Ben
Brantley

January 14, 2015

Marlon Brando made his 21st-century Off Off Broadway debut this week, at the Ellen Stewart Theater on East Fourth Street. Dead for more than a decade, Brando looks great and not so great in the role of Sir John Brickman, a self-made British property baron of the 19th century. He ages all too convincingly in this cradle-to-grave performance, which opened on Tuesday night and runs through Sunday, in costumes that include a torn T-shirt, a black leather motorcycle outfit, a Roman toga and, for Brickman’s later years, cheeks padded with cotton. Though his words, in English, suspiciously resemble lines from films like Julius Caesar, The Wild One and The Godfather, the subtitles — and the Spanish interpreter talking over him — assure us that what he’s really discussing is subprime mortgages, cheap housing developments, market liquidity and easy credit access. Brando, it appears, has risen from his grave to give us a lesson in the disastrous economic policies of our time. This film god’s unexpected reincarnation has been provided by the Spanish media-mixing performance group Agrupación Señor Serrano, whose Brickman Brando Bubble Boom is part of the Under the Radar festival of experimental theater, in conjunction with La MaMa. This inventive production uses various, seemingly incompatible materials — film clips, sheets of plastic foam, Monopoly sets — to create a D.I.Y. history pageant.