His name is Emanou, he was born in a stable and his dad was a carpenter. He’s one of a band of musicians who entertain the poor and homeless. One of his comrades finks on him to the cops and the other denies knowing him. He is flogged, then strapped to a bicycle-frame and forced to walk to his place of execution. But don’t mistake him for Jesus: he also surrenders his virginity—over and over—to the local whore. He recites platitudes when asked his mission. He loses even this feeble faith before dying. And he doesn’t rise again.
Tom Bateman, Danny Belrose and Bob Rokos in The Autombile Graveyard
The adventures of Emanou and his two sidemen, Topé and Fodere, provide the only semblance of plot in The Automobile Graveyard, Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal’s portrait of a society mired in inhumanity, decadence and exploitation of the innocent. The denizens of the abandoned cars peer out from their rusted bunkers only to gawk at one another or to summon Milos, their unctuous caretaker, whose duties include pimping Dila, his young wife, out to his charges. She is ambivalent about her occupation, seeming more repulsed at having to empty toilet-buckets than at swapping body fluids with strangers. But she is not without her heroic impulses—at one point, she rescues Emanou from arrest by offering herself up to his pursuers for a gang-shag.
Despite the efforts of its author to shock us, however, this 1959 play emerges as notably similar to many in the post-WW II absurdist canon. What ultimately distinguishes it are the inventive touches rendered its interpretation by director Michael S. Pieper and a Trap Door cast led by Danny Belrose as the martyred Emanou and Nicole Wiesner as the cheerfully amoral Dila. These include cross-generation sim-sex represented by a mother sucking her son’s thumb, an instant or two of female nudity and a vomiting scene graphic enough to recall the glory days of Torso Theatre.
On a more intellectual level, the voyeurs are made up to look like Emil Nolde masks. A truckside advertisement proclaims “FERNANDO! THE BEST DEAL IN TOWN.” And, as played by sound designer Bob Rokos, the mute Fodere speaks eloquently though his music. The results contribute to making an otherwise generic play interesting for its 80-minute running time.