By Bill Marx

“It’s not just some generic ‘evil’ The Arsonists protests, it is willful blindness to fascist and authoritarian agendas. Denial and hiding behind ‘bourgeois’ comfort is the theme.”

Director Bob Scanlan — Samuel Beckett has informed his entire theatrical career, but not in ways that will be obvious here.

Denial is a complex concept, particularly regarding resistance to accepting the climate crisis. According to sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard, denial reflects a “failure to integrate” certain challenging forms of scientific knowledge into everyday experience. The result is what could be described as a kind of “double reality.” In one reality, she writes,” there is the collectively constructed sense of normal everyday life. In the other reality … the troubling knowledge of increasing automobile use, polar ice caps melting, and predictions of [future] extreme weather scenarios.”

Keep in mind how global warming is contributing to outbreaks of massive wildfires here and elsewhere, and the relevance of Swiss dramatist Max Frisch’s 1953 play The Arsonists becomes chillingly clear. The script interweaves comedy and tragedy as it nimbly plays with a troubling “double reality”: in this case, the predicament of an upper-middle-class man who knows/doesn’t know why disasters are taking place all around him — parts of his city are systematically being set ablaze.

Of course, handling that “double reality” with the proper nuance on stage is a tall order. Praxis Stage not only chose to produce The Arsonists at the politically right time (September 5 through 15, at Chelsea Theatre Works), but was savvy enough to enlist a director who probably has the theatrical chops to juggle a “triple reality.” Bob Scanlan is currently the artistic director of the Poets’ Theater. He is the past winner of an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director and served for many years as the literary director of Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theater, where he headed the Dramaturgy Program for the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard. Scanlan has lectured internationally on various theater topics (most frequently on the works of Samuel Beckett), and has directed at a number of Boston theaters, the Poets’ Theatre, the Actors’ Shakespeare Project, the A.R.T., Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, and many others.

I sent Scanlan some questions via email about his approach to the play, the target of the script’s satiric ire, and if he was going to draw on his experiences directing the plays of Samuel Beckett.

Arts Fuse: Why stage The Arsonists now? What appealed to you about the script?

Bob Scanlan: Daniel Boudreau, the artistic director of Praxis Stage, is the one who chose to revisit this play. He just asked me to direct it. But it is an inspired choice in this election year. The play was written in the late ’50s, when Europeans were still processing World War II and asking themselves how they could have “let it happen.” Max Frisch is Swiss, and the helpless neutrality of the Swiss during World War II was on his mind: bourgeois complacency, denial, and complicity in the rise of fascism in Europe… well, It Can’t Happen Here, right? The play is really timely…

AF: Translator Alistair Beaton wrote that “the play itself is an extended metaphor about the weakness of personal ethics in the face of evil. Exactly what that evil is, Frisch never says, though as a Swiss citizen he felt keenly the stifling and hypocritical nature of middle-class morality … in the end, the power of The Arsonists lies in the undefined nature of the evil it portrays.” Would you agree?

Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch. He wrote Biedermann und die Brandstifter in 1953. It has been translated as The Firebugs, The Fire Raisers, or The Arsonists.

Scanlan: No. That’s British twaddle. “Undefined evil”? Give me a break! It deals with clearly defined nefarious threats. The Royal Court theatre represents a certain type of British activism which is off the mark here. It’s not just some generic “evil” the play protests, it is willful blindness to fascist and authoritarian agendas. Denial and hiding behind “bourgeois” comfort is the theme. We don’t often use the word “bourgeois” nowadays, but it is that dirty secret: members of the middle-class (and higher income) — no matter how outrageous the threats are — are convinced that they are not “really” directed at “us”… provided we are white and well off … or comfortably ensconced in solid property holdings. “Evil” is an evasive concept — much too vague.

AF: Reading the play today, what struck me about Biedermann is that, though he is aware of impending disaster, he does nothing to prevent it. The way he clings to denial strikes a particularly contemporary chord. How do you see the character?

Scanlan: That’s it. That’s the play. It’s a huge part and demanding for a good actor.

AF: I saw a Boston production of The Arsonists (entitled The Firebugs) back in the ’80s. It was staged as a knockabout farce, albeit with a serious message. Truffaut’s film version of Fahrenheit 451 crossed with the Keystone Cops. What are your thoughts about how to handle the play’s potential for knockabout comedy? And its chorus of firefighters?

Scanlan: The play is funny, but not a knockabout Monty Python farce. The Brits tend to handle all satire as loony farce. This play derives from Brecht and Eugene Ionesco. It is deadly serious, even though it is frequently funny. It is most clearly inspired by Brecht’s Die Kleinbürgerhochseit (A Respectable Wedding) and Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. (I directed the American premiere of Brecht’s play way back when I was just a pup and won the “Best of Boston” award from the Real Paper). The final scene of The Arsonists is a replay of Brecht’s one-act play.

AF: You are best known in the Boston area for your direction of plays by Samuel Beckett. Is that expertise informing your direction of Frisch’s text?

Scanlan: Well, yes. Beckett has informed my entire theatrical career, but not in ways that will be obvious here. I have directed all of Beckett, it’s true, but in a long directing career I have directed far more plays that are not Beckett, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, Molière to Feydeau and Anouilh, Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre, Ibsen and Strindberg. I do favor French and European playwrights, but I’ve worked with and directed David Mamet, David Rabe, Bob Wilson, Paula Vogel, Beth Henley, Arthur Miller…. I’m a universalist, or try to be.

I’m proud to be known as “The Beckett Man” — and in fact I plan to present one Beckett evening every year with our revived Poets’ Theatre. We (the Poets’ Theatre) were shut down by Covid, but are coming back with a new board and new organization. Our next production is This Costly Season by John Okrent, a poet and family doctor who wrote eloquent sonnets about the Covid-19 crisis in its earliest and most deadly stages … a doctor’s perspective on that horrible time (we have tended to forget how horrible it was already) is uniquely vivid…. look for it. The Arsonists is also about forgetting how horribly things can turn out.

In rehearsal for The Arsonists. Left to right Kim Carrell, Bob Scanlan, and Ziar Silva. Photo: courtesy of Praxis Stage

AF: In 1960, Frisch added a (Shavian?) epilogue to the play, in which Biedermann defends himself against the Devil. This version omits that section — are we missing anything?

Scanlan: I’ve decided that the “Don Juan in Hell” epilogue adds nothing to our play. The translation by Alistair Beaton omits it.

AF: Frisch and playwrights of his generation, including Durrenmatt, Pinter, and even Beckett, are rarely staged in Boston — and that neglect probably extends around the country. Why do you think that is?

Scanlan: I think that at any time in history, plays that are 75 years old go into decline — for no other reason. But all good plays, if they were truly good in their time, can surprise us by engaging revivals…. and then again, people get tired of whole eras that are too much ballyhooed as Golden Ages. We will recover the playwrights you mention in due time. Beckett, for instance, is widely stereotyped in people’s minds and in popular culture. Rediscovering the actual plays in performance can be very invigorating: they will seem new.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.