THEATER REVIEW

Brenner: Smooth as `Buddha'

Boston Herald - Boston, Mass.

Mar 28, 2009

"THE BUDDHA IN HIS OWN WORDS"

At BCA Plaza Black Box, Thursday night. Through April 4. Also April 10-12 at the Cambridge YMCA Theater.

You can't keep a good story silent. We've taken to engaging with texts one-on-one (that is, alone with a book) these days. But once upon a time, stories were shared orally - person-to-person with all the attendant variations.

Actor-cum-writer Evan Brenner tells it old-school in "The Buddha in His Own Words," his one-man show on the making of a holy man. Brenner is performing in the BCA Plaza Black Box, but will later move the piece to the Cambridge YMCA Theater. Using excerpts hand-picked from Buddhist scriptures, Brenner traces Siddhartha Gautama's life from birth to death. "In His Own Words" is only about 90 minutes, but it's as calming and expansive as a well-brewed pot of tea.

In this second iteration of Brenner's performance (the first was a 2007 workshop version called "Buddha: Triumph and Tragedy of the Great Sage"), he sets out to humanize the exalted guru. His wanderings took him on the road, under trees, even through piles of rotting corpses, but never to the top of a pedestal.

Many of us are familiar with the basic story of an Indian prince who left his decadent life and achieved enlightenment. But Brenner's selections from Buddhist texts show the Buddha to be a complex, flawed and very mortal individual. After all, this is a man who abandoned his wife and newborn son, who in his ascetic fervor took to eating his own excrement, and who was unable to prevent a slaughter in his homeland.

It's clear from watching "In His Own Words" that Buddhist sutras, even in English translation, were meant to be spoken aloud. Many of the stories in the piece unfold with the familiar rhythms of a fable or a well-told joke.

It helps, of course, that Brenner is a subtle and masterful storyteller. Against a backdrop wallpapered in pages from Buddhism's Pali Canon, Brenner makes the transformation from a man reading in his living room into a riveting narrator, and finally into the Buddha himself. He speaks quietly but powerfully, taking us from tale to tale with the proper balance of tranquility and tension.

Under the direction of David Fuhrer, "In His Own Words" is a rare - and in this case, appropriate - thing for a one-man show: an entirely egoless production. What could have easily been a grand, self-exalting vehicle is subdued and humble, a gentle but persistent whisper.

JENNA SCHERER