F. Murray Abraham shines like the sun in a new production of ‘Galileo’

It’s not too difficult to be transported to another realm when entering the doors of the Classic Stage Company on 13th Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Hanging from the ceiling are eight planetary orbs, gold in color and strategically placed around the staging area of Brian Kulick’s first-rate production of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo.

The scenic design by Adrianne Lobel is earthly. The performance at the play’s center is heavenly. Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham, who is always a welcome addition to the New York stage, gives a masterfully understated performance as the famed scientist who waged an historic tug-of-war with the Roman Catholic Church over his revolutionary findings. Abraham, so in command of Brecht’s language (the play pulls from the digestible translation by actor Charles Laughton), feels perfectly comfortable in his uncomfortable predicaments.

The towering man walks around the tiny stage of the Classic Stage Company like a pied piper, a character so advanced that he doesn’t even bother talking about the specifics of his work — though he still achieves a following. Much of the two-act drama deals with the extension of Galileo’s work, rather than the work itself. Brecht, one of the most forceful voices of theater over the past 100 years, focuses on how this scientist’s public shunning can speak to many eras throughout history. Writing during the tumultuous 20th century, it doesn’t take someone of Galileo’s caliber to realize that the playwright is interested in the suffocation of truth by the hands of morality. Take out the scientists’s theory that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe and plug in whatever concept you would like: With great change comes great resistance.

Brecht’s thesis is not perfect. His play, this many decades after its debut, feels overly simplistic, almost to the point of trivialization. Many of the actors speak in rhyme as they introduce Galileo and his plight. There’s also an inherent sense of theatricality that keeps the audience at an arm’s length from the actual plot. Whenever the going gets rough, the characters break from the narrative and dance around the circular stage. For a man who faced torture at the hands of the Church, his biography makes for light, breezy entertainment.

Kulick, who serves as artistic director of the Classic Stage Company, understands this wistfulness and uses it to full effect. The cardinals and religious leaders are almost clown-like in their dealings with the scientist, while Brecht’s translated words produce smiles, more than furrowed brows. But the director also grounds the performance in the tragedy of Galileo’s difficulties, and this is where Abraham’s skills as an actor take center stage.

Walking around in a split trench coat, the actors plays the title role as a true believer, a person who throws his ambition into his work. When he’s held prisoner in his own house, after confessing that his “true” science was in fact “false,” the man secretly writes new theories in a journal, which is secretly smuggled out of the house and brought to the more receptive minds of continental Europe. Brecht, Kulick and Abraham show us the dejection of this pivotal historical figure through an unfiltered lens. Forget about the planets hanging from the ceiling. Forget about the dances and songs. Forget about the rhyming couplets and clever turns of phrase.

Here’s a man with a dangerous idea: He knows his work his true, but in order to let these theories blossom, he needs to denounce them and work clandestinely. Galileo, which runs through March 18, reminds us of the martyrdom that often comes with such genius.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• Galileo

• Written by Bertolt Brecht

• Translated by Charles Laughton

• Directed by Brian Kulick

• Starring F. Murray Abraham, Jon DeVries, Robert Dorfman, Aaron Himelstein, Andy Phelan, Amanda Quaid, Steven Rattazzi, Steven Skybell and Nick Westrate

• Running time: 120 minutes

• Currently playing at the Classic Stage Company at 136 E. 13th St. in New York City. Click here for more information.

• Rating: