'Nathan the Wise'

In my last performance report (“Bright Star,” 11 April), I started with a list of things of which I’m not a fan.  (“I think more reviewers should make their predispositions clear the way you do!” declared my friend Kirk.)  This time, I’m going to go in the opposite direction: I’ve been a fan of F. Murray Abraham for a long time—I can’t even remember the first time I saw him on stage (on screen, the first time I noticed him was as Antonio Salieri in the 1984 film version of Amadeus.)  I think he’s one of our best actors, especially on the stage—and I got to tell him I think so once when I met him in a supermarket in the Village.  I also wrote his biographical article in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1993).  (My only posted play report other than this one that features Abraham is The Merchant of Venice in which he played Shylock at the Theatre for a New Audience in 2007, published here on 28 February 2011.)

So when I saw that the Classic Stage Company was going to mount Nathan the Wise with Abraham in the lead, I made a note in my calendar to try to get seats as soon as non-subscriber tickets went on sale.  I tried to do the same thing a few years ago when CSC staged Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo starring Abraham in the title role, but didn’t get to the box office soon enough and there were no seats left, so this time I went as soon as I could on the first day of availability with happier results.  So on Friday, 15 April, Diana, my usual theater companion, and I met at CSC’s 13th Street theater in the East Village for the evening performance of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 18th-century German classic.  I couldn’t be happier that we did.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) was a writer, dramatist, philosopher, and critic of art and theater during the German Enlightenment (Die Aufklärung, ca. 1720-1785).  Born in 1729 in Kamenz, Saxony, the son of a Lutheran minister, he was very interested in theology, which he studied at the University of Leipzig.  This affinity led him to a strong belief in the importance of religious tolerance.  Lessing also worked as a critic, an essayist, and a librarian and later in his life, he received a degree in medicine.  While his most famous work, Nathan the Wise, focuses on religious tolerance, Lessing was known for his wit and his earliest plays were comedies.  Drawing inspiration from Roman comic playwright Plautus and others, Lessing wrote satires addressing human weaknesses such as The Young Scholar, his first produced play (written when he was still 18), The Old Maid, and The Misogynist (all staged in 1748).  (Another early comedy, The Jews, 1749, was a blatant condemnation of “the disgraceful oppression” of German Jews by Christians.  One review of the play rejected it as “improbable because a Jew could not be upright and noble.”  Nathan the Wise was Lessing’s response to this criticism.)  Around this time, young Lessing made the acquaintance of the great French writer Voltaire (1694-1778), a guest of the Prussian court, who employed the nascent German writer to translate some books into French for him.  The association didn’t last long because Lessing found himself disagreeing with Voltaire’s advice about playwriting.

As a result of his rejection of the Frenchman’s counsel, the young writer made great contributions to the development of middle-class German drama with his plays Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and Emilia Galotti (1772).  Lessing is widely considered the father of dramaturgy, the theater profession which serves as a resource for playwrights or directors on such areas as the play’s historical or regional context and the thematic consistency and stageworthiness of the text.  He served as a dramaturg at the Hamburg National Theatre—really the in-house critic, which Lessing called a “dramatic judge,” who gave feedback to the company before a production played before an audience—publishing the seminal work in the field, Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767-69).  He pioneered Ideendrama, the drama of ideas, rejecting Voltaire’s classic French approach of emphasizing the characters’ actions, and placing the main focus on the play’s central themes.  (Voltaire and his literary supporters subsequently slandered Lessing, leaving him an outsider in the world of letters during his lifetime.)  The final decade of Lessing’s life was fraught with personal hardships and tragedies: his health began to fail and he lived a lonely life; he married relatively late, in 1776, and his wife died in 1778 giving birth to their son, who only lived a short while.  He himself died suddenly, alone and poor, on a trip to the city of Braunschweig (Brunswick) at the age of 52.  

Lessing  completed the first draft of Nathan der Weise in 1778.  The firm of C. F. Voss published it in Berlin in 1779.  The Berliner Theater in Berlin presented the first performance of the play on 14 April 1783, two years after Lessing had died; the dramatist never saw Nathan performed.  That performance is estimated to have lasted 4½ hours; in 1801, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) made an adaptation that streamlined the discursive original down to under four hours.  (It’s on Schiller’s version that Edward Kemp has based his 2003 adaptation that Brian Kulick, CSC’s artistic director, used for the production I saw.)  Originally written in Shakespearean blank verse (iambic pentameter)—Lessing was an admirer of Shakespeare and urged other writers to imitate the English writer’s format—Kemp’s English version is in prose, some of it approaching contemporary speech.  The play’s a didactic work that preaches harmony and tolerance among adherents of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—and, implicitly, all religions.  (A great deal of what Schiller trimmed were long passages of philosophical and theological debate.  Kemp followed in Schiller’s footsteps, cutting a few more windy passages and putting the entire script through what he called “a process of ‘compression.’”  He also rearranged some of the scenes, or parts of scenes, in the second half of the play.  The CSC production runs two hours and five minutes with one intermission.)

Shortly before Lessing wrote Nathan the Wise, Johann Melchior Goeze (1717-86), the strict leader of the Lutheran church in Hamburg, wrote against Lessing and other Enlightenment thinkers for their unorthodox theological and moral views.  Lessing responded with a series of pamphlets assailing Goeze for what the playwright considered narrow-mindedness.  After supporters of Goeze persuaded the ruler of the Duchy of Braunschweig, where the dramatist was then librarian of the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel, to prohibit Lessing from writing on religion, he composed Nathan the Wise to continue his argument against intolerance.  (Braunschweig was the name of both a duchy and a city, the seat of the ducal court.  The town of Wolfenbüttel had been the ducal seat until 1753.)  In the play, the Patriarch, the head of the Christian church in Jerusalem, represents Goeze.  (Lessing modeled Nathan on his lifelong friend, the eminent German-Jewish philosopher and writer Moses Mendelssohn, 1729-86.  Mendelssohn, grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, helped Jews integrate into German society and his reputation as a thinker earned him the sobriquet, the “German Socrates.”) 

Since Nathan the Wise was published in 1779, it has caused controversy with every production.  As an Enlightenment thinker, Lessing aimed to spread humanism and tolerance and the plot of Nathan, popular for over two hundred years, has found relevance through the ages.  The play’s message of equality among Muslims, Jews, and Christians led the Catholic Church to ban it.  (Much of what Schilling excised were explicitly anti-Christian passages.  Nonetheless, the closest thing to a villain in Nathan is the Patriarch.  Saladin, the great enemy of the Christian Crusaders, is depicted as merciful and generous to a fault—generally believed to be historically true.  Except for the Patriarch, anyone else who harbors a prejudice—the Templar, Sittah, Daya—does a reversal by the play’s end.)  Lessing had expected no less, having already faced bans on his writing earlier in his lifetime.  Despite the bans, the play was popular across Europe.  In Nazi Germany, when Jewish artists were forbidden to work before the public, the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Culture Association of German Jews) was formed to allow them to perform for exclusively Jewish audiences; Nathan der Weise was the first play presented by this organization, the only time it was performed in Germany until the end of World War II.  (Nathan der Weise was also the first play to be produced in Germany after the war—in 1945, four months after VE Day, at the Deutsches Theater in what would become East Berlin.)

German film director Manfred Nolan made the first and only movie version of Nathan der Weise, released in 1922.  Intended to shed light on how pointless World War I had been, it was a hit except in Bavaria, the birthplace of the National Socialist Party, which labeled it “Jewish propaganda” and threatened theater-owners who tried to show it.  Nolan described the movie as a plea for humanity, but with the rise of Nazi Germany, a Jewish title character and the plot endorsing tolerance for groups including Jews led the German authorities to destroy the  film and ban it from movie theaters.  (Believed lost forever, a copy was rediscovered in Moscow in 1996.) 

English translations have allowed for many productions in the United States and England; the first of these translations was by William Taylor, performed in London in 1805.  For nearly 50 years afterward, though, Nathan was neglected, until 1860 when a well-received revival of the play was mounted in London, sparking a steady flow of productions that continues to this day.  In 1967, director Julius Gellner’s version of the play at the Mermaid Theater in London enjoyed a successful run lasting over a year.  In 2002, a new translation and adaptation by Gisela and Paul D'Andrea was produced at the Theater of the First Amendment in Washington, D.C.; it was nominated for the Charles MacArthur Award (of Washington’s Helen Hayes Awards) for Outstanding New Play.  Kemp made his translation/adaptation in 2003 at the behest of Steven Pimlott, who directed it at the Minerva Theatre for the Chichester Festival Theatre in the U.K.  The version was remounted at the Hempstead Theatre in London in 2005 with Anthony Clark at the helm.  In New York, CSC’s staging is the first Off-Broadway, but there was a short-lived run on Broadway in 1942.  Lasting only 28 performances, the production was produced by Erwin Piscator and directed by James Light, with Herbert Berghof as Nathan.  The CSC production, staged by Brian Kulick (in his last directing gig at CSC after 13 years as artistic director),  began performances on 24 March and opened on 13 April; it’s scheduled to close on 1 May.

The play’s set in Jerusalem in 1192, during a respite in fighting between Muslims and Christian Crusaders.  The Muslim forces under Saladin, the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria (1137-93; reigned from 1174-93), had captured the cities of Acre and Jerusalem in 1187.  Armies under King Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart, 1157-99; reigned 1189-99) and other Christian leaders recaptured Acre in July 1191 during the Third Crusade (1189-92). After his allies—Leopold V, Duke of Austria (Leopold the Virtuous, 1157-94; reigned 1177-94), and Philip II, King of France (Philip Augustus, 1165-1223; reigned 1180-1223)—left the Holy Land in 1191, Richard continued to advance, defeating Saladin every time they fought and taking key cities along the Mediterranean coast.  But in September 1192, Richard and Saladin signed the Treaty of Ramla that left Jerusalem under Muslim control and Cyprus and the coastal cities under Crusader control.  The treaty granted Christian pilgrims the right to visit holy places.  Nathan the Wise takes place during this uneasy peace, which lasted until the Fourth Crusade (1202-04).

(Mentioned in Nathan are some sites of Crusader battles.  The Templar says he was captured at Tebnin, a city in Syria [now part of Lebanon] held by the Christians until 1187 when Saladin’s forces retook it and took many defenders prisoners.  The knight also reveals that his uncle, also a Templar, was killed in Gaza, the city in Palestine that was captured, also in 1187,  by Saladin, who destroyed the city’s fortifications in 1191.  Later, the lay brother tells Nathan that the knight he served, who’d given him the baby Rachel, died in Ascalon [Ashkelon in modern Israel], on the border between Egypt and the Crusader Kingdom.  The Christian knights took Ascalon in 1099, during the First Crusade [1096-99], and then lost it to Saladin in 1187, but during the years in between, the city was the site of continuous battles and sieges.  The Philistine city Gath—home of biblical Goliath—where Nathan’s family was slaughtered, was already a ruin by Crusader times, but the Christian knights built a fortress on the site as part of a defensive ring around Muslim-held Ascalon.  I found no record of a massacre of Jews there, however.  I also found no appropriate town named Darun, where the lay brother handed Rachel to Nathan, in the Holy Land; villages in Persia and modern-day Bangladesh don’t seem likely.) 

As the play opens, Nathan (F. Murray Abraham), a Jewish merchant, returns home from a trading and debt-collecting journey to learn that his daughter, Rachel (Erin Neufer), was saved from a fire by a young German Knight Templar, a captive whom Saladin spared because he resembles the Sultan’s late brother.  (The Knights Templar were a highly trained Christian military order that protected pilgrims to the Holy Land and fought its Muslim occupiers.  The organization’s members, who didn’t marry, are often called simply Templars.)  Rachel believes that the knight is an angel—illustrated by the cast in the most inventive bit of staging in the production—but Nathan persuades her that he’s mortal.  Nathan finds the Templar (Stark Sands) to thank him, but the knight scorns Jews.  Nathan asks, “Must Jews and Christians be always Jews and Christians and only humans afterwards?  Or like me will you stand here and say it is enough to be a man?”  The Templar takes Nathan’s hand in friendship.

In Kemp’s adaptation, the play isn’t divided into acts, but rather 11 scenes.  At CSC, the intermission comes between scenes five and six.  As the audience returns to our seats, the actors playing the two male Muslim characters Al-Hafi (George Abud) and Saladin (Austin Durant) kneel together center stage on prayer rugs and say their daily prayers in Arabic, a sequence that, like the prologue, also isn’t in Kemp’s text.

On the advice of Al-Hafi, the Sultan’s household treasurer and Nathan’s chess-playing friend, Saladin summons Nathan to ask for a loan, but decides to test the merchant’s vaunted wisdom first.  (The epithet given Nathan in the play’s title, ‘Wise,’ is probably Lessing’s rendition of the honorific Jewish title Reb or Rebbe, used to designate respected and trusted members of the community in the centuries before Rabbi came to mean an ordained clergyman.)  Saladin asks Nathan which is the true faith: Islam, Christianity, or Judaism.  Nathan replies by telling the Sultan the “Ring Parable”:

A magic ring that can render its owner loved by people and God has been passed from father to his favorite son for generations.  When the ring was handed down to a father with three sons whom he loved equally, he promised it to each one.  To keep his promise, the father had two exact replicas of the original ring made and on his deathbed gave one ring to each son.  The brothers “haggle, argue, and fight” over who owned the real ring and then took the quarrel to court.  The judge advised each son to believe that his ring was the original and to live in such a way that his ring’s power could prove true, to love one another as their father had.  

Nathan compares this parable to religion, explaining that we all live by the faith we’ve learned from those we trusted.  Saladin is impressed by the story and calls Nathan his friend.  Meanwhile, the Templar has fallen in love with Rachel.  He asks Nathan if he can marry Rachel but Nathan tells him to wait and the knight thinks Nathan is rejecting him.  He tells Daya (Caroline Lagerfelt), Rachel’s companion who’s Christian, and she reveals a secret that even Rachel doesn’t know: Rachel is only Nathan’s adopted daughter; she is, in fact, a Christian.  The Templar nearly gets Nathan into trouble with the Patriarch of Jerusalem (Lagerfelt, in an odd bit of double-casting) when the knight asks a “hypothetical” question, for raising a Christian as a Jew is a crime for which Nathan could be burned at the stake. 

The Patriarch, guessing about whom the Templar was talking, sends a lay brother (John Christopher Jones) to spy on Nathan.  The brother, however, turns out to be the former soldier who turned the infant Rachel over to Nathan 18 years earlier when the knight he served was killed and his wife had died in childbirth.  What the brother didn’t know, Nathan explains, is that on the day before Rachel was brought to him, his own wife and seven sons had been killed by Crusaders and though Nathan had sworn eternal hatred for Christians, when he held the baby girl, he immediately loved her as the return of one of “the seven.”

In the end, Nathan untangles several twists.  When the Templar told Nathan his name, the merchant had realized something and confirmed his suspicions with the lay brother and a prayer book the brother found in the pocket of Rachel’s dead father.  It turns out that the Templar is really Rachel’s brother and that their father, Nathan’s friend, was actually a Muslim forced to take a German name in order to marry a Christian.  The man was in actuality the Sultan’s lost brother, so the Templar and Rachel are Saladin’s nephew and niece.  In addition to this mélange of faiths and ethnicities with a common bond of family and love, Lessing wove into the story several others to make his point about tolerance and understanding: Nathan’s best friend, Al-Hafi, is a dervish, a Muslim ascetic, and Rachel’s companion, Daya, is Christian.  Saladin also has a sister, Sittah (Shiva Kalaiselvan), who converted in order to marry a Christian—though she’s not especially happy about it.  As contrived and melodramatic as all this sounds, it’s integral to Lessing’s theme: we’re all brothers and sisters—a message that was certainly bold in the 18th century, even during the Enlightenment.  (This ecumenism was one of the notions for which Goeze assailed Lessing.)  It’s certainly lost on many of today’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims (and, I daresay, adherents of several other world faiths).

The show’s scenic design, by Tony Straiges, is very simple, but effective.  CSC’s stage is a thrust with the playing area level with the floor.  As we enter, walking around the periphery of the stage to get to our seats, we can examine the pre-set: the floor is strewn with Persian rugs, one of which is still rolled up; some large pillows for sitting are scattered around; a chess board, set for a game, sits on one rug and a scimitar lies on another nearby.  About a half dozen Near Eastern brass lamps hang from the fly space,  Ten plain wooden chairs are lined up just below the upstage wall.  There’s no other furniture and the basic décor never changes.  On the upstage wall is an enlarged black-and-white photograph of a bombed-out street in some Syrian or Iraqi town, Staiges’s and Kulick’s literal way “to sharpen some of the connections between the Jerusalem of 1192 and the Middle East of” today, as Kemp explained he intended his adaptation to do.  This is greatly aided by Joe Novak’s lighting and Matt Stine’s soundscape.

In the house, at the ends of the front row seats, are one or two folding canvas stools on which we are admonished by the ushers not to put anything.  We’ll soon find out that the cast seldom leaves the theater and when an actor is “off stage,” he or she sits either in a chair on stage or on a stool in the house.  This was an element in Kulick’s conceit that his production of Nathan the Wise is a story being told by a group of enactors.  We aren’t watching life unfold but the reenactment of a fable or parable meant to teach us a moral lesson.  The actors in Kulick’s cast aren’t portraying actual people named Nathan or Saladin or Rachel, but other performers or storytellers who’re representing (or presenting if you want to get technical about it) these characters.  Kemp even says that “the play is a kind of fable” and that Lessing “put a ‘fable-like’ aura around the action” of Nathan the Wise. 

In a preamble Kulick added to Kemp’s text, the cast enters at the beginning of the performance, dressed in contemporary “street clothes” and begins haranguing one another in three different languages—German, Hebrew, and Arabic—like a miniature Tower of Babel.  An Arabic text is projected over the rear-wall photo.  Then Abraham quiets the cacophony by reminding his companions that they “have a story to tell,” as they help each other don white robes or tunics over their ordinary dress that will be each character’s identifying garb for the story enactment.  These costumes, designed by Anita Yavich, are decorated with writing: the Muslim characters all wear robes with Arabic script, the Jews have Hebrew writing, and the Christians German or Latin (I couldn’t get a clear enough view of them to be sure as it was inscribed in medieval script).  Some of the writing is arranged in a pattern: the Templar’s tabard had the knights’ red cross formed by tiny letters; Nathan and Rachel’s lettering was arranged in what looked to me like a menorah, which is the oldest symbol of Judaism going far back before the well-known Star of David, a very modern device, was adopted.  (Today, the seven-branched candelabrum is the symbol of the city of Jerusalem; the seats in Israel’s Knesset, its parliament, are arranged in the form of the menorah.)  I have to think all this was a deliberate design element, Yavich’s contribution to the storytelling conceit.

This approach, the twice-removed enactment of Lessing’s tale, might have been necessitated by a feature of Kemp’s translation and also might explain a characteristic of the company’s performance.  I said earlier that some of Kemp’s prose approached contemporary speech, clearly not what 12th-century (or even 18th-century) characters would use if they spoke English.  So perhaps to justify this apparent anachronism, Kulick devised this idea of presenting the play as a story being acted out by a group of players, providing them with permission to be a touch more modern than they might if they were doing a straight classic play.  This could also explain why the cast, including Abraham, all seemed to be playing with subdued energy, almost casually sometimes.  If the language is faux-contemporary, then the behavior might fall into that rhythm as well since the performers aren’t trying to be the medieval figures, coping with all the emotion-laden facts of their lives, but actors recounting a fable.  I believe it’s a Brechtian technique devised by Kulick to distance the spectators from the action so that we can make thoughtful comparisons to the current conditions in the Middle East—not just to the bloody fighting and destruction represented by the photo backdrop, but to the status of Arabs in Israel, the conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, the plight of the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey (it’s interesting to note, by the way, that Saladin was a Kurd, not an Arab), and the constant infighting among Muslim sects like the Sunni, Shia, Wahhabis, and Yazidis.  As Abraham continues his admonition about their story: “It happened long ago, but it might be worth hearing today.”

In any case, the acting is less bombastic than I would have imagined for a period classic like Nathan—and I don’t mean that as a complaint.  The most “modern” performance comes from Stark Sands as the Templar.  (His “street” dress, by the way, includes military combat boots with black trousers with the legs bloused as if his first persona were a special-forces warrior—another reference to current conditions in the Middle East, I presume.)  Sands looks very young, about a decade younger than he really is, and his performance comes off as a willful post-adolescent rather than the confused and lovelorn soldier the story makes him.  I haven’t seen any of his previous work, so I don’t know if this is habitual or if he selected this, with Kulick’s guidance, for Nathan, but of all the actors, he’s the least persuasive.  Most of the characters make mercurial changes of attitude, going from animosity (or at least skepticism) to bosom friendship in an instant, and Sands accomplishes this no less believably than any of his castmates, but his other scenes have less depth and truthfulness than the other characters’, and if this is an aspect of the storytelling approach, Sands takes it too far.

Even Abraham’s Nathan is curiously unemotional—especially considering the position he’s in for most of the play.  He arrives in Jerusalem to find that his house burned down and that his beloved Rachel was nearly killed; he soon suspects that his daughter’s savior is not who he presents himself to be, but someone whose existence could upend Nathan’s happy home; he’s threatened with exposure for a transgression the Church has decreed would cost him his life.  Yet Abraham remains calm and rational throughout.  Compared to his Shylock nine years ago, this Nathan is cold-blooded.  (Granted, Merchant is a tragedy and Nathan decidedly isn’t—but the characters can’t know that before it all ends.)  Austin Durant’s Saladin, a benevolent and even jovial characterization, doesn’t face quite the dire fates that Nathan does, but he’s going broke due to his profligate generosity and his financial relief keeps being delayed.  Yet he’s not in the least worried.  Nor is he concerned about the Crusader armies out to drive him from the Holy Land and kill him—after all, that’s how he got hold of the Templar to begin with, and he’s already lost his beloved brother.  Yet he engages in philosophical debates with Nathan and deliberately loses at chess to Sittah so he can give her money he doesn’t have. 

The most emotional performances come from George Abud’s Al-Hafi, who’s played as an excitable fellow, Erin Neufer’s Rachel, a teenager in love, and Lagerfelt’s Daya, who’s anxious to get back home to Switzerland and will do almost anything to make that happen—even betray her kind and generous employer.  The contrast can seem so disparate as to be almost unbelievable.  It’s hard to fault the actors, though, since the problem is so evenly distributed, so I lay the responsibility on Kulick.

All told, the entire cast, with the possible exception of John Christopher Jones’s sincere and honest lay brother, is remarkably cool and unemotional, and I took it that this is the storytelling approach.  (There’s a great deal of storytelling in the play, so the actors are depicting enactors telling a story about people who constantly tell stories.  Do you get that?)  It distances the whole production from the spectators a little too much to engage us—at least it did me.  In a way, I don’t feel as if I actually saw a performance of Nathan the Wise, but rather someone telling me the story of Nathan the Wise.  It wasn’t entirely satisfying—though not completely alienating, either.

Turning to the published reviews, I see that the website Show-Score tallied 24 reviewers and reports that 71% were positive, with only 12% negative.  (17% of the reviews were mixed.)  The average score on Show-Score was 69 (out of 100, I presume).  Newsday’s Linda Winer described Kemp’s translation as “lucid and engrossing” and said that Kulick’s production “combines straightforward storytelling with the otherworldly charm of a fable.”  Winer praised Abraham’s “calm, tender humanism” in contrast to his more usual theatricality, and deemed Neufer’s Rachel “lyrical” and Sands’s Templar “impressively ardent.”  In the end, the Newsday reviewer found CSC’s Nathan “exactly what . . . this theater dedicated to re-imagining classical repertory for modern audiences should do.”  In amNewYork Matt Windman, in contrast, found the production “bare and unexciting” that “doesn’t make a strong case for the German play, which mostly resembles an antiquated comedy full of slow exposition and surprise revelations.”  Of the performances, Windman asserted, “Abraham appears in a jovial mood, full of good humor,” unlike his Salieri or Shylock, and “Sands . . . gives a one-dimensional performance that is far too aggressive in tone.”  Elisabeth Vincentelli pretty much dismissed the revival in a short paragraph in an omnibus column in the New York Post, praising CSC for doing the “obscure” play, but adding, “If only the show were a little more exciting.”  Kulick’s production of “this fable-like” play “moves at a sluggish pace,” Vincentelli asserted; though Abraham’s “thoughtfully sober” performance deserved plaudits, “‘Nathan’ could have used less solemnity and more oomph.”

Lessing’s play has “timeless urgency, but sags under a convoluted plot,” wrote Joe Dziemianowicz in New York’s Daily News, but Kulick’s “spare, well-acted revival plays up the strengths.”  Despite the “uniformly fine” cast, with special kudos for Abraham’s “ wry, fiery and smart” Nathan, the play’s “ending feels dashed off.”  In the New York Times, Christopher Isherwood reported that in the first half of Nathan the Wise, “I found myself listing toward boredom,” but as the second part began, “the play grows increasingly engrossing” and “proves to be a moving story that speaks  . . . to conflicts that roil the world today.”  The Timesman generally praised Kemp’s translation (which the reviewer rightly noted is “more of an adaptation”), but still found, “There is no small measure of pontifical speechifying.”  Of Kulick’s staging, Isherwood complained about the seating of the “off-stage” actors in that upstage row of chairs, which he found “a slightly deadening presence that smacks vaguely of the lecture hall.”  The references to today’s Middle East, most notably the rear-wall photo, the Times review-writer judged were emphasized “a little heavily.”  Isherwood wrote that “the cast is mostly good” (he found that Neufer’s Rachel “strikes a somewhat jarring contemporary note and gets a little shrill”), with praise for Abraham (“quietly intense, persuasive”), Lagerfelt (“fervent but conflicted” as Daya), and Sands (“ardent”).  The reviewer noted that “the almost melodramatic turns of the plot are integral to the play’s central theme,” even as some “can be seen looming in the distance, prominent as a caravan of camels”; however, he still enjoyed “the unfolding of the story,”  which “is both a thoughtful (if sometimes preachy) exploration of mankind’s seeming inability to shed itself of culturally embedded prejudices, and a savory drama.”

The reviewer for the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” found Nathan’s second part, beginning with the “Ring Parable,” “more successful” than the first, even with the “flurry of revelations” that “amusingly link” most of the play’s characters.  With a central performance by the “forthright, thoughtful, and immensely clever” Abraham and “a robust, sympathetic” turn by Durant “that provides a pleasing counterpoint to Abraham’s,” Kulick’s revival “is a little bit Shakespeare, a little bit Scheherazade, and a little bit modern allegory, not laid on too thick.”  Time Out New York’s Adam Feldman called CSC’s Nathan the Wise “an elegant and apt parting gift [a reference to Kulick’s departure from the company at the end of the season] that sums up much of his approach to the company over the years:  Thoughtful and sincere, it combines a dramaturg’s love of theater history with a yen to connect today’s headlines to yesterday’s footnotes.”  While Kulick’s tie to the modern Middle East “comes off more as a concept than a vision,” “the play is gently engaging on its own terms.”  The “marvelous” Abraham “brings worldly wit to his early scenes and Biblical fire to his harrowing climactic monologue,” Sands is “mercurial,” and Abud and Jones provide “tasty bits.”  Feldman found the first act “discursive,” but the second is “suspenseful” and the man from TONY thought that Kulick directed with a “judicious highlighter to a worthy text, and the result is a virtuous envoi.”

On the website Stage Buddy, Mark Dundas Wood had trouble with Lessing’s script, feeling that it “might work better as closet drama” since the attraction “is not Lessing’s storytelling prowess.”   Kemp’s translation and Kulick’s staging aim “to make the play accessible to 21st-century audiences,” observed Wood, with assistance from Staiges’s setting and Yavich’s costumes.  “While Lessing’s musings on questions of faith may be of interest to today’s audiences,” felt Wood, “his antique scenario never quite seems to click for us.”  The “plot becomes increasingly convoluted as the play progresses,” the Stage Buddy reviewer asserted, comparing it to “a credulity-stretching Plautian comedy,” even though Kulick’s staging “adds energy.”  Declaring that Abraham is the “chief reason” to see Nathan, Wood also had praise for Abud and Lagerfelt, though he expressed reservations about Sands, who “pushed a bit hard at times.”  Theatre Reviews Limited’s David Roberts called Lessing’s play “complex,” his characters “well-rounded and interesting,” and the plot “engaging and relevant.”  “Under Brian Kulick’s artful and efficient direction,” alongside the “brilliant and the quintessence of exquisite acting” of Abraham, the “accomplished ensemble . . . successfully negotiates” the play’s complexities. 

Charles Wright of CurtainUp dubbed CSC’s Nathan as “splendid looking,” thanks to “top-notch designers”—“an admirable valedictory” for Kulick.  Wright characterized Kemp’s translation as “ear-pleasing prose” with “a contemporary ring throughout without seeming slangy or anachronistic.”  Kulick, the CU reviewer found, assembled a “well-calibrated ensemble” led by Abraham, who “is like the concertmaster of a chamber orchestra, leading without calling undue attention to himself.”  On Theater Pizzazz, Marilyn Lester dubbed Lessing’s Nathan the Wise “a remarkable work” and described Kemp’s translation as “both respectful to the original and perceptively modern and relevant.”  Director Kulick “paced the work briskly and intelligently” and the “ensemble cast is pitch-perfect,” with special praise for Lagerfelt as the Patriarch (“chillingly fierce”) and especially Abraham, who “demonstrates why he’s one of the most talented and brilliant actors of our time.”  Michael Hillyer described the CSC production as “handsome” on New York Theatre Guide, with a “talented company . . . creating a strong sense of ensemble,” “simple but effective” design elements, and direction that “helped to create a simple story-telling framework [and] concentrated upon the narrative.” 

Michael Dale of Broadway World deemed that “NATHAN THE WISE, does play a bit like theatre for young audiences in Classic Stage Company’s new mounting” because “Kulick’s production draws obvious parallels between yesterday and today.”  Of the performances, the BWW reviewer reported that Abraham’s Nathan is “wry-humored and amusingly philosophical,” Sands is  “intense” as the Templar, and Saladin is “gregarious in Durant’s portrayal.  Dale concluded that “while pleasant, sweet and well-acted, there’s little in NATHAN THE WISE to stimulate interest, aside from its value as a theatrical artifact.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray wrote that Nathan the Wise makes “soberly considered, worth-remembering points about religious tolerance,” but while “Lessing’s work is serious-minded,” Kulick’s staging “too often feels as though it isn’t.”  To be fair to the director, who “instructed the whole cast to tread lightly,” Murray noted that Kemp’s translation “downplays the classical (literal and figurative) poetry.”  All of Kulick’s approaches, “taken all together, . . . rob the work of the weight and the import that might have made it worth doing in the first place,” the TB blogger complained.  Lessing’s story is “dogged” with “unlikeliness” and Kemp’s translation is “a soap-opera tract” with “unmusical dialogue” that Murray felt eliminated the lyricism and poetry of the original.  Kulick and his design team abet these deficiencies “by jolting contemporaneity at every turn”; these  tactics “lower the stakes” so “that the performances only skim the surface.”  The result, said Murray, is that none of the actors, except Durant, hits the true notes for their characters and the audience is unengaged.  The TB reviewer declared that the simple act of Abud’s and Durant’s saying prayers before the second half of the show says “more than all the rest of this production’s modern ministrations put together.”  Zachary Stewart called the CSC revival of Nathan an “excellent and earnest production“ of Kemp’s “zippy” version on TheaterMania.  Though Stewart thought that the reach out to the contemporary Middle East was “somewhat heavy-handed,” he allowed that it “actually complements Lessing's parabolic drama” and that Staiges’s “minimalist yet effective scenic design” enhances this connection because it “suggests both eras.” 

On the cyber journal the Huffington Post there were two notices.  The first, from Michael Giltz, dubbed Nathan the Wise a “warm-hearted story” that “has the shape of a Shakespearean romance, the insight of a Michael Frayn drama and the soul of a fairy tale”; however, “Kulick hasn’t quite woven all these strands into a cohesive evening of theater; the scenic design by Tony Straiges is especially indifferent.”  Nonetheless, “a fine cast and the probing intelligence . . . make it an enjoyable one.”  In Kemp’s translation, the play “has an elemental appeal,” but “the scenic design did the story no help”: Giltz found that the photo mural “with its mixed message distracted throughout.”  The HP blogger deemed that Abraham “dominated . . . by quietly anchoring the performances of everyone around him,” although their acting was “slapdash in style.”  Giltz concluded that “you are never in doubt as to the thrust of the story, even if “a certain clarity was lacking in the ending.”  The following day, Giltz’s HP colleague Fern Siegel found the play “an emotional roller-coaster ride,” while at the same time “a bit contrived.”  “Still,” Siegel continued, “its solid cast, led by a centered Abraham, carries it off.”  Staiges’s scenery “is economical”—except for the photo mural, which she found “confusing”—and Yavich’s costumes “are evocative.” 

'A Man’s a Man'

On 24 and 27 January, I published a two-part theater-history article on ROT called “Dueling Brechts” which related the saga of two nearly simultaneous Off-Broadway productions of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mann ist Mann in 1962.  One of the two was called A Man’s a Man, presented by the New Repertory Theatre Company in a translation by Eric Bentley; the other was entitled Man Is Man, directed by Julian Beck for the Living Theatre using a translation by Gerhard Nellhaus.  Mann ist Mann has never been a popular Brecht script, showing up on New York City stages maybe once every eight or 10 years, but the Classic Stage Company has just presented a new staging of A Man’s a Man using a translation by Nellhaus.  (The CSC staging is clearly based on one of Brecht’s later revisions of the play—he cut Widow Begbick’s three daughters out and shortened the script in 1931, which Nellhaus also translated, and later made more pointed intimations about Nazism to which he was vehemently opposed—but I don’t know which one Brian Kulick directed.)  The production began previews on 10 January and opened on 30 January; it closed today, 16 February.  My friend Diana and I caught the performance on Friday evening, 7 February, at CSC’s home on East 13th Street in the East Village.

A Man’s a Man is Brecht’s study of the mutability of the human character, including a person’s most fervently held beliefs and principles.  According to the playwright, anyone will abandon one personality and set of principles and take on another as exigency dictates, or, as Brecht put it in one of his first interviews, the play’s “about a man being taken to pieces and rebuilt as someone else for a particular purpose.”  Along the way, Brecht denigrates war and the military, the machine age and modern society, and capitalism.  Set in Brecht’s idea of Kiplingesque India in 1925, A Man’s a Man tells the story of the innocent and compliant Galy Gay, a simple Irish porter out to buy his wife a fish for their supper who’s enlisted by three British soldiers, Uriah Shelley, Polly Baker, and Jesse Mahoney, who need a replacement for one of their machinegun unit.  The soldiers had just tried to loot a temple for cash to buy beer, sustenance for the coming war, and had to leave their fourth man, Jeraiah Jip, behind when they fled.  The soldiers are terrified of their sergeant, the notorious Bloody Five, known for his bloodthirstiness both in battle and in the barracks, so they cajole, persuade, threaten, and hoodwink Gay into taking Jip’s place.  Along his way, Gay’s introduced to the Widow Begbick, the proprietor of a traveling canteen where the soldiers relax and carouse.  As Gay becomes more and more the kind of killing machine he’s led to believe he’s supposed to be, he witnesses his own “execution” and funeral, even delivering a eulogy for himself.  In the end, he takes part in a war against Tibet, single-handedly conquers a fortress, and is declared a hero for his ferocity.  He’s become the perfect soldier.  When Jip returns to reclaim his position, his former comrades turn him away with Gay’s old identity papers.  (A more detailed synopsis of the plot would probably be misleading and confusing.  It’s not quite “incomprehensible,” as the characters warn us in the performance, but it is absurd and alogical.  Telling a story was not Brecht’s point, you understand.)

In “Dueling Brechts,” I laid out a brief history of the play and some of its important productions, which I won’t recap here.  (Go to http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2014/01/dueling-brechts-part-1.html for those details.)  I will add, however, that six years before writing Mann ist Mann, Brecht started working on a play called Galgei, set in Munich, in which “some villains” tell “solid citizen” Joseph Galgei he’s “wicked” merchant Pick and Galgei eventually succumbs.  Over two days in 1926, fortified by “½  bottle of brandy, 4 bottles of seltzer and eight to ten cigars,” Brecht reported that he transformed Galgei into Mann ist Mann.   Between 1920 and 1926, during the script’s transition, Brecht took up the study of Marxism, rejected German Expressionism, and came under the influence of the Neue Sachlichkeit, which Kulick, also artistic director of CSC, translated as the “New Matter-of-Factness” (but which is very hard to pin down in English). 

Though I’ve read the script (principally in Nellhaus’s translation for the Living Theater mounting) and done research on those long-ago productions, I’d never seen a performance of any version of Mann ist Mann before now.  The CSC production was very interesting and well executed within director Kulick’s interpretation.  As I start to write this report, however, I haven’t sorted out if the interpretation is what I’d have chosen, or really whether I actually liked the performance or just appreciated it.   Maybe by the time I finish the report, I’ll have worked it out.  In any case, I might as well begin with the performances and the production and get to themes and the interpretation when I’ve had some time to cogitate.

I’ll start with the set, because it was a striking evocation of Kulick and designer Paul Steinberg’s notion of what Brecht was on about in A Man’s a Man.  CSC has a relatively small stage area, a thrust configuration that’s pretty much a large square.  For Man, the floor was essentially bare—no constructed scenery on stage—with the fly space festooned with bright green palm fronds evoking the tropics.  (Kilkoa, the setting of Man, is an imaginary place, so its geographic location is wherever Brecht and the director want it to be.)  The back wall of the acting area incorporated a large metal garage-like door that served various purposes and could be obscured by sliding panels painted with motifs suggesting various locations during the play; there was a smaller wooden door to stage right of the big one.  The most salient element of the design were the orange-painted oil barrels stacked seemingly haphazardly around the stage at the pre-set, suggesting huge palm tree trunks.  (The color, designer Steinberg explained, “is meant to be slightly vulgar and intense.”) The barrels were moved, restacked, and transformed by suggestion and imagination into many disparate objects all during the performance.  Steinberg explained that the barrels came from a reference in the play to the coming war.  The soldiers don’t know who the enemy will be or where they’ll be fighting, and point out that if it’s about cotton, they’ll be fighting in Tibet and if it’s about oil, the fight will be in Pamir (a region of Afghanistan).  Steinberg said, “To me there’s no more potent symbol in today’s world than oil as a force for wars.  And so that’s where those things come from.”  (The war in Man is in Tibet in the end, so Steinberg’s allusion is demonstrably a contemporary reference to our recent wars in Iraq and Kuwait and our conflicts with Iran to keep the Persian Gulf open to oil shipping.)  The barrels are the packages Galy Gay carries as a porter, the “leather box” in which Jeraiah Jip hides when he’s left behind at the temple, Begbick’s beer wagon, the “elephant” Gay is hoodwinked into selling illegally, the train cars in which the soldiers ride to war, and so on.  They became an emblematic image for the production.

The costumes, by Gabriel Berry, were mostly World War I-era British army field uniforms, with the four machine gunners wearing the familiar pie-plate helmet.  (Bloody Five wore a dress uniform with Sam Browne belt and a peaked cap.)  The widow wore a patterned ’20s drop-waisted dress.  The overall effect was to reinforce the period without commenting on it or the styles overtly.  Justin Townsend’s lighting, essentially bright and white as if the sun were shining at its height all the time, was in a similarly straightforward vein.

While Bentley endeavored to make his Brecht translations idiomatically American, Nellhaus didn’t, retaining the faux-British feeling Brecht seems to have intended.  (I’ve read some Brecht in the original German, but not Mann ist Mann, so I’m extrapolating here.  Nellhaus’s rendition of the play for the Living’s 1962 staging was authorized by the Brecht heirs; I know nothing about the CSC version, but the endorsement suggests he hewed close to Brecht’s use of language.)  Given the fantasy depiction of the British Raj (besides the fact that Kilkoa doesn’t exist, Brecht gave England a queen in 1925), Nellhaus’s approach seems apt (as long as the actors can handle the alien speech, which the CSC cast did) and also in line with Brecht’s famous striving for unfamiliar stage life to remind us that this is a show, a demonstration, not reality.  To that effect, Brecht inserted songs into the script, another non-realistic technique to accomplish his intention that we pay attention to his points and not be drawn into an empathetic relationship with the characters.  The lyrics of CSC’s A Man’s a Man, of course, were Nellhaus’s renditions of Brecht’s verse—Brecht was also a poet as well as a playwright—but the music for the production was new, composed by Duncan Sheik, composer for Spring Awakening (Off-Broadway, Broadway, 2006-09) and the recent London production of American Psycho (2013-14).  Maybe I’m too hung up on Kurt Weill, but I found the new score too lyrical, too tuneful for Brecht and A Man’s a Man.  In contrast to, say, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, in which the pretty music (by Richard Peaslee) clashed with the brutal imagery of the words, there was no conflict in Sheik’s compositions.  Brecht’s lyrics were inspired by troop songs (via Rudyard Kipling), but there wasn’t much martial in Sheik’s music, which subverts the disorienting function of the songs.  Remember, Brecht wasn’t about entertainment and appeasing an audience: “I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed,” he declared in that 1926 interview. 

The performances were generally fine, though perhaps a little too much in the realistic vein.  I didn’t see Kulick’s previous Brecht work at CSC, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (2013) and Galileo (2012), so I don’t know if A Man’s a Man is typical of his approach to the writer, but style wasn’t a main element in this production.  If anything, Kulick subdued stylistic aspects of the production in almost every department except the set design.  (It may be significant that Steinberg’s principal field of design is opera, often a showier medium.  In his interview, the designer remarked that “in any musical theatre, the design is often a bridge between the abstraction of music and the literal quality of the words.  It has a different place in the structure.  But for a play it’s a more one-to-one dialogue with words.”)  I can’t say that Kulick’s approach didn’t work for me, but it wasn’t as starkly interesting and provocative as I expect from Brecht; on the other hand, it didn’t iron out all the Brechtian quirkiness, a tactic that turns his plays into mush.  So I guess I was left with neither fish nor fowl—but at least I didn’t get pabulum.  In the worlds of theater and Brecht, that counts as a win.  (It also comes close to damning with faint praise, and I regret that.  If the play were still running, I might have rephrased that statement.)

The central performances were all a little problematical, but not immensely off base.  As Galy Gay, Gibson Frazier was a little more a nebbish than I think he ought to be; Charles Isherwood of the New York Times dubbed him “boyish but rather anonymous.”  I don’t mean the character, who is, as he says, a “nobody,” but as a stage presence.  Frazier, however much he may wish otherwise, was following in the footsteps of the likes of Peter Lorre, whose 1931 performance raised a critical howl which Brecht felt compelled to answer in print; Joe Chaikin, who won an Obie for the portrayal in 1962; and even Bill Murray, who did the role in a 1986 staging in Hyde Park, New York.  But Frazier barely stood out from the ensemble, and “the peculiar oddity of ‘A Man’s a Man,’” wrote Isherwood, “is that it’s hard to lament the disappearance of Galy Gay, because there was never anything much there to disappear.”  We’re not supposed to empathize with Gay, according to Brecht’s theatrical philosophy, but we are supposed to take notice. 

As the Widow Begbick, Justin Vivian Bond brought the fresh (I think) element of drag impersonation to the role.  (I learned of a production in Los Angeles in which Galy Gay was played by a woman, but I never read of a man appearing as Begbick before.)  Previous Begbicks have been Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife; Judith Malina in the Living’s version; Olympia Dukakis, winner of the 1962 Obie for her portrayal in the competing production; and Stockard Channing in 1986 opposite Bill Murray.  Formerly Kiki of the comic musical duet Kiki and Herb (1990s-2000s), Bond is certainly statuesque.  (Bond seemed taller than all the men in the cast, particularly 5’ 9” Stephen Spinella’s Bloody Five.)  But I kept feeling that v was in a different play from everyone else, almost doing a solo act in the middle of A Man’s a Man.  (As a transgender person, Bond insists on not identifying with either sex and prefers to use v as the suitable pronoun, so I will oblige.)  I can’t put my finger precisely on what was disconnecting, but it had to do with v’s energy and “presence,” if that makes any sense.  Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York  Daily News said, “Bond’s acting is one-note,” and despite her flapper garb, Bond’s Begbick was from a different time and place somehow.  (Bond’s program credits list few traditional plays and I wonder how much work v’s done with a cast and a script.  V was a little like some of those old-time movie actors who just did their own thing, irrespective of what anyone else on the screen was doing.)  Because this was Brecht, however, it wasn’t as damaging as it might have been had the play been a Shaw, say, or a Shakespeare, and Bond’s smoky, dark voice was appropriately Brechtian to my ear, even if the songs v sang rang a little too lilting. 

In the late 1950s, a translator-playwright was contemplating a rendition of Mann ist Mann in New York City.  The actor to whom the English script was to be offered was Marlon Brando “because of the ‘wonderful role’ in it for him.”  I assume the offer would have been for Galy Gay, but Brando probably would have been more credibly cast as Bloody Five.  In that light, Stephen Spinella was an odd choice for the fearsome military veteran and the actor’s slight build emphasized this.  Despite the abundant facial hair the actor sported, he seemed like a boy dressed up in his father’s uniform—or perhaps an old granddad in his former regalia.  Again, this being Brecht, such a disconnect might have been appropriate had I not felt that Spinella was the slightest bit uncomfortable in the role.  Watching him, I couldn’t help wondering what a bigger man would be like as he dissolved into jelly.

The other soldiers—Jason Babinsky as Polly Baker, Steven Skybell as Jesse Mahoney, Martin Moran as Uriah Shelley, and Andrew Weems (who replaced an injured Bill Buell in January) as Jeraiah Jip—as well as Ching Valdes-Aran as Mr. Wang, the temple priest, were all fine.  (Allan K. Washington played all the other characters, including Mrs. Galy Gay.)  Nothing really stood out in the ensemble, but it all worked well.  (Interestingly, as if to balance the transgender Bond’s playing Widow Begbick, Valdes-Aran, a female actor, was billed as Mr. Wang, though the role as presented by the actor and Kulick is essentially gender-neutral—and gender-irrelevant.  Wang’s costume, a tunic and turban, looking like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, was probably modeled on male garb, but to a Westerner, it was ambiguous.) 

I’m still struggling with Kulick’s interpretation.  Mann ist Mann predates Brecht’s famous theater theories, including Epic Theater and the so-called Alienation Effect, but he did insert rudimentary versions of them into the stage work when he directed the revised play in 1931.  Today, of course, most theater people will find the seeds of the playwright’s ideas in the script and bring them to the fore, at least in each director’s vision of them.  Since, as I acknowledged, I haven’t seen Kulick’s earlier Brecht presentations, I don’t know if he has a consistent Brechtian viewpoint or not, but on the basis of A Man’s a Man, I’d say he soft-pedals the starker aspects of Brecht’s theories.  Hence, I imagine, the semi-realistic performance style and the wholly realistic costuming.  Perhaps it was also the rationale for the lyrical musical style in which Duncan Sheik composed, influenced (as it should have been) by the director’s vision.  (Paul Steinberg’s scenography, as I said, was a different matter.)  I’d also say that Kulick emphasized the comedy over the more barbed political and polemical points Brecht was making—though it’s hard to roll over them completely.  In the end, Kulick created an enjoyable and interesting piece of theater—but just how much Brecht was present is in question for me.  I’m unquestionably glad I saw this performance, though I’m not sure what I learned from it other than having gotten to see a version of this play on stage finally.  (Brecht has copped to making at least 10 revisions of Mann ist Mann from 1926 to his death in 1956.)

In the press, Newsman Dziemianowicz reported, “The first half delivers a clean, smooth, energetic ride and buckles you in tight. . . .  But the second act is shaggy, inert, less musical and loses its grip,” due in part to “sluggish pacing.”  “Overall,” he wrote however, “performances click.”  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli opened her review with: “There’s a reason we don’t see Brecht’s ‘A Man’s a Man’ very often: It’s not all that good.  To come alive, it needs a brilliant production – and this clunky Classic Stage Company revival isn’t it.”  Commenting on the accident that sidelined an original cast member, the Postwoman complained, “Sadly, that was far more exciting than what unfolds onstage,” but added that Sheik’s music was “quite pleasant, especially in the hands of Justin Vivian Bond.”  Singling out Bond and Spinella for praise, Vincentelli wrote that “the rest of the ensemble is dull” and “the action is both sluggish and incoherent.”  The reviewer closed with a quip: “When one of the soldiers . . . wonders out loud, ‘What is happening here?,’ the widow turns to the audience and shrugs comically, as if to say, ‘Beats me.’  You and me both, Begbick.” 

The New York Times writer Charles Isherwood called CSC’s A Man’s a Man “this hard-working but uninvolving production [that] moves with the lumbering tread of a pachyderm in no hurry to get to the watering hole,” although he allowed that this wasn’t necessarily Kulick’s fault, or that of the cast, “who embody their cartoonish characters with energy and verve.”  Said the Timesman, “All do their best to lift Brecht’s meandering parable about the dehumanizing nature of military life (or maybe modern life) to . . . playful heights.”  Brecht’s play, Isherwood observed, “lacks the cogency and tangy theatrical vitality of his later, better-known works” and “galumphs along awkwardly and with only modestly funny satirical flourishes, leaving us to grind our teeth as we wait for Brecht’s ideas to heave oh so slowly into view.”  Composer Sheik, the Times reviewer reported, “provides polished and haunting work” and, as Begbick, “Bond gives a cheerfully louche, funny performance”; Spinella, “almost unrecognizable underneath a fierce outcropping of military facial hair,” Isherwood wrote, “gives a sharply funny portrait of the savage Bloody Five.”  In the end, he asked, “Does any of this sound riotously funny?  Yes, well, I’m afraid it isn’t.”  As Isherwood pointed out, “Brecht was never exactly renowned for the lightness of his touch, and despite the cast’s cheerily unearnest efforts, much of the comedy comes across in rather heavy quotation marks.”  In am New York, Matt Windman, calling the CSC revival an “intimate production,” felt that the company “may have overreached in bringing back ‘A Man’s a Man’” in a performance that “comes off as slow, disjointed and altogether uninteresting” and “is otherwise a dull affair” because “the humor fails to land.”  Newsday’s Linda Winer averred that CSC had “mounted a tedious production that annoys in the noisy, look-at-me manner of bad children's theater.”  Winer added, “Sweet/bitter harmonies and oompa rhythms by Duncan Sheik (‘Spring Awakening’) offer little compensation.”

Brendan Lemon of the Financial Times capsulized his experience of A Man’s a Man by writing, “I regret to say that I was neither much amused nor touched.”  His disappointment, he said, “has something to do with the casting”: “none of [the ensemble] is able to summon and sustain the odd-comic tone that Brecht’s near-vaudeville project requires.”  The cast, Lemon lamented, is “not helped by the staging (from the usually inspired Brian Kulick), which tends to lag during the scene changes.”  CSC’s “robust new revival,” wrote Elysa Gardner in USA Today, “proves as deliciously farcical – and sobering – as ever.”  “[U]nder Brian Kulick's brisk, stinging direction,” wrote Gardner, the cast “proves both adept at broad humor and capable of stunning us into thoughtfulness.”  In the end, the review-writer concluded that “however bizarre or surreal the journey, A Man's a Man will leave you shaken, and invigorated.” 

In the Village Voice, Alexis Soloski called Kulick’s A Man’s a Man “long, loud, and slow” and pointed out that “[t]he script is more obvious than some of Brecht's later works.”  The New Yorker described A Man’s a Man as a play that “has the anguished, disjointed quality of a man racing to keep up with his own ideas” while the CSC production “embraces the frenzy, and, like its protagonist, gets deliriously lost within itself.” 

In his Hollywood Reporter review, Frank Scheck expressed the opinion that A Man’s a Man is “hopelessly dated even in the most expert hands” and that “[d]espite an exuberant staging . . . and the addition of some tuneful songs . . ., this determinedly cartoonish production never fully succeeds in delivering the playwright’s message . . . with sufficient bite.”  Scheck added, “The tonally uneven production is ultimately unsuccessful in making the strange proceedings sufficiently comprehensible” and even found Steinberg’s set ultimately “monotonous.”  In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman felt, “Patches of the play are messy, and some are blunt” but that the writing’s “incisive enough to draw a little blood.”  Director Kulick, said the man from TONY, brought “out the play’s vaudevillian aspects” in a “lively revival,” but Feldman admonished that “the play is no mere goof.” 

In the cyberpress, Fern Siegel of Huffington Post dubbed the Man revival a “smart production” which offered “a rare opportunity to see early Brecht deftly presented.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer called the CSC production “smartly staged” with which “there's a lot that's right.”  Sommer described the cast as merely “okay,” citing drawbacks such as Frazier’s failure “to bring out this innocent abroad's Chaplinesque qualities” in Galy Gay and the fact that the other soldiers’ “comic antics are only fitfully funny.”  Tulis McCall of New York Theatre Guide complained that despite “the best efforts of this fine cast and excellent production values – this still feels like an evening that will never get to the end.”  In spite of “boatloads and boatloads of words that hinder rather than guide the observer,” McCall reported “we are buoyed up by work of this excellent cast.”  Calling Kulick’s staging “a disappointingly reductive production that's a little bit like being cornered at an alt-rock concert by a militantly anti-war lefty who insists ‘it's all about the oil, man,’” Zachary Stewart wrote on TheaterMania, “With the help of Sheik's dreamy, mellow, and often beautiful songs, this play set in a warzone creeps along at a sleepy pace, offering very few ‘aha’ moments.”