A MOST ACCOMMODATING DISASTER

Gottlieb Biedermann tells his wife and his maid that even if he had three spare beds standing empty, taking in a stranger would still be out of the question. He says this in one breath. In the next, he offers the stranger his attic. That gap, between the rule he states and the door he opens, is the actual subject of Max Frisch’s play, first staged in 1958. It runs now in Alastair Beaton’s translation at the Skylight Theatre, directed by Luke Harlan: the fear of being rude to a man drinking your wine, and how far that fear lets a house burn.

Trevor Jonathan Lown

Two totalitarian systems sit behind this play, and Frisch never named which one he meant. Beaton’s translation keeps that refusal alive, relocating the action to what The Firebugs’ playbill calls “Anytime, Anyplace.” Reviewers have spent seven decades filling that blank with whatever crisis they arrived carrying: Vichy France, Soviet Prague, the war on terror, a social media feed. Harlan leaves the blank alone. That restraint is the choice that keeps this production from turning into a two-hour op-ed. It hands the audience Biedermann’s cowardice with no assigned target. Then it makes them sit with the fact that they cannot name their own version of him without indicting somebody in the room.

Brian Wallace, Jazelle Villanueva, Tessa Auberjonois, Liam Rhodes, and Trevor Jonathan Lown

Los Angeles is getting an unplanned Swiss-German rep season this year. The Physicists, Dürrenmatt’s play about scientists hiding a dangerous discovery inside a madhouse, ran at Actors’ Gang in May. The Visit, his other durable English-language import, about a town that talks itself into a murder for money, opens next at the Pasadena Playhouse. Frisch and Dürrenmatt were contemporaries who distrusted the same figure: the reasonable, well-meaning person who enables catastrophe while insisting on their own good sense. Three productions in one year make that argument available to compare directly, which does not usually happen outside a festival.

Brian Wallace, Liam Rhodes, and Trevor Jonathan Lown

Brian Wallace plays Biedermann as a man convinced of his own decency. That conviction survives right up until the barrels of gasoline are stacked in his attic and the fuse is measured for length. Frisch’s diagnosis of an ordinary man rationalizing catastrophe into politeness predates Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil by a decade. The observation only holds if Biedermann plays as recognizable rather than as a cartoon villain refusing to see. Wallace never once reaches for the cartoon. Tessa Auberjonois matches him as Babette. Her complicity runs on the same fuel: an unwillingness to make a scene, dressed up as loyalty.

Brian Wallace

The pair actually setting the fires steal the show. Trevor Jonathan Lown’s Josef Schmitz flatters Biedermann into submission with the guilelessness of a man who has done this exact routine a hundred times. Liam Rhodes’ William Eisenring supplies the calculation underneath it, the one actually counting fuses while Josef counts compliments. Seamus Mulcahy plays the play’s narrator as the only character who knows exactly what play he is in. It gets him the evening’s best running joke: he is the one person onstage smart enough to see the fire coming, and the only one with no power to stop it.

Moneer Yaqubi, Molly Kirschenbaum, and Flor de Maria Chaua

Stephen Gifford’s two-story set keeps the gasoline drums in full view and still reads as somebody’s home, which is a hard trick. Jared A. Sayeg’s lighting ranges from stark realism to full surrealism without a visible seam, and Drew Sensue-Weinstein’s sound design stays percussive throughout, landing hardest exactly when the script needs it.

Tessa Auberjonois

Before any of that, three cast members in firefighter gear meet the audience in the lobby to check bags for contraband. It plays as a bit. It works as one. It is also the production’s clearest argument in miniature: the people checking you for matches are the same people who will watch the house burn down anyway. Nobody in this play, onstage or off, is equipped to refuse a well-mannered guest.

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photos by David Esquivel

The Arsonists
The Firebugs
Skylight Theatre, 1816½ N. Vermont Ave. in Los Angeles
Thurs.–Fri. 8; Sat. 5 & 8; Sun. 2
ends on Sept. 20, 2026
90 minutes, no intermission
for tickets ($45; $25 seniors/students), visit Skylight Theatre

for more shows, visit Theater in LA

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