Performances at the Park Avenue Armory, also known since
2015 as the Thompson Arts Center, are more than just play productions, as you
may see from my report on Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape from two
seasons ago (18 April 2017) and before that, Théâtre du Soleil’s Les
Éphémères (15 July 2009). Productions
at the Armory are either conceived for that huge, open space (the 55,000-square-foot
Wade Thompson Drill Hall) or specially adapted to it. And when the director
is someone like Richard Jones, who mounted The Hairy Ape and
clearly knows how to use the space, it can be extraordinary. (I included a very brief historical
description of the Park Avenue Armory in my report on the art installation Drill, posted on Rick On Theater on 15 July 2019.)
So when I read that Jones, a British theater and opera
director, was returning to the Armory for another production, my ears pricked
up. I wanted to know more.
On offer was the world première of a new adaptation (by 44-year-old
Obie Award-winning American playwright Christopher Shinn, a Pulitzer Prize
finalist) of Austro-Hungarian playwright and novelist Ödön von Horváth’s
(1901-38) 1937 play Judgment Day (Der
jüngste Tag), I was interested. The
whole package was intriguing.
I’d had a taste of Jones’s work and was interested in seeing
more. I’d been hearing about Shinn a lot
lately, a theater artist who falls into that group called “emerging”—not quite
famous yet, but on the verge. All I knew
about Horváth was his name, but there’s something fascinating about him. He had the air of a ground-breaker, an
iconoclast. He was vaguely like Georg
Büchner (1813-37) or Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), theater innovators who
were poised to make a splash and then died young, leaving a handful of
remarkable plays and unfulfilled promise.
(Büchner died of typhus at 23, but Mayakovsky died an apparent suicide
at 36. Horváth died in a freak accident
at 37.)
So, I brought the production to the attention of Diana, the friend
with whom I usually go to theater—I’m supposed to be touting her onto unusual
productions—and we booked it for 8 p.m. on Friday, 3 January—our first show of
the new year. It was an excellent
decision—Judgment Day was a
fascinating experience.
As you might guess, Horváth’s plays—he left about 18, maybe
half of them available in English translation—are not frequently produced in
this country. Aside from the Armory’s Judgment Day, in New York City, I found
only two productions of Don Juan Comes
Back from the War (1936) Off-Broadway in 1979 and 1986. I didn’t do a thorough search—he might be
popular in regional rep companies, though I doubt it, or college and university
theaters (more likely), but I can say that his name hasn’t otherwise arisen on the pro or
semi-pro theater (Off-Off-Broadway) scene here in the 46 years I’ve been in New
York.
Abroad, however, there has been something of a resurgence of
interest in Horváth’s work. In 2009, for
instance, the Almeida Theatre in London staged Judgment Day in a translation by playwright Christopher Hampton (Total Eclipse, 1967; Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1985) directed
by James Macdonald. Richard Jones
himself previously directed Tales from
the Vienna Woods, Horváth’s best known play, at London’s National Theatre
in 2003, and in 2013, Berlin’s Deutsches Theater staged Tales.
Last April in Berlin, the Maxim Gorki Theater presented an
adaptation by Swiss writer Tina Müller of Horváth’s novel, 1937’s Youth Without God staged by Turkish
director Nurkan Erpulat. Last Summer,
another staging of the novel by Thomas Ostermeier was seen at the Salzburg
Festival in Austria and in 2018, an earlier production was mounted in
Stuttgart. That same year, Faith, Hope and Charity was presented in
Vienna.
A three-act German opera adapted from Der jüngste Tag composed by Giselher Klebe (1925-2009) premièred in
1980 in Mannheim, Germany; the composer’s wife, Lore Klebe (1924-2001), wrote
the libretto based on Horváth’s play.
English translations of Horváth’s text of Judgment Day are published in Judgment
Day (Faber & Faber, 2009), translated by Christopher Hampton (b. 1946);
and Ödon von Horváth: Plays (PAJ
Publications, 1986); Judgment Day is translated
by Martin and Renate Esslin. Christopher
Shinn’s adaptation of Judgment Day
was released by Methuen Drama in 2019
Richard Jones’s Judgment Day was
commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory—that is to say, the Armory commissioned
Jones’s next project following the success of The Hairy Ape and he selected Judgment
Day and got Shinn (Dying City, Where Do We Live?, and Now or Later) to make the adaptation. It’s the Armory’s first foray into producing
from the get-go; future commissioned projects will include work from two-time
Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage (Ruined, 2009; Sweat, 2017) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (twice Pulitzer-Prize finalist for Gloria, 2016, and Everybody,
2018). The world première of the new Judgment Day started previews on 5
December 2019 at the Armory and opened on 11 December; the production closed on
10 January 2020.
Born Edmund Josef von Horváth on 9 December 1901 in what is
now Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary) into an aristocratic Hungarian
family, the playwright and novelist, who wrote in German, lived in Berlin and
Vienna during the 1920s and ’30s. He
preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von
Horváth. In 1931, he was awarded the
Kleist Prize for Tales from the Vienna
Wood, Horváth’s most successful and best known play. The Kleist Prize was the most prestigious
literary honor in Weimar Germany, discontinued after 1933.
Horváth witnessed at first hand the rise of Nazism and his
plays often explore popular culture, politics, and history, with a particular
focus on fascism and its dangers. Written
on the eve of World War II, Der jüngste Tag (sometimes translated as The Last Day) is set in 1933, the year
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
That year, Horváth left Berlin and returned to Austria. A prolific writer of plays and novels,
Horváth’s works were banned when the Nazis came to power.
Horváth’s last play (some sources say his next-to-last, but
I can’t find one later), Judgment Day has
been seen as an allegory for the indoctrination of Nazi ideology; it was
published in 1937, a year before Austria’s Anschluss
(annexation) with Germany. The writer
lived in a fraught part of the world at a particularly fraught time, and I
suspect his plays, especially Judgment
Day, manifest that.
Of course, I am working through a filter—Shinn’s
adaptation—so I may be misperceiving the evidence. Indeed, the adaptor remarked that, though
Horváth died at just 36, “As I adapted Judgment
Day, he felt older to me—his dark, wry vision is startlingly mature.” Shinn added that this play “still feels ahead
of us in revealing who we are and where we might be headed.”
Horváth fled Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and moved to Paris. On 1 June 1938, he was struck by a falling tree
limb and killed on the Champs-Élysées during a thunderstorm. He was buried in Paris, but in 1988, on the
50th anniversary of his death, his remains were transferred to Vienna and
reinterred.
Christopher Shinn was born in 1975 in Hartford, Connecticut,
and raised in Wethersfield; he currently lives in New York City. He’s the author of Dying City (2007, Lincoln Center; 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Where Do We Live? (2004, Vineyard
Theatre; 2005 Obie Award for Playwriting), and Now or Later (2008, Royal Court, London; Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play shortlist), among
other plays. The Royal Court Theatre in
London produced his first play, Four,
in 1998, garnering rave reviews.
His most recent play, Against,
had its world première at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2017, starring Ben
Whishaw. A revival of Dying City at Second Stage in New York
City, directed by the playwright, ran from 4 to 30 June 2019.
His plays have also been premièred by the Royal Court
Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, Donmar Warehouse, Goodman Theatre, Manhattan
Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard
Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Soho Theatre (London), and Hartford Stage.
Shinn graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of
Fine Arts degree in Dramatic Writing in 1997.
A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches playwriting at the New School. His work is published in the U.S. by the
Theatre Communications Group and in the U.K. by Methuen.
In a 2013 Los Angeles
Times article about Shinn, Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre and a theater writer for
numerous national publications, explained, “If playwright Christopher Shinn has
a signature character, it is the manipulative victim—the half-sympathetic,
half-deplorable sort of person whose suffering is real but who uses it as
rationale for bad behavior.”
This
description fits the playwright’s depiction of Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz, the
central character of Judgment Day. Whether the Hudetz on view at the Park Avenue
Armory is Shinn’s creation or whether the adaptor adopted him from Horváth’s
original is irrelevant: Shinn is working in familiar territory.
In the same article, Shinn was very explicit about his
dramatic focus:
We’re living in a time where
people think of themselves as victims, whether they’re oppressed or the
oppressor, whether they’re doing violence or violence is being done to them. This is what compels me and keeps me going:
I’m so sympathetic to the way trauma shapes people, but as a dramatist I’m also
interested in questions of agency and responsibility.
This is precisely what Jones’s production of Judgment Day explores. It sounds to me as if Jones found his perfect
collaborator in Shinn—and perhaps, at least for Judgment Day, Horváth’s doppelgänger.
Shinn’s version of Judgment
Day, rendered from a literal translation (by Tessa Keimes-Kin and Susan
Salms-Moss), is performed in one 90-minute act divided into seven scenes. The year of the setting isn’t specified in
the program, but the clothing worn by the characters and the use of Frakturschrift (sometimes called the
“German alphabet,” the official typeset of the German-speaking world until
1941, when it was abandoned by the Nazi government) for all signs and banners
on the set put the period in the mid-to-late ’30s.
Other aspects of the clothing—dirndls for some of the young women, shorts with long socks and short,
sturdy boots for some men—suggest southern Germany or Austria (the costume
design was by Antony McDonald); the mix of German (Frau Liemgruber, Herr Koller)
and Hungarian (Thomas Hudetz, Pokorny) names pinpoints the locale as most
likely Austria. (Late in the play, a
wanted poster offers a reward of 1,000 schillings, the former currency of
Austria—except for the World War II period—before the euro was introduced. Germany’s currency in the 1930s was the
Reichsmark)
At the train station in a small Austrian town (Scene I), several
prospective passengers are waiting for the delayed train. Frau Liemgruber
(Harriet Harris), the town gossip, and a local lumberjack (Andy Murray) are sharing
rumors about their fellow townsfolk with a traveling salesman (Jason
O’Connell).
The station manager, Thomas
Hudetz (Emmy Award-winner Luke Kirby of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), a
dutiful civil servant, is on duty. Frau
Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan) says goodbye to her brother, Alfons (Henry Stram),
the town pharmacist, who was visiting her. She complains about her husband.
The waiting passengers gossip and Frau Liemgruber is pleased
to tell everyone that Frau Hudetz is 13 years older than her husband and that
he no longer goes anywhere in town, but stays in the station, where the couple
have a comfortable apartment overlooking the tracks with a view of the surrounding
forest.
A couple of express trains hurtle through the station (portrayed
by flashing lights and the loud sound of a speeding train, courtesy of lighting
designer Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound designer Drew Levy) and the stationmaster
throws the lever that sends the all-clear signal down the track. Fearing they might be late, a young man,
Ferdinand (Alex Breaux), a butcher from a nearby town, arrives in a rush with
his coquettish fiancée, Anna (Susannah Perkins), whom he’s been visiting.
When the local arrives and all the passengers board and the train
leaves, Anna, who’s the innkeeper’s daughter, starts flirting with Hudetz and
finally kisses him. Frau Hudetz watches
the scene from their apartment window. Another express train passes and the
station manager, distracted by Anna’s advances, forgets to give the caution signal.
There’s a horrendous collision with a
freight train down the track. Eighteen
people, including the train driver, Pokorny, are killed; several more are
injured, like the stoker (George Merrick).
At the scene of the accident (Scene II), people are gawking and
the police start the investigation. A
drumhead tribunal is set up at the base of a viaduct and the injured stoker swears
to the prosecutor (Maurice Jones) that his train driver has never run through a
signal. Hudetz repeats that he’s “always
been a diligent official” and that he’s not to blame. Anna testifies in his favor, but Frau Hudetz
charges her husband with lying. Hudetz
is arrested.
Four months later (Scene III), a reception is being prepared
in The Wild Man inn to celebrate Hudetz’s acquittal and release from jail. (In German, the inn’s name is Der Wilde Mann,
which can also be translated as The Savage Man or The Crazy Man.) The waitress, Leni (Jeena Yi), is hanging a
banner saying “Willkommen Herr Stationsvorstand” (Welcome Mr. Station Manager)
as the innkeeper (Tom McGowan) makes the preparations for the party.
Hudetz is wheeled into the inn in triumph, standing in a
railroad luggage cart—like a Roman hero in a chariot—with banners on the sides
reading “Herzlich Willkommen” (Hearty Welcome). At Anna’s urging, Hudetz agrees to meet her at
the viaduct the next evening.
Alfons, Frau Hudetz’s brother, comes to the inn to talk to
his brother-in-law. He’s become a pariah
in town because of his sister’s betrayal of Hudetz and is almost attacked by
the gathered party-goers who’ve turned into a vengeful mob, but Hudetz stands
up for him.
The next evening, Hudetz waits for Anna at the base of the viaduct
(Scene IV). A policeman (Charles Brice)
atop the overpass calls down to him in a challenge. When he recognizes Hudetz, the guard warns the
stationmaster of roaming Gypsies. Anna
appears and expresses remorse over her perjury and because of the train
accident for which she feels partly responsible. As the two cast huge silhouettes against the
monumental viaduct, she tells Hudetz that she loves him.
In the inn (Scene V), Hudetz drinks a glass of wine,
contrary to his habit. Anna has gone missing;
Leni, the waitress, is worried. The policeman
brings the news that Anna was found dead at the viaduct. Hudetz, now suspected of murdering Anna,
hastily sets off to hide from the search parties.
Frau Liemgruber, shopping at Alfons’s pharmacy, talks about
Anna’s funeral (Scene VI). She’s brought
along a photo of her dead body. She also
reports that Hudetz is the suspect. But Alfons
doesn’t want to take part in the gossip.
Frau Hudetz now lives with her brother in his apartment
above the pharmacy. While the two are
eating, Hudetz shows up. He’s being
hounded and wants to flee, but he can’t hide in his railroad uniform. He asks Alfons for a suit. When he discovers the picture that Frau Liemgruber
left behind of Anna lying dead, he runs out without the suit.
The entire town—both men and women, many carrying rifles—is
out hunting down Hudetz The innkeeper
and Ferdinand, Anna’s fiancée, are with the police looking for Hudetz near the
site of the train accident (Scene VII). Alfons
reports that his brother-in-law had been at his apartment. The search of the viaduct is shifted to the
accident site.
Pokorny (Jones), the locomotive driver, and a trackworker (O’Connell),
two fatalities of the accident, appear to Hudetz. They encourage him to kill himself, but the spirit
of Anna appears and tries to persuade him to live. When the police come back, Hudetz faces his
arrest.
We never learn how Anna died, whether she committed suicide
over her false support for Hudetz in the accident inquiry or whether the
station manager killed her to keep her from recanting her testimony or whether
someone else, like Frau Hudetz, who was jealous of her youth and her attraction
for Hudetz, killed her. The play never
reveals the truth.
I haven’t entirely come to grips with Horváth’s play—or
Shinn’s rendering of it. The adaptor himself finds that it’s “very hard
to know what the play was saying. There’s no character that you can look at as
a stabilising point.” Shinn continued: “It
feels like our society is without a centre. Nobody quite knows where to look
for how it will get better.”
But Jones’s production is astonishing. It’s stunning. (Talk about the opposite of “simple setting,”
as my friend Kirk Woodward writes about in “Gospel
of John in Stage,” posted on ROT on 11 January.) There’s not
a lot of scenery, but what there is hardly “simple.” Wait and see (assuming I can describe it
accurately! That’ll be a challenge.)
The play is peculiar—at least in the adaptation—but
deceptively so. It looks at first encounter like a typical translation
from German of a pre-World War II script—a little stilted, tinged with German
Expressionism, but fundamentally Realistic. (The production picked up a
number of little “Germanisms” that rang especially true—like what I saw in the
film The Big Lift about which I blogged on 13 August 2017:
little formal bows people made when greeting or departing from one another, for
instance, or the small leather pouch the waitress at the inn had at her waist
for collecting payment or making change—such identifiably German cultural
things.) It turns out that it’s not so simple—at least not in
Christopher Shinn’s version.
Judgment Day’s physical production is more than just a
performing environment. I don’t want to
give the impression that the set is more important somehow than the acting or
the writing, but I will venture that it’s an equal partner. Theater and opera scenic designer Paul
Steinberg created a monumental set, towering at over 25 feet high.
When we enter the Drill Hall, we’re confronted with a huge,
wooden structure facing the seats. Diana
and I were on the far left of the first row, so the wall, which stretched all
the way across the front of the bleachers, was only a few feet in front of us. This is the train station and platform; the
tracks would have been under us and there’s a door to the office in the wall on
our left, a ticket window (“Fahrkarten”) just to the door’s right and a window,
which turns out to be the Hudetzes’ apartment, high up on the far right. The fateful levers for the train signals are
on the platform at the left end, almost in front of where Diana and I were
sitting.
We were so close that I felt a little uncomfortable,
thinking that if any scenes took place at the right end of the set, we’d have
to strain to see them. The wall’s
already extreme height was greatly exaggerated by our closeness to it. Diana asked if I thought the set was going to
move, and I figured it was—little did I know—because it appeared to be flat—that
is, two-dimensional—looked as if it were sitting on wheels, and was encircled
on the sides and back by trees which would only be truly visible if the wall
weren’t there.
As I observed, the Drill Hall is lined on three sides by a
forest of trees—some flat, cut-out silhouettes and others look like unsold
Christmas trees—shrouded in ground-hugging fog.
A huge, ominous clock hangs above it all in the rear of the space, lit
like the moon. The floor of the Drill
Hall, as big as a quarter of a Manhattan city block, is covered in a glossy,
black material, making the set seem to be gliding on black ice. This gave the performance an air of a
dream—perhaps a nightmare.
After Scene I, the wall moves around the space by means of a
hydraulic cart driven by a stagehand.
Another architectural set piece, the arch of a viaduct, also moves into
place. The company of 17 also moves onto
the stage at the same time, moving in large groups, sort of marching (but not
quite like soldiers) between the sliding wooden behemoths.
My thought was that the technical rehearsals for Judgment Day must have been something to
see—and that the production must have begun rehearsing the scene changes—there
are six of them—from the very first day.
Not just the actors, but the set pieces, described by Helen Shaw of Vulture and New York magazine as “like a giant’s building blocks,” really had
to be choreographed by movement director Anjali Mehra (for the actors), and
production stage manager Lisa Iacucci and stage manager Janet Takami (for the
set pieces).
Angled obliquely for Scenes III and V, the long wall, with
the addition of a blond wooden bar, becomes the back of The Wild Man inn, with
the viaduct in place perpendicular to it as a sort of tunnel leading to the
inn. In Scene VI, the wall opens like a
pop-up book to reveal the two-story interior of Alfons’s pharmacy downstairs
and apartment above. The set pieces, in
a way, are two giant characters in the play.
(I can see how this might get in the way of the performance, and some
reviewers felt it did, but I didn’t. On
the other hand, as I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for theatricality.)
Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting does more than create the
illusion of speeding trains with the help of strobe lights—an excellent
conceit, incidentally: effective in a practical sense and, at the same time,
artistically and theatrically satisfying.
(And, since Diana and I were seated right where the “train” was
traveling, it was also a teeny bit scary—especially the first time.) Since Jones’s production leans toward
Expressionism—I’ll address how I think this applies to the acting
shortly—Sherin’s lighting adds to this stylistic choice. Some scenes, like the train depot, The Wild
Man inn, and Alfons’s pharmacy, are bright, almost blazing, and mostly
white.
These contrast with scenes like the viaduct, the crash site,
streets, which are shadowy and gloomy, somewhat menacing. The background of the forest, where
occasionally spooky figures lurk, are always in semi-darkness so that, with the
shiny black ground, it creates the impression that the town is isolated from
the rest of the world, like a sinister Brigadoon.
Sound designer Drew Levy, like Sherin, contributes to the
passing-train effect, a significant contribution to the production considering
how the railroad, the trains, the viaduct, and the crash loom over the town and
its citizens. (If the set is another
character in Jones’s Judgment Day,
then so is the invisible train.)
The Armory’s Judgment
Day has two sound designers; the other one, Daniel Kluger, is also
responsible for the music. Though, like
a movie sound track, the production’s musicscape uses various period-evoking
types of music, the most prominent is the oompah sound of German traditional
music. It’s so identified with Germany
and Austria that it inevitably establishes a cultural milieu.
(When oompah music is played in The Wild Man, I was
immediately transported back to the early-1960s in Koblenz, Germany, when my
teenaged friends and I used to hang out sometimes at a restaurant/Weinstube
called the Weindorf—literally ‘wine village’—where that kind of music was the regular
accompaniment. It was positively
Proustian! I wrote about this eatery in
“An American Teen in Germany, Part 2,” 12 March 2013)
I’ve delayed writing about the Horváth/Shinn play as long as
I can now. As I said earlier, it’s
deceptively straightforward, for all intents and purposes the story of a
horrific train accident near a small town for which the local stationmaster is
blamed. He’s exonerated on the perjured
testimony of a young woman who’s later tortured over her lie. When she’s found dead, the stationmaster is
accused of her murder. It’s almost
Hitchcockian—a sort of The 39 Steps with psychological
overtones and a film noir dynamic.
But the twist, dramatically speaking, is that the
townspeople develop a mob mentality that’s flexible: they fit up anyone who
threatens their collective sense of moral responsibility, irrespective of its
validity. At first, the town backs
Hudetz in his claim of innocence, supported by Anna’s testimony that he pulled
the signal lever on time as always.
They never liked Frau Hudetz (“a really hateful woman,” says
Frau Liemgruber) whom they consider an older woman who seduced a young man (“the
most wonderful man”) and then kept him tied to her out of jealousy, so when she
testifies against her husband, the townsfolk believe Anna and Hudetz, who’re
lying, and ostracize Frau Hudetz, who tells the truth, and her brother,
Alfons. Alfons’s mere appearance at The
Wild Man is enough to generate the people’s anger and a mob almost attacks him
but for Hudetz’s intercession.
Later, when Anna is found dead, the town turns on Hudetz,
suspecting him of murdering her because she was about to recant her testimony
from the accident investigation. Now the
townspeople stalk the town carrying rifles and axes, searching for Hudetz like
a lynch mob (or the villagers in Frankenstein
hunting for the monster).
This is all supposed to represent a fascist mentality, but
it doesn’t come across to me. It’s mob
justice, a kind of mass paranoia and hysteria—sort of like what Arthur Miller
exposed in 1953’s The Crucible. But Miller (1915-2005) was writing
specifically about Joe McCarthy (1908-57) and commie witch-hunts of the 1950s
and the analogy he’s drawing is clear.
Fascism doesn’t say “mob mentality” to me, so the connection is
weak. Fascism to me means a regimented
society, required to follow orders blindly.
There’s no Duce or Führer in Judgment Day telling the townsfolk whom to believe or what to do.
What is clear from the play is that the train wreck
represents the National Socialist take-over of Germany’s government; Horváth
wrote Judgment Day after fleeing
Germany when the Nazis took power.
Hudetz, as an official of the state, symbolizes the Weimar government
that was unable to stop Hitler and his party before they seized power because
it was, as it were, asleep at the switch.
Note how the waiting passengers on the platform flatten themselves
against the station wall as the rushing train barrels unstoppably through town.
The townspeople are the citizens of Germany who run from one
power base to another, believing whatever dogmas promise them what they want at
the moment and putting the blame for the country’s woes on whichever suspect is
convenient. (This is the consequence of
a small-town version of Hitler’s technique of the Big Lie, which advocates
telling a lie so immense that no one will believe that someone would be so
audacious as to think he could get away with it.)
Meanwhile, Hudetz’s conflict over his responsibility for the
accident and even Anna’s death is a reflection of the conflict the German
people felt collectively over their complicity in the Nazi horrors. Isn’t that the plot of Judgment Day, reduced to a skeletal outline?
I know what
Horváth and Shinn want to say in this production; if it’s not clear from
Horváth’s rep as a writer—though he was never affiliated with any political
movement, he was sympathetic to the left and his writing often exposed the
dangers of fascism—the Armory production’s publicity made it explicit. But it isn’t in the play as far as I can tell.
The thing I don’t know, though, is whether it’s in Horváth’s original
but lost in Shinn’s adaptation, or if it’s missing from both. (Max McGuinness, theater reviewer for the U.S.
edition of the Financial Times, says
that Shinn “sticks closely to the original text while adding occasional Americanisms.”)
If Judgment Day had been set in 1950s Poland or Czechoslovakia
(or Horváth’s ancestral Hungary, where an anti-Soviet uprising took place in
1956), it could be read as an anti-communist play. In Iran in the 1980s or ’90s, it could be in
opposition to the Ayatollah’s theocracy.
Hell, you could put it in Louisiana in 1928-32 and say it’s an exposé of
Huey Long’s (1893-1935) reign as governor.
This Judgment Day is only
anti-fascist because someone says it is!
Movement director Mehra does her bit, with the coordinated
movement of the cast in groups as if they were some sort of paramilitary
cohort; in a couple of sequences, they come awfully close to goose-stepping
(which, of course, is indelibly associated with Nazis—but which many totalitarian
armies use, including the Soviets and their satellite states, Iran, and North
Korea). Mehra and Jones have Luke Kirby’s
Stationmaster Hudetz moving around the depot performing his duties in a walk
that’s stiff and march-like (he even squares his corners); I could almost hear a
snare drum marking the cadence. (In the New
York Times, Jesse Green
likens Kirby’s movements to “a figure that got loose from a Swiss clock.”)
It’s not really fair—or even accurate—to speak of individual
performances in Jones’s Judgment Day. Kirby and Susannah Perkins as Anna set a
tone, under Jones’s guidance, but the whole cast works as a unit stylistically
to establish and maintain the world of this play. In fact, there are moments when the entire
cast is the world of this play—say,
when they are about to gang up on Alfons in The Wild Man or, more pointedly,
when they are prowling the streets like a demented posse. (That latter bit was clearly set up by
movement director Mehra.)
Together, the company works to sustain the atmosphere of the
little town under the thrall of groupthink.
I’ve spoken of the way they move, but their speech, though subtly,
follows a similar pattern. Jones has not
guided his cast into eccentric performances, but there is a sort of
automaton-like quality to their speech—not so much like robots but living
Stepford people. There’s a kind of
soullessness in their voices. It works
rather well for the most part, though occasional jolts occur when an actor
encounters one of Shinn’s anachronisms.
(I’m pretty sure that no one in 1930s Austria ever said anything about
“downsizing.”)
My survey of the published criticism of Richard Jones’s Judgment Day at the Armory will include 14
reviews from various outlets. Unlike the
review round-up for my last report, for One
November Yankee on 6 January, this one includes several print notices,
along with numerous on-line reviews and one radio review.
In the Financial Times,
McGuinness remarked that this Judgment
Day “seems particularly timely.” McGuinness
reported that scenic designer Steinberg “aims to give the set ‘a dreamlike
quality’ using the reflective floor, while the forest is intended to supply ‘a
fairytale aspect’ reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm.” This “otherworldly vision suggests a
counterpoint to the language of the play, which is deliberately flat and
clichéd,” found the FT reviewer.
McGuinness observed that “there is no mention of the Nazis,
nor any political discussion in Judgment
Day, which helps give Horváth’s play its lasting allegorical resonance.” He also felt that all the characters “seem
rudderless and lacking in self-awareness,” which “supplies a parallel with the
contemporary US.” The FT journalist ended by warning that this
“guilt trip into the twisted psyche of 1930s Europe promises to illuminate the
corrosiveness of our own time.”
“With ‘Judgment Day’
. . . [Richard] Jones seems eager to top his previous achievement,” asserted Green
of the New York Times. “The
Armory production . . . feels even more monumental than ‘The Hairy Ape,’ both
larger and grimmer.” Green described Steimberg’s
set as “a giant’s playthings,” which, “[l]it gorgeously by Mimi Jordan Sherin .
. . slide and twirl about the huge space in various combinations that fascinate
and appall the eye, like de Chirico paintings come to life.”
Then the Timesman lamented, “If only the play
would come to life too.” Green found
that “Horvath’s brand of social critique and political allegory . . . feels
overwhelmed here by the physical production.”
He reported that “Jones makes exciting stage pictures out of that group
chaos” and that “[a]urally, too, the production tells a coherent and emphatic
story of people too easily manipulated by their drive for excitement.” Green continued, however: “But with a few
exceptions, the characters’ interior lives are invisible and inaudible to us.”
“Clearly,” added
Green, “this is Jones’s way of dealing with the strangeness of the play, which
isn’t amenable to naturalism.” The Times review-writer affirmed that
Jones’s Judgment Day is “not the kind
of drama that expresses itself best in subtle acting, even aside from the
monumental staging with which the actors must fend.” He felt that the leads didn’t present the
kind of “great-face bigness—the kind you see in silent movies” needed to convey
Horváth’s point, several of the supporting characters did, naming Alyssa
Bresnahan’s Frau Hudetz; Jeena Yi’s Leni, the barmaid; and Harriet Harris’s
gossip, Frau Liemgruber.
Asserting that in a vast venue like the Park Avenue Armory,
“[y]our patrons expect epic art that exploits the scale of the building (not to
mention its history of wealth and militarism) to comment on a meaty issue,”
David Cote extolled Judgment Day as “a
fairly obscure German drama about guilt and mob mentality, , , , staged with
smart, handsome efficiency by veteran English director Richard Jones” in the
New York Observer.
Cote put Horváth, had he lived, in a category with interwar German
and Swiss dramatists like Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), Carl Sternheim (1878-1942),
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and Max Frisch (1911-91), whom he labeled “unsentimental
social critics who mingled gimlet-eyed satire with surreal or grotesque
effects.” Cote also compared Horváth
with visual artists of the Weimar era Otto Dix (1891-1969) and Georg Grosz (1893-1959),
“who saw decaying flesh, venality, and creeping fascism everywhere they looked.” (I don’t know Dix’s art, but I’m well
acquainted with Grosz’s grotesque caricatures of German life, and the
connection to Horváth, at least as exemplified by Judgment Day, is spot on, I think.)
Of the visual effect of Steinberg’s set design, the Observer writer affirmed: “The imagery
is stark, monumental, and very German.”
He added: “Lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin’s chilly shadows and
Daniel Kluger’s ghostly sound designs contribute to the overall morbid, tense
atmosphere of repression and dread.” The
reviewer’s final assessment of the production, which he tarred with “pretentious
gigantism that is the unfortunate byproduct of Armory presentations,” is:
The cast is solid; Jones’s
direction is clean and forceful; the design is impressive and engaging; and
Horváth’s cautionary message comes through clearly in Shinn’s lean script. But Judgment Day is, finally,
a small play in an oversize production that dilutes any ripple effect the fable
might have in 2019.
“The human element feels like an afterthought in Richard
Jones’s staging of Ödön von Horváth’s dark morality tale,” wrote Elisabeth
Vincentelli in the New Yorker.” The set is “pharaonic,” the lighting is
“stunning,” and “[t]he over-all effect is breathtaking, with the actors often
looking like figurines in a giant model.”
With the exception of Harriet Harris’s “vicious gossip,” however, “the
performances are haphazard, which defangs the story.” Vincentelli concluded, therefore: “The
extravagant design is never less than entrancing, but we are far from Jones’s
2017 masterstroke, ‘The Hairy Ape.’”
In Vulture/New York magazine, Helen Shaw declared,
“On the bright side (or maybe the dark and primeval side), Judgment
Day at the Park Avenue Armory is a visual feast.” After describing in detail the visual and
aural production (“It’s entrancing”) and naming the accomplished artists in the
creative team, however, Shaw continued:
And . . . yet . . . the big names
and the big set don’t quite come together to make a big production. The dancing architecture works, but the human
components seem unchoreographed; any time there’s more than four people
onstage, the mise-en-scène looks
sloppy and astray. More importantly, the
expressionist environment asks for stylization from the actors, but Jones seems
to have left them confused about what that should look and sound like.
The review-writer was also displeased with the adaptation,
reporting that “Shinn, perhaps with his mind on Brecht, deliberately leaves the
stilted tenor of translated text in place: Speakers can sound as though they’re shouting
subtitles at each other.” With the
exception of Harris (“as exaggerated as a George Grosz painting”), “everyone
else, even strikingly fine actors, seems stranded.” Shaw found that “Jones seems to be moving his
cast from image to image rather than moment to moment.” Her conclusion? That “the show seems to have been made from
the perspective of the huge, beautiful monoliths: It’s vast and slow and cold,
and not, ultimately, all that concerned with the people on the ground.”
Zachary Stewart labeled
the Armory’s Judgment Day “a jaw-dropping
production” on TheaterMania. “Even
if you are turned off by the icy chill of the script,” Stewart promised, “Jones’s
production draws you toward its bewitching flame.” Shinn’s adaptation into modern English is “a
surprisingly excellent job” that still “maintain[s] the prewar tone of the
piece.” Stewart found, “There's a lot to
chew on in Judgment Day,”
including instances of “contemporary resonance.” In Stewart’s eyes, “Judgment Day is
a withering take on the tribal instinct, and the centrality of myth in
reinforcing that instinct. When everyone
in the room believes one thing, it is almost certainly not the truth.”
On Broadway World, Michael Dale felt
that “Judgment Day, may seem on paper
to be an introspective drama about guilt and punishment,” but he asserted that
“such intimacy doesn’t fly on the massive stage of the Park Avenue Armory’s
Drill Hall.” The BWW reviewer posited, therefore, that director Jones, adaptor Shinn,
and set designer Steinberg “have created a huge, cold, emotionally stark
production that is chilling in its inhumanity.”
Dale reported that “Steinberg’s imposing set pieces, harshly lit by
Sheri[n], emphasizes an attitude of individual insignificance deferring to the
greater good as enormous structures appear choreographed along with the
movement of actors.” The review-writer
concluded his notice by pointing out:
As with any political piece or
social commentary, there's the temptation to compare the era of the play with
contemporary times. Certainly, themes of
technological advancements diminishing opportunities for workers, the dangers
of mob mentality and society's leanings towards gender-based sympathies are
still with us.
David Finkle credited Jones with “[e]stablishing his own
fearlessness” on New York Stage Review,
finding that the director’s “staging [of Judgment
Day in the Armory] gives it an enormous size and scope.” The production’s “locomotive pace holds Judgment Day to a parable’s
effectiveness.” The NYSR writer found that “the drama is as efficient, yet as narrow,
as an arrow hitting a target’s center.” In conclusion, Finkle judged:
There’s no denying that in his
momentous Judgment Day production, director Jones knocks
patrons over the heads. It’s an alert
from a sober decade in which a fascist leader was blowing heavy clouds over the
Continent and the globe. When ostensible autocratic leaders appear to be
emerging in growing numbers today, it seems as if von Horváth’s work has a
potent relevance to a swelling contemporary plight.
In NYSR’s second
review of Judgment Day, Elysa Gardner exclaimed:
Let us now praise melodrama, at
least conditionally. Coarser
examples—say, soap operas, or mega-musicals involving bloody wars or
misunderstood creatures besotted with nubile women—may not offer much to
recommend the form. But approached with
imagination, skill and a clear sense of purpose—and a few dashes of knowing
irony, where appropriate—it can provide riveting and even thought-provoking
entertainment.
“A case in point is on ravishing display at Park Avenue
Armory,” Gardner wrote, calling Judgment
Day a “socially, morally and psychologically charged thriller [that] has
become a triumph of overstatement in service of plain but difficult truths.” She specifically praised the design team, “who
have turned the vast space at the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall into a
glorious (and essentially minimalist) landscape” and said that the actors all “deliver
memorable individual performances.” The overall
production, which the NYSR reviewer
labeled “breathtaking,” “leav[es] us jarred and mesmerized throughout.”
“Once in a while, a powerful play blows in from the past to
hit you with the force of a gale wind,” wrote Carol Rocamora on Theater
Pizzazz, referring to
Horváth’s “chilling . . . moral fable” Judgment Day is “a thrilling production
directed by Richard Jones,” Rocamora continued; “it’s a dark play for dark
times—both then and now.” The TP reviewer asserted, “The astonishment
of this production is its jaw-dropping scale,” with a “dazzling design . . . by
Paul Steinberg.” “Jones’s sweeping
directorial style,” she declared, “combined with an exquisite attention to
detail and precise timing of so many moving parts, is incomparable.” Additionally, Rocamora praised all the designers:
Enhanced by Mimi Jordan Sherin’s dramatic lighting design, Antony
McDonald’s colorful costumes, Daniel Kluger and Drew Levy’s powerful sound
design (including bells, whistles, screeching brakes, and crashing train
sounds), and Daniel Kruger’s haunting music design, the cumulative,
larger-than-life results are overpowering—more impactful than anything you’ll
see on a New York stage this season.
“Shinn’s timely
adaptation of Judgment Day leaves you with haunting questions about truth,
conscience, and responsibility to society despite the personal cost,” concluded
Rocamora. “These are the very questions
that resonate sharply and urgently in today’s turbulent times.”
On TheaterScene.com, Arney Rosenblat characterized
the play as a “cautionary parable's over-arching themes of the complicit nature
of guilt and destructive nature of mob mentality,” which “has been cleanly and
effectively adapted by Christopher Shinn.”
Rosenblat reported that director Jones “choreographs, with the aid of
Movement Director Anjali Mehra, a character ballet across the shifting stage to
establish an unrivaled visual experience.”
The reviewer explained, “To fill both the enormous space of the Armory
and the larger than life goals of the parable, Jones encourages his actors, for
the most part, to give larger than life
performances.” Rosenblat gave extra praise
in this regard to Harriet Harris for her portrayal of Frau Liemgruber, but he
generally complemental all the cast.
Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp proclaimed, “Christopher Shinn
. . . and director Richard Jones . . . have given von Horváth’s work a slick
production that feels remarkably of the moment.” It’s staged with the “operatic grandeur the
Armory’s vast stage calls for,” she affirmed, but added, “For all its pertinent
issues and stylistic diversity, Judgment Day doesn’t quite
make the grade as a memorably great play,” in part because “the spectacular
staging does tend to upstage the actors.” Nevertheless, “the entire cast
meets the challenge of playing to the top row of the Drill Hall’s raked seating
area.”
Victor Gluck,
reviewing for TheaterScene.net (not
associated with the similarly-titled TheaterScene.com,
quoted above), dubbed the Armory’s Judgment
Day “a superb production” that “seems as powerful and relevant as if it had
been written in this decade, not 80 years ago.”
Gluck added, “The production makes this expressionistic drama as
contemporary as if this style were newly born.”
Interestingly, Gluck, like a number of his colleagues in criticism,
noted, “The monumental set pieces . . . dwarf the characters,” but found method
in this set-up, “suggesting that people are pawns in some cosmic pattern bigger
than themselves.” His ultimate
assessment of the Armory staging of Judgment
Day was: “Richard Jones’s huge production gives the play the breadth that
it needs to tell its story with stunning visual effects.”
“Ödön von Horváth is
in fashion these days, because he wrote about how the threat of fascism
affected ordinary people,” noted WNYC’s Jennifer Vanasco in a radio review, continuing,
“But this production of his 1937 play ‘Judgment Day’ . . . fails to make that
threat feel real, or important.” Vanasco
explained that Judgment Day “should
be an interesting morality play about the fickleness of crowds, yet the story
doesn’t wrestle with guilt or complicity in an interesting way.”
“Horváth’s point is
that everything is connected, that every wrong action sets off a chain of
additional bad actions.” But the
reviewer on the New York City outlet for National Public Radio felt:
This doesn’t really make sense. But
then, a lot of the play doesn’t. It’s
never clear why Anna kisses the stationmaster to begin with. More importantly, some of the villagers are
survivors of the crash, but they don’t seem upset about the incident. No one is mourning those whose lives were
lost. Instead, they just gossip about
why the train barreled through the signal.
Vanasco reported
that “the Armory stage is enormous and the actors are dwarfed by the impressive
set,” a sentiment shared by several other review-writers. “The structures are a wonder,” she affirmed,
observing that “[a]t the close of the first act, one of them smoothly recedes
into the distance—and Anna gets smaller and smaller.” Vanasco added, “Unfortunately, so do our
hopes for a meaningful performance.”
The WNYC reviewer
thought, “It could be that in a more intimate space, the audience would more
easily connect with the characters. Perhaps
the play would feel relevant and hot-blooded, instead of the chilly work we
have here.”
