production does with it. Margulies’s has not written a script that on its own is particularly compelling or ambitious (as opposed to what we get from Shakespeare or Stoppard). Rather, he’s built a vessel whose effectiveness as a mode of transport will be wholly determined by how a theatre company rigs it. And International City Theatre has crafted it into quite a speedy little catamaran.
As Rougemont, Jud Williford would seem to be the center of the show, and to be sure he is perfect in the role (doing a job similar to his turn as Phileas Fogg in ICT’s 2013 production of Around the World in Eighty Days), precisely enunciating every syllable and modulating Rougemont’s narrative with proper emotion at each line. But Nick Ley and Laurine Price are equal partners in the show’s success. Playing performers within a performance as Rougemont’s aides (delightfully breaking the fifth wall), each glides from character to character, as well as jumping offstage (but in plain sight) to do the necessary Foley work to evoke the many locales and atmospheres into which Shipwrecked! sails. They make their manifold and often complicated tasks seem effortless, seamlessly joining moment after moment like perfect pearls on a string. Because they execute literally every duty they’re assigned to its fullest extent, I’m reluctant to single out any particular role, but it must be said that Ley’s work as Bruno, right down to the quick respiration that is immediately recognizable as canine, would lead me to believe he has some dog in him were I a little worse in biology.
The production details are equally effective. The set, the lighting, the wardrobe, the props (love the ladder!), the sound design—all have been chosen and implemented with perfect economy. Director Luke Yankee has brought together exactly the pieces he needs to maximize Shipwrecked!, moving them around the stage like a grandmaster.
It doesn’t especially matter whether Margulies’s re-imagining of Louis de Rougemont’s fantastical autobiography tickles you as clever confabulation or feels like a pat on the head of merely serviceable storytelling. When a production has this much meticulous detail and is this perfectly assembled, it’s hard to imagine anyone’s not being completely engaged. This is an impeccable show.
SHIPWRECKED! AN ENTERTAINMENT—THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LOUIS DE ROUGEMONT (AS TOLD BY HIMSELF) INTERNATIONAL CITY THEATRE • 300 E OCEAN BLVD • LONG BEACH 90802 • 562.436.4610 • ICTLONGBEACH.ORG • THURS-SAT 8PM, SUN 2PM • $25-$49 • THROUGH NOVEMBER 6
(Photo credit: Tracey Roman)