Review: 'Beams are Creaking' offers night of intrigue, thrills — and courage

THEATER REVIEW |

In the first act of "The Beams are Creaking," Douglas Anderson's illuminating drama about Dietrich Bonhoeffer — a real-life German Lutheran pastor who conspired to assassinate Adolf Hitler — the story's hero is introduced as a fast-rising star in his national church.

Fresh from a speaking tour of the United States, faced with offers from radio and publishers, the much-in-demand, confident Bonhoeffer barely has time to absorb the Nazi threat to his country in 1933. He tells his proud family that beleaguered African Americans he met are in greater peril than German Jews.

Bonhoeffer wasn't the only intellectual to underestimate Hitler. But that naïve position makes an excellent starting point in Anderson's portrait of the young theologian and his serial metamorphoses into defender of his faith, spy, freedom fighter and imprisoned philosopher.

In a compressed history lesson that proves, during the show's first half, as exciting a political thriller as it does a savvy character study, "Beams" is the tale of a courageous man struggling with an accelerated destiny.

Matt Shimkus' sweet but penetrating performance as the appealingly bookish Bonhoeffer sets up interesting tensions whenever the cleric arrives at a moral and historical crossroads. Rebuffed by a charmingly hostile Hermann Goering (Don Brady) over state control of the church, Bonhoeffer realizes there is no outthinking the Nazis.

So, with Hitler's grip tightening and crimes mounting, he becomes a man of wartime action. Action so instinctive, relentless and risky that there is no time to breathe for what seems years.

Director Karen Lund and a flawless cast draw out relationship kernels and warm-blooded nuances in Anderson's rushed if entertaining intrigue. Lund's handling of Act One's devastating final moments, in which it's the audience that suddenly can't breathe, is magnificent.

Where a lot of episodic time and space are thrillingly collapsed in Mark Lund's scenic design and Andrew Duff's lighting, the sole setting of Act Two is Bonhoeffer's jail cell in all its grim, daily constancy. Where we'd only seen relationship fragments before, we now have a funny and powerful bond between Bonhoeffer and a prison guard (wonderful work by Robert Gallaher).

Most of the play's (and Bonhoeffer's) exciting ideas about unconditional, living faith emerge in this cell. But it's hard not to feel that Anderson's text (first staged in the late 1970s) shortchanges the pastor's fuller, human complexity a little.

Bonhoeffer's fiancée (Sarah Ware) visits the prisoner, stimulating intense if tacked-on feelings. (She should be seen earlier). It seems Bonhoeffer managed, despite everything, to have time for a romance while trying to change the world. A glimpse of him immersed in a growing relationship would have rounded and enriched this already-fascinating character a little more.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com

Actor Robert Gallaher's name was incorrect in an earlier version.