Edition: U.S. / Global

THEATER REVIEW: THE MAN WHO; Peter Brook Charts Twists and Turns Of the Human Mind

Published: March 15, 1995

Running a mere 100 minutes and played without an intermission, Peter Brook's hypnotizing new theatrical work, "The Man Who," would seem to be as spare and tightly constructed as his 10-hour "Mahabharata" was winding and discursive. Yet "The Man Who" is no less an epic. It's as vast and mysterious as the human imagination, and as commonplace as the image of a man trying to shave himself, but failing.

The work was inspired by, but is in no way a conventional stage adaptation of, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," Oliver Sacks's best-selling collection of case histories about the neurologically impaired. Performed by a superb ensemble of four actors and one musician, this series of fables is an adventurous journey through the mind, as well as a demonstration of a very rare kind of dedicated theater craft.

"The Man Who" is not really a play. It's certainly not a documentary. Call it a performance piece. However you categorize it, it's one of the season's major theatrical events. Under the aegis of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it opened on Monday night at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn, where it will be through April 9.

Consider this fable about a young man who sits immobile in a hospital room, having lost all feeling in his body from the neck down. He comes to realize that if he concentrates on his right arm, he can raise it. He can even make the right hand grasp the side of the chair. With more concentration he is able to stand, and as long as he sees his feet, he is able to move around the room, lurching in the stiff-legged manner of Frankenstein's monster.

"I can walk," he announces, "but nothing has been achieved." Each day the young man must again learn to do what he did the day before. "There are no habits," he says with resignation, "only tricks and stratagems." It's as if his body were a land devastated by war, a place without civil order where life's most basic activities have become endeavors worthy of an Odysseus.

This is the method and the emotional effect of "The Man Who," in which the four actors switch easily back and forth between their roles as patients and doctors with each new tale as the performance proceeds. The setting is minimal: a rectangular playing area equipped with some plain white chairs, a couple of tables, two video monitors and one video camera.

The case histories have been stripped of most of their medical jargon. The characters carry little baggage in the way of personal histories. The traumas responsible for their conditions are sometimes identified, but only in passing. These aren't narratives of the kind that would ever turn up in a segment of "General Hospital" or in an old Dr. Kildare movie. There are no heart-lifting resolutions.

Instead, "The Man Who" is one of the most magically effective explorations of the mind (also possibly the soul) ever be attempted on the stage, where communication necessarily is limited to external signals. Why is it so moving? Mr. Brook and his associates (the actors David Bennent, Sotigui Kouyate, Bruce Myers and Yoshi Oida, and the musician Mahmoud Tabrizi-Zadeh) pull off something like a magic act.

They so precisely evoke the appearances and sounds of behavior, omitting all superfluous detail, that the audience is drawn into a hidden world seldom encountered in the theater. Without missing a beat, the performance moves from the specific and the familiar into the unknown. The result is theater that is simultaneously poetic and utterly realistic.

Like its succession of characters, "The Man Who" is funny, inspiring, desperate, heroic and suicidally lost. Always, though, there's a sense of awe about the nature of the human condition. There's the patient who's convinced that he's living inside a dream from which he's now ready to be awakened. He's decided that the only way he can effect this is to jump from the roof of the hospital: his fright, he believes, will wake him.

Then there's the ebullient fellow who suffers from Tourette's syndrome, which is characterized by involuntary movements and tics, grunts, barks and, frequently, obscene language. Between actual attacks, he recalls with pleasure some of his more outrageous shenanigans, even imitating himself. "The blunt force of the subcortex always wins," he says cheerfully, although he notes that he doesn't "tic" when he's playing Ping-Pong.

"There's a link missing between the mind and the body," he says, "between the me and the it. Joking apart, it's no joke to be like this."

Some of these heroes have been able to make accommodations with their conditions. Others are not as fortunate. One man is so afflicted that he can't even remember he has a problem. Though now aged and gray-haired, he has no memory of anything that has happened in the last 27 years. He longs to have his first glimpse of the sea, although he saw it just three minutes before. Another man doesn't recognize that he has a left side to his face, which makes shaving a problem.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat can identify familiar objects only through the music he associates with them. Another fellow has lost the connection by which he can say the words he reads and understands. When a doctor plays back the gibberish the man has been spouting, the man's face collapses. "Oh," he says in despair, "what rolish!"

Without condescension or sentimentality, Mr. Brook and his colleagues bring these characters to life in a way that removes the horror and establishes connections to the rest of us. It's not a matter of "there but for the grace of God go I," but of a renewed, almost exhilarating awareness of the mind as an interior universe still to be charted.

"The Man Who" was developed by Mr. Brook and his colleagues at his Centre International de Creations Theatrales in Paris over a period of years. The time spent is evident in the precision of this performance, which is so thoroughly grounded in technique that the piece looks as fresh at the Majestic as it did when I first saw it in May at the Royal National Theater in London.

There's also something absolutely right about international nature of the superb cast as represented by Mr. Bennent (who comes from Germany), Mr. Kouyate (Burkina Faso), Mr. Myers (England), Mr. Oido (Japan) and Mr. Tabrizi-Zadeh (Iran).

The mind acknowledges no borders. THE MAN WHO Inspired by the book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," by Oliver Sacks. With the collaboration of Marie-Helene Estienne and the performers: David Bennent, Sotigui Kouyate, Bruce Myers, Yoshi Oida and Mahmoud Tabrizi-Zadeh (music). Directed by Peter Brook; adapted into English by Mr. Brook. Literary advisor, Jean-Claude Carriere; video images, Jean-Claude Lub tchansky. Technical director, Jean-Guy Lecat; stage manager and lighting designer, Philippe Vialatte. Presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Lichtenstein, president and executive producer and Centre International de Creations Theatrales, Micheline Rozan and Mr. Brook, directors, with Roy A. Somlyo and William Wilkinson. At the Majestic Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Photo: Bruce Myers, left, and Sotigui Kouyate in Peter Brook's production of "The Man Who," at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn. (Gilles Abegg/"The Man Who")