John Kennedy Toole never lived to see the Pulitzer Prize awarded to his only fully realized novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces”. He committed suicide in 1969, at the age of 32, and it was only after more than a decade of effort by his mother, and the powerful support of the noted Southern novelist Walker Percy, that the book was published and went on to commercial and critical success. A decade after that, Book-It began trying to get permission to do a theatrical presentation, only to be granted limited permission this season. Mary Machala took on the daunting task of adapting the sprawling, multi-character comic epic for the stage, and then directed this excellent cast to an ambitious, highly entertaining production.

The motley assortment of characters are all vivid and engaging, the action fast-paced and the drama tightly focused. If the production goes on a bit long it's probably because the source material is also a bit overdrawn. Toole, like his hero Ignatius J. Reilly, seems a bit overawed by his own clever intellect, prolific imagination and baroque linguistic invention. One can only speculate in how many other ways Toole was like Ignatius.

Brandon Whitehead does a terrific job of embodying this least likely of literary “heroes.” Shaped like a pair of parentheses in a plaid hunting shirt topped by a green cap and a tattered scarf, he saunters through his life balancing his disdain for all those about him with his arrogant assertion of his own “taste and decency.”  His cluttered bedroom, just off the kitchen of his mother's home, smells of erudition gone bad, of his personal detritus mingling all his souring social failures with his dirty socks and stained sheets. Out in the world he is a problem looking for something to bother, whether it is the social order or the business affairs of Levy Pants, where he manages to turn an insignificant position into a ruinous complication.

His even less significant later employment as a hot-dog vendor on the streets of the French Quarter leads to even greater difficulties. This pilgrim's progress is from over-educated nitwit to over-engaged lunatic, escaping the city and his home just ahead of the mental-health authorities. Whitehead is most successful at maintaining the sovereignty of Reilly’s real-estate, which is to say the small piece of earth on which he stands at any given moment, and sustaining a running commentary in which he functions as a kind of copy editor for all of life's editorial content.

Perhaps the most difficult task is keeping the character from being simply ridiculous, from being dismissable, and in doing that to keep him as an entity who cannot be ignored at the same time that he is essentially insubstantial. For all his disagreeable qualities, all his inadequacies (or maybe because of them), this is a very complex character, and Whitehead does a fine job of making him comic and memorable, both pitiful and preposterously noble.

Because so much of this novel depends on the large community of distinctive and memorable characters, success for the the cast in this production depends equally on creating strong individuals joined in a particularly off-kilter universe. Mary Machala's direction allowed them to create a unified and balanced comedic ensemble while delineating individuals, all of whom are just a touch more real than Ignatius.

I particularly liked David Goldstein's running gag as a New Orlean's cop working “undercover” and advancing to successively degrading assignments. Ellen McLain grounded much of the drama with her fine portrayal of Ignatius's mother, a woman whose love and devotion to her son grows thin but never ceases. Betty Campbell did a hilarious, broad comic bit as the way-too-old Trixie at the pants factory, and Charles Norris gave the hired-hand role of Burma Jones some real solidity and amusement. Bill Johns drew very different characterizations for the factory owner Gonzalez and the flamboyantly decorative Dorian Green. Cynthia Geary brought a rhinestone-in-the-rough quality to the bar owner, Mrs. Levy and Samara Lerman brought down the house with her performance as perhaps the least-talented ecdysiast  in the history of the world.

This production is entirely successful in creating the varied and highly amusing world of New Orleans in the early 1960's, and in making Ignatius the sort of character that one can never forget or duplicate. It is less successful at showing us why this novel is considered a “masterpiece” and why this is all meaningful and not just amusing. As I said earlier, I think the show is probably 15 or 20 minutes long, and would benefit from cutting, although I don't think the cuts would be easy or obvious. As it is, Book-It has once again brought a significant piece of literary fiction to the stage and maintained the distinctive qualities of the book while adding the strengths of live performance. It's an admirable and fun piece of work for the entire confederacy of us out in the audience.

PICTURED ABOVE: Brandon Whitehead as Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. 
PHOTO BY: Adam Smith.