Bruce Myers as the Grand Inquisitor.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" - the most famous chapter of perhaps his greatest novel (and perhaps the greatest novel), The Brothers Karamazov - is one of those rare narratives which truly operate as strange loops; the story becomes what it is not before our very eyes.  It's told by the skeptical, intellectual Ivan - the "middle" Karamazov - to his younger brother, the mystic Alyosha, in a seeming attempt to shake the novice monk free of his naïve faith.  (Of course it does nothing of the kind.)

The parable - in which Christ himself materializes in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition, only to be imprisoned by the Grand Inquisitor and sentenced to death by fire - is designed to reveal the cynical (though utterly logical) calculations behind the most horrifying episode in the history of the Catholic Church. Which it certainly does, with a lucidity that over the years has lost none of its chilling power.  The Grand Inquisitor - a pale wraith of "four score and ten" - observes his imprisoned savior with something close to legalistic contempt.  You have no right to interrupt us, he admonishes Christ (who has been a dazzling distraction from the usual program of auto-da-fés), and begins to explain how the Church has assumed the burden that God himself abandoned some fifteen centuries before.

That explanation hinges on the troubling duality of free will: Christ refused to declare himself definitively while on earth, to allow men to believe in him of their own accord. Yet the ministers He left behind had no such luxury; they were inevitably forced to abandon that stance to maintain the faith.  The Church is therefore committing its horrific crimes, the Grand Inquisitor argues, as an inevitable consequence of the Savior's absence; and he's willing to sacrifice Christ himself to the flames to preserve the central "mystery" of Christian faith.

The Inquisitor's logic, self-serving as it may be, is impeccable; but Christ's answer is not an argument at all, but rather a simple, transcendent gesture: he kisses the Inquisitor on the lips, and then silently departs. As Ivan puts it in his famous final line, "The kiss glowed in his heart, but the old man held to his idea."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the skeptical Ivan, rather than Alyosha, who is destabilized by the conclusion of his tale; by that mysterious finish he is laughing "feverishly," in fact, and is only calmed when his brother, in imitation of Christ, kisses him on the lips, too.  "That's plagiarism!" Ivan laughs.  "But . . . thank you." It's an exquisitely subtle reminder that our horror of the Grand Inquisitor can only make sense within the template of the mystery he claims he is dedicated to serving - which, of course, requires our forgiving him.

An El Greco portrait of a cardinal of the period.

Judging from the production that's closing this weekend at ArtsEmerson, however, Peter Brook (and adapter Marie-Hélène Estienne) don't really see the story in quite that way.  Their "Grand Inquisitor" is critique through and through, sans much in the way of mystery.  Which isn't an entirely bad thing - only, as with Brook's Beckett (on view in the companion touring production Fragments), we intuit it isn't the whole thing; Brook has once again inexplicably thinned out his source.

Yet it's true that in the accomplished British actor Bruce Myers, Brook has found a convincing embodiment of the Grand Inquisitor indeed - with his sunken, flickering eyes, his pale tapering fingers, and wearily fluid delivery, Myers suggests almost without trying the craft and coolly mature intellect moving behind the Grand Inquisitor's various intellectual gambits. And after a seemingly disastrous opening night, in which he struggled repeatedly with his lines, Myers seemed fairly confident in his text in the performance I caught (although he often referred to a script on a lectern before him). He was also clad in a dark, tailored suit that might have been by Armani - a wittily secular touch, I thought, and very far from the "rough, monkish cassock" described in The Brothers K. In a later talkback, however, Myers revealed it was the first time he had donned the suit in performance; usually he wore a cassock much like that described by Dostoevsky (which he had brought with him on stage, but left on a chair).

This struck me as an intriguing metaphor that might be developed more fully; Myers quipped that his suit had been designed for a production in which he played George Soros, of all people, and it did wittily disengage the Grand Inquisitor's arguments from the limiting template of the Spanish Inquisition - and thus allowed us to appreciate their timelessness. For similar excuses along the lines of "the-ends-justify-the-means" have been made for the excesses of almost every autocrat who ever lived. They're being used even now in the name of the free market, to excuse child labor in the Third World. They'll always be with us.

And yet in the case of the Grand Inquisitor, they're paired with a genuine religious mystery - the "kiss that glows in the heart" - that I think Brook and Myers have missed; the show, in short, is all Ivan and no Alyosha. When the lights finally dim, we may have heard all Bruce Myers's lines, but we haven't heard everything Dostoevsky had to say.

Not quite a meeting of the minds.

Like a lot of people, I'd always thought of Peter Brook and Samuel Beckett as kindred spirits. Both always seemed committed to a monkish spareness, and a determination to burn away distractions, to burrow down to the essentials of things.   Brook spurned more and more of the trappings of theatre as he aged, and Beckett's plays dwindled into "dramaticules" so concentrated that sometimes he seemed to be poised at the very edge of being, scraping at the basis of consciousness. But surprisingly enough, Fragments, Brook's whimsical treatment of various Beckett "shorts" and "roughs" at ArtsEmerson through April 3, somehow leaves you pondering the differences between these two giants rather than their similarities. For note that adjective "whimsical" - yes, I meant it, and it's not a word that's usually attached to Beckett. Not that the great Irish playwright isn't funny - in fact, he's hilarious. But is he whimsical?

Well, sometimes Brook, and co-director Marie-Hélène Estienne, almost convince you he is; and the lightness the director brings to opaque scraps of script like Neither isn't entirely unwelcome.  There's nothing worse than Beckett when it congeals into doom-ridden pretentiousness, that's for sure.  And Brook's spritzes of zen bemusement keep the production far from the dark, very still waters where so many productions drown.

Still, as you watch Fragments, you keep feeling that Brook doesn't really "get" Beckett, or rather that he keeps trying to tease the great playwright into his own modes of Grotowski-in-Asia stylization.  But Beckett's simply got more grit in his soul than Brook seems to realize; and what's more, Beckett is deeply religious, even though apparently an atheist - as one wag put it, Beckett's universe may be a godless one, but the god it's missing is Christian.  Meanwhile Brook kind of floats in the penumbrae cast by Buddhism and Hinduism (or something like that; did I mention Sufism? Zoroastrianism?).

So the tone is a bit odd, and then there's the problem of the changes Brook makes in Beckett's stage directions, even the very explicit, don't-change-this-under-any-circumstances stage directions.  Now I'm not one to cling to Beckett's prescriptions as holy writ - still, whenever a director asks me about this question, I always reply with the following: "Now remember Beckett was a genius - so ask yourself, am I a genius?"  I say this because time after time, when I see a Beckett production that hews closely to his instructions, I find it superior to one that was "experimental."  Now sure, maybe Brook is a genius, too - maybe - but still, Samuel Beckett had a phenomenally acute understanding of how his work would best be realized onstage.  You tinker with his instructions at your peril.

In Fragments, the greatest damage is done to Rockaby, the haunting late-career solo piece in which a lonely woman retreats completely from a seemingly-empty world into the rocking arms of death itself (in French, the original language of most of Beckett's work, the title of the play is Berceuse).  In their production, Brook and Estienne abandon almost all of Beckett's suggestions about props and costume; the weirdly glamorous funeral gown, the pre-recorded vocals (the actress onstage should only chime in occasionally), the chair that rocks itself - all this is gone, as are even the subtle divisions of the woman's descent from consciousness into, well, "apparent" death, as the playwright puts it.  (Does anyone ever really and truly die in Beckett?)

The results were, inevitably, thinner than they should have been - indeed, whole swaths of theme were just missing, and while actress Hayley Carmichael did her best with the text, she simply couldn't conjure its full, echoing dimensions.  Which is too bad, because as Rockaby is the greatest of the scripts on offer in Fragments, its failure counted for a lot. And there were other odd deviations from Beckett's directions that undermined the other, slighter pieces: in Act Without Words II, for instance, I believe Beckett even spells out that the seemingly divine prod that pokes his Didi- and Gogo-like protagonists must come from the wings (on ever more sets of wheels), rather than down from the flies - yet Brook brings it down from the flies anyway, which partly spoils the piece's central joke (that God is just as rickety, and just as determined, as we are).

Still, there were many moments in which Beckett's voice came through, in "fragments," as it were - and it's a voice that's always worth hearing (I personally place Beckett right after Chekhov in the pantheon). Actors Bruce Myers and Yoshi Oïda brought a withered comedy and calm pathos to Rough for Theatre I, which is a kind of variant on the themes (and characters) of Godot and Endgame (although neither actor had quite the level of desperate decline needed to conjure Didi on his way to Hamm, or Gogo on his way to Clov). Brook's methods seemed best suited to the wry vaudeville Act Without Words II, which played (as it should) as a Beckett's idea of a silent Buster Keaton movie. Best of all was Come and Go, which Brook staged explicitly as a light drag burlesque. I have to say that even here, the more exquisite qualities of Beckett's conception (its geometric perfection and eerie sense of timelessness) went missing; but at least the piece worked as comedy, and as a charming introduction to the playwright, as intended. I just thought that Peter Brook would intend more.