Stage

...s version of circus sawdust) with the company bunched grayly in a group, slowly following him, exiting as the horse passes them and keeps going...

...a God made manifest in images-into a heartbreaking personal struggle...

...They are of two kinds primarily...

...The horses are sometimes led portentously around the ring, sometimes put through routines that are probably from their Circus Flora acts, as when Mike sits daintily on the edge of the bed that is the piece's main prop...

...and by Paul Gallo's lighting...

...Freyer's set is a large white box fronted by a scrim curtain...

...perhaps because we have learned enough about animal behavior since Whitman's time to know that animals do bow, after their fashion, to the dominant one in a group...

...On the night that I saw Species, Michael J. Anderson's voice broke on the words "barbaric yawp...

...Clarke's images are accompanied and enhanced by music that ranges from "We'll Meet Again" to "Stabat Mater...

...At least, I assume that these were the two performers but they, like the other humans in the cast, are identified only as members of the company, presumably on the assumption that it is the group not the individuals who provide the total effect...

...Hans Neugebauer, the director, solves that problem with an abstract production...

...Although the ending of Endangered Species was affecting, it never had the force of the last scene in Arnold Schoenberg's Moses and Aron at the City Opera...

...There is vitality in the animal, none in the humans...

...The performer in this case is Lisa Dalton, who in a later extended scene with Alistair Butler turns into the victim as rag doll...

...Coe dropped a line from that section ("Not one kneels to another...

...by passages from Walt Whitman adapted by Robert Coe...

...The circus can be an image of pain (see The Hunger Artist), but it is conventionally an occasion for joy-an emotion that seems to be at odds with Clarke's controlling idea here...

...This is made clear when an actor moves through the fallen bodies at the end and speaks Whitman's lines, "I think I could turn and live with the animals...

...Much of the advance publicity for Endangered Species concerned the animals that Clarke was adding to her company...

...It is clear that we are Clarke's endangered species...

...Grey, and Mike, a miniature...

...GERALD WEALES...

...STAGE CREATURES ALL 'SPECIES' & 'MOSES' Martha Clarke's Endangered Species begins when one member of the company crawls diagonally across the large stage at BAM's Majestic Theater (the patented Clarke crawl) and ends when the company is gunned down by unidentified assailants-offstage sound...

...Not quite the ending actually...

...it should have been...

...Flora, who was allowed one cute bit-the closing of a door-for her curtain call, is used as a mysterious figure who passes regally across the stage, seen through the doors that open at the back...

...This Moses is not forbidden entry into the land of milk and honey...

...All the players are dressed in white, their faces chalked, and they fall into tableaux which suggest George Segal statuary groups and remain unmoving while the music carries the action...

...The giraffe, teasingly promised early in the process, never materialized at all (too expensive, the Music-Theatre Group's Lyn Austin told me), and several animals listed in the program-Bert (the goat), for instance, and Tony (the capuchin monkey)-never made it to the stage...

...Moses and Awn is a static opera-dramatically, not musically...

...Partly that is Schoenberg's fault, for it breaks down into a kind of catalogue of orgiastic doings without the firm through line that carries the other scenes...

...By the opening, the nonhuman cast had dwindled to four-Flora Baldini, the elephant, and three horses (Jack, Mr...

...Grey, a Percheron so well trained that he could let a performer on his back simulate sex withhout turning a horse hair...

...The poet never serves Clarke's theme as the animals do...

...Still, the animals are clearly intended as a contrast to the humans, holders of secrets that human beings do not know...

...God becomes a small square of light that penetrates the curtain, presented first and most effectively when Cross comes quite close to it, framing his inspired and slightly demented Moses in a large-theater equivalent of the close-up-the prophet whose eyes predict the ending...

...Both Clarke's images and Whitman's lines are full of rape, murder, suicide, war...

...Overall, how ever, Moses and Awn is wonderfully effective as theater...

...but Whitman's poem is finally celebratory, Clarke's piece darkly foreboding...

...A friend of mine, watching me write the review, said that I mentioned this change only to indicate that I had read Whitman, but the alteration here is symptomatic of the misuse of Whitman...

...Unable to accept what Aron has done to his vision ("I bow down to necessity," sings the worldly brother), Moses refuses to follow the Israelites and through the door at the back that opens onto a pastel paradise, the one touch of color (the sacrificial blood of the orgy scene, aside) in the white/gray settings and costumes provided by Achim Freyer...

...The Final image is of Jack, the talented Clydesdale performer, moving in a circle around the improvised ring (the dirt bed of The Hunger Artist as Fibar, Inc...

...The others are more physical, more violent-falls, chases, trapeze swings, vaultings on and off Mr...

...Oddly, the orgy scene, in which there is more business than anywhere else in the opera, is the least effective one...

...Perhaps it was intentional...

...The piece, as usual with Clarke, consists of nonlinear presentation of shifting images...

...The power of Schoenberg's music and the performances of Richard Cross (Moses) and Thomas Young (Aron) turn a theological quarrel-the invisible God vs...

...Long, slow walks across the acting space, pregnant pauses, lingering looks of longing or lust or horror...

...Moses' defeat, partly self-inflicted, weighs heavily at the end, but there is still the promise of paradise, however compromised by human limitations, that not even the presence of Flora can give to Endangered Species...