![]() ![]() As the novelist, actor Richard Crawford veers into comic-opera territory as he chortles to the audience over his sins. The larger problem for the play, though, is that the tangled question of Céline’s motives resists dramatization almost completely. Above all, the play suggests, they represent Céline’s most extreme attempt to secede from humanity. Jason Lindner’s adaptation offers various explanations for the anti-Semitic pamphlets. The Flying Machine tackles the ticklish Céline question head-on in its new one-man adaptation of Journey, interspersing scenes from the novel with glimpses of the elderly author reminiscing over the trouble he has caused himself and others. The latter activities left an enduring stain on his reputation, an asterisk sure to pop up whenever his remarkable early novels are mentioned. He was, less happily, the author of equally exuberant and equally nasty anti-Semitic diatribes in the years before World War II, and a Vichy collaborator during the war. ![]() Louis-Ferdinand Céline broke new literary ground with Journey to the End of the Night, his exuberantly nasty bill of particulars against existence masquerading as a picaresque adventure. ![]()
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