Theater Review - Playing with fire

PushPush Theater performs the dysfunctional family drama Fireface like a punk rock song. The German play resembles the kind of rave-up played with such speed and intensity that you don’t notice — at first — how derivative the melody is and how lame the lyrics are.

Playwright Marius von Mayenburg scrawls a furious family portrait that emphasizes two teenage kids, sexually provocative older sister Olga (Zoe Cooper) and moody, pyromaniacal younger brother Kurt (Joey Boren). Their squabbles with their parents (Alex Van and Shelby Hofer) and each other seem noisy but relatively normal, except for the incestuous tension between the siblings, which heats up when Olga insists on giving Kurt his first shave.

But when the brother-sister bond turns literally sexual, Fireface turns increasingly torrid and anguished. Olga chooses her first boyfriend, a leather-clad motorcyclist (Daniel Pettrow), but feels disappointed when he turns out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Kurt speaks lyrically of his acts of arson, even after he badly burns his face. In Fireface, each scene arrives hard on the heels of the previous one, with the actors barging in and out of doors and storming across the set. If director Tim Habeger set a slower, more realistic pace, Fireface would be only shrill, but the production’s velocity creates the feeling of events rushing out of control.

The playwright proves transparently eager to shock a “bourgeois” audience, but his depiction of the parents touches on real-world concerns. Van and Hofer portray their unsympathetic roles with sympathy, finding parallels with the parents of Columbine-style school shooters: Father and Mother see their children running wild, but their efforts to save Kurt and Olga prove too little, too late. Fireface doesn’t spell out where the parents went wrong, either. They’re loud, pushy and obsessive (the father constantly reads about a local serial killer) but not abusive.

Fireface fills half the bill of PushPush’s German play festival and, beginning April 27, runs in repertory with Kerstin Specht’s The Frog Queen. With characters barking speeches at the audience, and the moments of incest, vomiting and nudity (fortunately not all at once), Fireface’s level of sleaze lives down to your expectations for an “edgy” German play. You imagine Dieter from “Sprockets” just loving it.

Fireface plays through May 22 at PushPush Theater, 121 New St., with performances at 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 5 p.m. Sundays. $8-15. 404-377-6332. www.pushpushtheater.com.