The Group Theatre's 'Johnny Johnson'

(19 November 1936-16 January 1937)

[When I was a grad student at New York University, I wrote a paper in May 1984 for a class called 20th-Century Mise-en-Scene, an examination of the staging techniques in modern Western theater taught by the late Michael Kirby  (1931-97).  The paper was a reconstruction of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson, the company’s only musical, with book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill.  The play ran at Broadway’s 44th Street Theatre from 19 November 1936—83 years ago tomorrow—to 16 January 1937.  

[In the course of my research, I read all the reviews I could locate and as many accounts from participants and later scholars as I could find.  I pored over photographs of the production and studied the ground plans of set designer Donald Oenslager.  

[I made slides of the photos and took them with me to Brooklyn (along with a rented portable projector) to interview Tony Kraber, one of the few cast members then still alive, so he could render commentary on the pictures, which I hoped would jog his memory of the then-47-year-old production.  I was also fortunate that at that time, I was acquainted with Sam Leve, a retired set designer, who had been Oenslager’s assistant.  In the end, I pieced together a description of the production from all these sources, picking out performance and staging details wherever I could glean them.  

[Kirby, then the editor of The Drama Review, proposed that I submit the paper to the journal, which was planning a Group Theatre issue, and the reconstruction was published as “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson (1936)” in the winter issue of 1984 (28.4 – T104).  It was my first published article.

[This post is a combination of my original typescript and the TDR version.  I have also revised it a little for Rick On Theater.]

Introduction

On Thursday, 19 November 1936, the Group Theatre (1931-41) opened its only musical play.  Johnny Johnson, with book and lyrics by Paul Green (1894-1981) and music by Kurt Weill (1900-50), played at the 44th Street Theatre on Broadway for a scant nine weeks—a total of only 68 performances—closing after the matinee and evening shows on Saturday, 16 January 1937.  It was an unusual play in many respects, and certainly would have had a startling effect on its audiences, who couldn’t really have known what to expect. 

According to Green:

The story of the legend—that is what I like to call the play—is the musical autobiography of a common soldier whose natural common sense runs counter to a sophisticated civilization.  The first act is a comedy, the second a tragedy and the third a satire.  That sounds crazy and maybe I can’t get away with it but that is what I have tried to write.

Green communicated his antiwar message in a succession of expressionistic scenes, pervaded by songs, ballads, marches, and hymns by Kurt Weill.

The play, subtitled “The Biography of a Common Man,” told the story of Johnny Johnson, an honest, truth-loving fellow who volunteered to be a soldier in the “war to end all wars.”  Green explained his choice of the leading character’s name in the News-Week review: “The character is named Johnny Johnson because war records show that there were 30,000 Johnsons in the American Army.  Three thousand of them were John Johnsons.” 

Johnny, a tombstone-carver, is introduced at the dedication of a peace monument he’d carved, just at the moment President Woodrow Wilson proclaims war.  His romantic fiancée, Minny Belle Tompkins, is enraptured by the glories of prospective martial heroism, and Johnny goes off to enlist at the local recruiting office. 

He’s put through army training with some difficulty and shipped off to France.  At the front, he contracts a private peace with a young German soldier, whom Johnny sends back to carry a message of peace and brotherhood to the other German soldiers. 

Wounded, Johnny is sent to a hospital from which he escapes with a canister of laughing gas.  He doses the Allied Supreme Command with the gas and temporarily succeeds in calling off the war.  He’s sent home to a lunatic asylum where a mad psychiatrist diagnoses him with as suffering from “peace monomania.”  Finally released, Johnny’s reduced to selling toys on a street corner—not very successfully, however, since he doesn’t carry tin soldiers.

The Origins of the Project

Johnny Johnson was a departure from the Group Theatre’s usual realistic and naturalistic productions coming “out of the Group Theatre’s suggestion, stimulation and actual assistance.”  The idea was spawned early in 1936 after Kurt Weill arrived in America.  The Group had become intrigued with Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, and they befriended him.  Stella Adler (1901-92) eventually suggested Weill write a musical play for the Group, and Weill proposed an American version of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, which had been done with some success in Germany by Erwin Piscator in 1927.

Harold Clurman (1901-80) visited Paul Green, who’d written the Group’s first play, The House of Connelly (1931), at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  While he was there, Clurman learned that Green had fought in France in World War I and “had an intimate acquaintance with the American soldier of that day.”  He passed on Weill’s proposal, and Green expressed interest.

Returning to New York, Clurman told Cheryl Crawford (1902-86), who, with Clurman  and Lee Strasberg (1901-82), made up the Group’s ruling triumvirate, that Green was the playwright for the job.  When Green definitely agreed to collaborate, Crawford and Weill went to Chapel Hill to start work on the scenario.  Crawford served as “coordinator” and the project became her “adopted child.”

Money being in short supply, the Group customarily spent the summer at an adult camp.  This time it was Pinebrook Club Camp in Nichols, Connecticut.  Clurman was named managing director of the Group, assuming authority over executive decisions.  As he and the Group tried to work out some internal problems, they awaited the arrival of the playwright who’d promised them scripts.

When Green arrived  with his script of Johnny Johnson, it was still unfinished.  It needed more work, and Green took it back to Chapel Hill.  At the summer’s end, Green returned to Pinebrook with the finished rehearsal script, and work began only a week or so before the Group moved back to New York.

The Music

The play that Paul Green wrote for Kurt Weill’s music was what he had come to call “‘symphonic drama’ . . . a ‘sounding together’ in the true meaning of the Greek word.”  From the very start, he said, “I wanted a musical score to be part of the script,” for “without music there could be no war . . . .  Music has always been an integral part of fighting.” 

Weill’s music, the first he wrote for the American stage, was based on American folk and popular songs.  It ranged over several genres, but filtered through his own European sensibilities.  It was variously described as “haunting,” “tuneful, gay and touching,” “lovely,” “seemingly careless, really profoundly sensitive,” “weird,” and “dramatic.”

The musical style itself wasn’t as striking as the way it was interwoven with the book.  A Group advertising flyer for the production explained:

While this is a play with songs, it is not a musical show.  The singing arises naturally from the situations of the imaginative story and the verses of the song flow as simply as the prose of the speech.

In  a theater more accustomed to operettas (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, generally considered the first American book musical, was presented only nine years earlier) and revues, such a production would doubtlessly attract attention.  The Brooklyn Eagle remarked, “All through the proceedings, the players stop at intervals to sing . . .,” and the New York Post called it “a new form in Broadway theatre . . . in that it introduces songs and incidental music regularly through the performance in an artless, haphazard manner . . . .”  The clearest description of how Weill’s music melded with Green’s script is provided by composer Marc Blitzstein:

. . . Weill has practically added a new form to the musical theatre.  It is not opera, although it partakes of the ‘number’ form of Mozart.  And it is decidedly not revue-form.  It owes something to the movies, but it is much more attached to the script.  Take the spot where the exasperated Sergeant tries to put Johnny through all the military paces, and winds up saying—“and you won’t learn, and so the hell with you!” [Act I, scene 4].  As he starts (speaking), the music insinuates itself into his speech, and his enumeration of the maneuvers gains momentum and dash by becoming rhythmical and percussive—until the final expletive, when the music drops out.

As for the performance of Weill’s music, critics nearly unanimously agreed that the Group’s actors weren’t trained singers.  The New York Sun said simply, “They act better than they sing.”  The production’s intent, however, was to present ordinary characters who sing—not professional singers.  The Group had no intention of presenting, nor did Green and Weill write, the usual sort of musical comedy.  Green intended to make the music an integral element of the play—his meaning of “symphonic drama.”  Speaking of Roll Sweet Chariot (1934), his first attempt at this kind of play, Green explained:

I found that in trying to express the inner lives and turmoilings . . . I was having to call upon nearly all the available elements in modern theatrical art . . . .  Folk song and poetry were needed here.  Likewise dance and pantomime and chorus voices.

Lehman Engel (1910-82), musical director of the production, described his encounter with the cast in rehearsal: “There were no singers in the cast, and the songs were worked on chiefly from an acting point of view.”  This, in fact, was precisely what Green wanted and what Weill had written.  As proof of this, there are two independent pieces of evidence. 

In the 1957 MGM Heliodor recording of Johnny Johnson, performers not generally known as singers were cast in the lead roles.  The record producers were probably trying to be true to the Green and Weill’s intentions using people such as Burgess Meredith (1907-97), who sang Johnny, over “legit” singers.  In addition, Lotte Lenya (1898-1981)—who was married to Kurt Weill—also sang on the record, and her unique performance style sounds unmusical to the uninitiated, as were 1936 critics. 

Even the musically knowledgeable could misjudge this new this new style, as Lehman Engel noted with some embarrassment.  He had just met the Weills, and didn’t know that Mrs. Weill was Lotte Lenya.  They were having tea at Engel’s Greenwich Village apartment:

In my desperate need to make conversation, I spoke of The Threepenny Opera with sincere enthusiasm but added that the female singer on a recording I had was terrible!  The Weills smiled indulgently and said that I must have the French recording.  No, I persisted, I had the German one.  It was then I found out that the singer was Lotte Lenya, my guest!  In my young life I held pear-shape vocal tones sacred, and it was to be many years before I could comprehend any other kind of singing.  When I did, I was to worship at the shrine of Lotte Lenya.

With this realization, it’s understandable that the Group would not bring in outside singers to enhance their vocal quality and that as “actors first and singers second, they would have delighted [Bertolt] Brecht with their lack of musical sophistication.” 

The Sets

As soon as the Group returned to New York, construction began on the scenery.  Donald Oenslager (1902-75), who’d been engaged as set designer, determined that “the first act . . . required poetic realism . . . .  The second act . . . employed expressionism . . . .  The third act . . . required distorted settings.”  There were problems, however, putting his concepts into practice. 

First, after Oenslager had made plans for the set according to his own design principles—an outgrowth of the New Stagecraft of Adolphe Appia and E. Gordon Craig—the Group directorate insisted he reconceive the production from an expressionistic point of view.  This caused some difficulty for Oenslager, who was not particularly interested in Expressionism. 

The second problem developed when Oenslager, in a hurry between appointments, left his new drawings in a drug store.  Having lost his second set of plans, he quickly drew a third set in time for construction to begin.  He felt his last-minute rush might have given his designs some serendipitous spontaneity. 

The production was out-of-the-ordinary for the Group, whose reputation had been built on Realism and Naturalism.  Johnny Johnson was “the only Group play that turned away from naturalism in all its elements . . . .”  Lee Strasberg, however, maintained that this was not as unusual as the public thought: “In many of our shows, we really used the principles of abstract art . . . .  [I]n productions like . . . Johnny Johnson, we used modern art forms.”  The overall effect of Oenslager’s “geometric setting”—which suited Green’s three-divisional script—was striking:

The warped perspective created by the exaggeratedly raked floor of the interior platform setting for this play, somewhat derivative of [Nikolai] Akimov’s work in the Soviet theatre after the First World War, helped create the mad whimsy of the play.

This, of course, was not how every critic saw it.  Blitzstein, who admired the music so much, didn’t respond to what he called “the hodgepodge scenic styles in the staging of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson . . . .” 

The scenery was mostly drab colors, gradations of black and white with a “sepia tint.”  The only sets with bright colors were the most starkly mad scenes: the Allied Supreme Command at the Château de Cent Fontaines, which had red, white, and gold appointments; the psychiatrist’s office, with its “red and white desk slanting at an angle of forty-five degrees . . .”; and  in the forensic arena in the insane asylum, also appointed in red and gold, and draped with American flags. 

In the remaining scenes, color was mostly absent, except for the opening celebration scene where color accent was provided by costume pieces such as ribbons and bows, mostly on the little girls.   

Furthermore, to enhance this subdued appearance, the show was spot-lit, illuminating small areas of the stage while leaving the rest in ambiguous darkness.   Even the indoor scenes had the appearance of being lit from one source that pinpointed a particular spot on the set, such as the psychiatrist’s raked desk, with the rest of the stage in increasing shadows receding into darkness.

This shadow effect was exaggerated by the vast stage at the 44th Street Theatre.  By all estimations, the theater was too big for the show.  The large musical house, with its 20- by 30-foot proscenium opening, necessitated that Oenslager design sets too big for the play.  Even with the vast sets, however, the stage area had to be reduced for what was primarily an intimate show, and this was done with lighting, enhancing the ambiguity of the space surrounding the performers.

The Rehearsals

Shortly after returning to New York, Clurman found that his duties as managing director as well as some personal difficulties were overwhelming, and he relinquished the directorship of Johnny Johnson to Lee Strasberg.  Rehearsals had already begun at Pinebrook with the Group’s usual discussions about meaning and content with Green and Weill, who were both in residence by this time.  Sessions continued in New York at the Belmont Theatre, a small house on 48th Street, with improvisations and experimentation.

The Group acting style, a heightened Realism, had by this time been set, and Strasberg saw no cause to develop a different style for Johnny Johnson.  (It’s worth noting here that Strasberg was one of the principle developers of the Stanislavsky-derived acting style known as the Method.)  Sam Leve (1908-99), Oenslager’s former student at the Yale School of Drama and assistant for Johnny Johnson, recalled that though the sets and physical production were heavily expressionistic, the acting, for the most part, was realistic.  In fact, only the “eccentrics” of the play were in any way exaggerated—the High Command, the psychiatrist, and the Brothers in the asylum debating society.

The music, too, was rehearsed in the Group’s usual manner.  Lehman Engel recalled:

The preparation of Johnny was unique among musical shows,  Since it was done with actors saturated in the Stanislavsky Method according to the gospel of Lee Strasberg, the show was studied, improvised, and dissected for  period of about three months prior to the beginning of actual rehearsals.

Many of the songs, in fact, were not even assigned to specific actors until just before performances began.  The whole cast learned and rehearsed the score, except a few songs that had been specifically written for certain performers, such as Private Harwood’s “Cowboy Song: The Rio Grande,” which had been written for Tony Kraber (1905-86).

The ensemble work that the Group had established over the five years of their existence was evident in their rehearsals, as well as the subsequent performances.  Again, Lehman Engel recalled that the company members “were especially considerate of each other’s neuroses and idiosyncrasies, which were legion.”

Then the production moved from the 500-seat Belmont to the 1400-seat 44th Street Theatre.  Lehman Engel described the consequences:

I recall one dress rehearsal when the actors had to encounter Donald Oenslager’s scenery for the first time.  The chief problem suddenly became one of self-preservation in climbing out of World War I trenches and of making costume changes with no allowable time.  The acting problem then became secondary despite the protest of the director.

In this state, Johnny Johnson went into previews.

The Previews

The show was conceived and rehearsed on an intimate scale.  Spectators at Belmont rehearsals were “very moved.”  In the smaller theater, “the production seemed charming: informal, unpretentious and sweet.”  But the company had no choice—only the 44th Street Theatre was available.  Johnny Johnson moved in and was “suddenly dwarfed and the light-handed informality of the performance lost its effectiveness.” 

Clurman’s fears of the effects of the larger theater were borne out: “Our actors’ voices sounded so small they were occasionally inaudible; Donald Oenslager’s sets . . . now appeared monstrous; the performances now looked amateurish.” 

The move to an unfamiliar space, the large set—19 scenes—and the Group’s financial problems all conspired to make the previews a disaster.  The orchestra was under-rehearsed, the actors got lost; “after the first five minutes . . . half the audience left.  By the end of the performance there were no more than twenty people in the auditorium.”

The opening was delayed for two days.  Musical numbers were cut and sets were abandoned (“New York Harbor” and “A road somewhere in France”).  The company stayed up every night till early morning “polishing, cutting and revising . . . .”  According to Clurman, the show improved each night, and by opening night had gone from 19 scenes to 13.  Clurman was astounded: “The performance went smoothly, and the audience appeared wildly enthusiastic.” 

The Response

The press response to Johnny Johnson ”was critically favorable, but discouraged all but the cognoscenti from seeing it.”  The audiences, however, generally enjoyed the show so much, many returned several times.  In the words of the New York Post reviewer, the audience “stood up and whooped loud applause for a good ten minutes . . . when the curtain fell on the opening of ‘Johnny Johnson’ . . . .”  Paul Green came out on stage to more applause, and Clifford Odets, Walter Huston, and Burgess Meredith were “overheard bellylaughing at the gags.” 

Of course, not everyone was this enthusiastic.  Some didn’t care for the comedy that ran through the play.  Some found the play touching; some laughed at the humor.  One reviewer said that “like a revue-goer, you enjoy some [scenes] and are bored stiff by others.”

The Performance

The diversity and strength of the reactions from both reviewers and theatergoers was due as much to the production’s uniqueness as to its quality.  Paul Green’s new form—the “symphonic drama”; Kurt Weill’s “non-musical” score; the ingenuousness of the performance, particularly the singing; and the three-styled expressionistic sets combined to make an event unprecedented on Broadway.  Like it or not, it was different.  In a promotional piece, Lee Strasberg wrote:

We meant to do an American folk legend, full of the humors of old vaudeville and the provincial family album, sharpened with poetic comments on the madness of contemporary life.  We felt that fantasy, extravagance, and dramatic music were intrinsic to such an exciting and ambitious experiment.

An advertising flyer for the show concluded that “the Group Theatre believes Johnny Johnson to be the most unusual and entertaining play it has presented thus far.”  There’s little doubt this was the case.

Paul Green’s attempt to combine various theatrical elements while juxtaposing dramatic genres didn’t always sit well with spectators.  The New York Post complained that “the play . . . leaps from straight drama to the maddest sort of farce and hence into pure fantasy with great abandon.” 

Others found the mélange pleasing: “The piece is built of dialogue, movement, scene, music, all together.  It is a promising—and needed—example of theatre that passes from one to the other of these with equal ease.” 

Despite the diversity of material and the number of scene-changes—which rose from 12 to 13 between opening and closing—an attempt was obviously made to keep the production in motion.    An unidentified reviewer in a weekly review of current plays called Margaret Wentworth's Sign Post remarked on the “quick-changing scenes” and Douglas Gilbert of the New York World said, “Lee Strasberg has staged the piece with a feverish continuity that matches the script.” 

The show’s pace seems due in part to a revolving set.  Though no reviewer mentioned this fact, the Alfredo Valente photographs of the set and Donald Oenslager’s floor-plans clearly show a turntable.  The sets shown in the drawings were specifically designed for a revolve with several back-to-back scenes indicated. 

Oenslager’s sketches suggest that sets were changed behind a blind—a painted backdrop, simple drape, or tall piece of constructed scenery—while a scene was in progress on the other side.  Sam Leve confirmed that this was the case.

What the audience saw was a central set piece—ranging from the complete, realistic front porch of the Tompkins home in Act I, scene 2, to a simple ramp with a painted backdrop for the camp drill-ground in Act I, scene 5—with the rest of the stage closed off by returns and two sets of wings.

In more complex sets, such as the porch, the recruiting office (Act I, scene 3), and the front-line trench (Act II, scene 1), small set pieces were run out from the wings.  It’s obvious from this set-up why spot-lighting was both necessary and desirable to close down the huge stage of the 44th Street Theatre.

The scenes changed so quickly that Russell Collins (1897-1965), who played Johnny, couldn’t completely change from his civilian costume in Act I, scene 3, to a full uniform in scene 4.  Photographs clearly show he was still wearing his civilian trousers under his military tunic until Act II.  It’s possible that some scenes might have revolved into view as the previous scene was ending.  Some photographs of Act I, scene 1, are taken with the scene 2 front porch in the background.

(This isn’t confirmed by any source.  Another explanation, perhaps more likely, is that some photographs of this scene weren’t taken in performance, and for one reason or another were shot before the scene 2 set.  Remember, though, that Lehman Engel recalled actors “making costume changes with no allowable time” in dress rehearsal.)

The acting, as has already been suggested, was primarily realistic.  Like Sam Leve, who witnessed several rehearsals, critics found this detracted from the performance when too much Realism “inhibited freedom of treatment”: “A certain heaviness was apparent in the production of Johnny Johnson, and despite the fine fantastication of Lee Strasberg’s production idea many performances seemed slack and pedestrian.”  The most blatant indictment of this problem came from John Mason Brown, who felt the Group Theatre’s actors

. . . set about the business of being funny with as much self-consciousness as if they were . . . a Greek chorus . . . . 

They reach for the ridiculous with a grim seriousness which does not add to the lightness of the lighter portions of “Johnny Johnson.”  They are all desperately in earnest.

The play opened on the dedication of Johnny’s monument to peace.  The script describes the scene: “The ground is covered with a carpet of green grass, and at the right a quaint young arbor-vitae tree is growing.”  Photographs of this scene show little of such realistic touches.  A certain backdrop bisected the turntable, and except for the Mayor’s bunting-draped “soap-box,” the stage was bare.  Several shots of this scene, including the Mayor speaking from his soap-box, and the confrontation of Johnny and Minny Belle with his rival Anguish Howington, were taken in front of the porch set for scene 2.  There was no documented explanation of this occurrence.

The porch setting was apparently substituted for the living room location described in the script.  The little evidence afforded by photographic records indicates the scene proceeded predictably in all other respects.  Both the setting and performances appeared essentially realistic in detail. 

The same was true of scene 3 in the recruiting office, except that the office was number 596673 in performance, instead of 18659 as indicated in the script.  (This change was apparently also made after the previews, as the 17 November program used the same number as the script; the opening-night program made the alteration.)  

Scene 4 seems to have been added in performance (or deleted from the published script).  It was set at an army training ground:

But the army takes [Johnny].  Then we see him being made into a soldier.  He can’t learn very well because the regulations sound silly to him, and besides he’s left-handed.  Everything is harder in the Army for a left-hander . . . .  He is finally taken off to war, against the better judgement of the whole army, because he seems to have won more favors from a favor-dispensing woman war worker than his sergeant and his captain.

The set for the scene was a virtually bare stage, with a raked platform across the center of the turntable, bisected by a drop painted with a row of military barracks.

The Statue of Liberty scene, originally scene 4, was cut after previews but reinstated sometime during the show’s run as Act I, scene 5.  In the scene, after Johnny sang a declaration of his peaceful intentions and his faithfulness to Minny Belle (“Johnny’s Speech”) to the Statue, the Statue sang a response of haunting sentiment (“Song of the Goddess”).  The song was omitted from the published version and there are no photographs of the scene.

In Act II, the first scene, set on “A road somewhere in France,” was apparently cut as a separate set, and the moment—virtually without dialogue, but with a column of wounded French soldiers returning from the front (“Song of the Wounded”)—was performed as part of the next scene, “The front line trench.”  In this new scene 1, an English Sergeant sang about “Tea.”  The program and published script list Jules (later John) Garfield (1913-52) as having played the part. 

As photographs clearly show, and Kraber clearly remembered, the role was played by Luther Adler (1903-84), and at least one reviewer recorded this reaction to the moment: “. . . and one perfectly atrocious [performance] by the Group’s best actor, Luther Adler.  He is for a few terrible moments a Cockney sergeant.”  The scene ended with Johnny in the trench with his company, who “. . . writhe their limbs in troubled sleep. [while] three great cannon bathed in green light rise over the parapet, and ghoulishly croak a lament . . . .”

In the hospital (Act II, scene 3, in production; scene 4 in the script), the set was minimal: a folding screen and a hospital bed set on the forward quarter of the turntable backed by the same drape used to divide the stage in Act I, scene 1.  The rest of the space appears ambiguous, though one photograph shows empty beds protruding from behind the drape divider.

The Château de Cent Fontaines (Act II, scene 4), set of the Allied Supreme Command, was the first brightly colored set in the show.  A very stylized drop of red and gold panels and a set piece resembling a large fan at the center rear formed the back “wall” of the set, bisecting the turntable.  The commanders all sat in plush-covered chairs of ornate design as they outbid each other for the number of casualties their forces would suffer.  There was an apparent attempt to make the actors in this scene look like their historical counterparts—although the characters are not named either in the script or in the program.

The scene designated in the scripts and the preview program as scene 7 didn’t exist as a separate scene by opening.  It may have been incorporated into the previous scene (“The edge of a great battlefield”).  This scene was a striking visual and musical moment that Charles Dexter of the Daily Worker described: “. . . in the climax, an English [sic – the script and program both say “American”] and a German minister [pray] as the bayonettes flash in the dark . . . .” 

In fact, the two priests chant and sing the same prayer in counterpoint, each in his own language.  (Only the English version of the prayer is in the published script, though the stage directions indicate that the German Priest utters the prayer in German.)  By opening night, this was the last scene in Act II.  The second New York Harbor scene was dropped and remained deleted throughout the run.

Act III opened in the State Hospital in the office of Dr. Mahodan: “. . . The examining psychiatrist was barricaded behind an enormous, crazily-aslant table and, as played by [Morris] Carnovsky [1897-1992] with deliberately jerky and angular gestures and body movements, seemed decidedly crazier than the patient . . . .”  This was the second scene with bright colors.  The raked red-and-white desk, placed in the set’s left front corner (on the turntable), sloped from five feet on the rear left down to three inches at center stage.  The lighting was very bright only on the desk; the rest of the set dimmed considerably.

The third colorful scene was Act III, scene 2, set in “the forensic arena in the house of balm.”  The set, with its sharply angled rear wall, was festooned with flags and brightly lit.  As the Adelphi Debating Society engaged in its discussion “Albert Van Deckers [sic - Dekkers] . . . as a mad gentleman . . . knits while the Senate is in session . . . .”

Finally released from the asylum, Johnny was reduced to selling toys “along a street symbolically leading nowhere.”  The stage was very dimly lit and nearly bare, with only a banistered flight of steps at the front right and an unlit lamppost at the front left.  The light seemed to have emanated from off stage in the rear right corner, leaving the playing area in deep shadows.

The floor plan of the scene shows the slanting rear wall was the same as the walls of Act III, scenes 1 and 2.  It bisected the turntable from eight o’clock to two o’clock in all three scenes, giving further evidence of the use of the revolving stage.

The play’s final moment is indicative of how blackouts were used between the many scenes:

The Paul Green-Kurt Weill musical Johnny Johnson borrows the [Charlie] Chaplin fade-out as its hero, momentarily defeated, goes off whistling, “a little more clearly now, a little more bravely” or (on the record) singing “We’ll never lose our faith and hope and trust in all mankind . . . .”

Conclusion

Visually, thematically, and musically unusual, Johnny Johnson was undoubtedly a controversial event, even among those who simply didn’t care for it.  It spawned discussion among leftists, pacifists, humanists, and adherents of many other causes and philosophies, each espousing Johnny Johnson’s point of view as their own.  Audiences were less confused by the play than critics: “Almost everyone who saw Johnny Johnson was charmed by it. . . .  [I]t had a subtlety and wit which were thoroughly engaging.”

Had the theater been smaller, the success of the production would probably have been assured, not only from a financial standpoint, but a critical one as well: “In a theatre suited to its scale, it would have come across with much greater bite; on that huge stage, it seemed weak.”  (Kraber estimated that the production came within $1,000 of its “nut” every week.  They just couldn’t fill the 1,463 seats of the 44th Street Theatre.

Johnny Johnson was an excellent example of Paul Green’s feeling that “The narrow confines of the usual Broadway play are not fitted to the dramatic needs of the American people.  They cannot contain the richness of our tradition, folkways, singing, dancing and poetry.”  It’s ironic that the thing most responsible for Johnny Johnson’s failure wasn’t a theater too small to contain it, but one too big for it to fill.

[The original production of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson included a number of company members who went on to become well known on stage and on film.  Among these, in addition to those named in the article above, were Phoebe Brand (1907-2004), Lee J. Cobb (1911-76), Elia Kazan (1909-2003), Will Lee (1908-82), and Sanford Meisner (1905-97).

[After the original 1936-37 production of Johnny Johnson by the Group Theatre, there were several revivals of the play.  From 21 October through 28 October 1956, there was an Off-Broadway production presented at the Little Carnegie Playhouse at Carnegie Hall directed by Stella Adler and starring, among others, James Broderick as Johnny Johnson and Gene Saks as the Mad Psychiatrist.  A Broadway revival directed by José Quintero opened, after 10 previews, on 11 April 1971 at the Edison Theatre, and closed after one performance.  The cast included Ralph Williams as Johnny and Alice Cannon as Minny Belle.

[Johnny Johnson was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company on 6-15 August 1986 at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Paul Marcus.  In 2009, a concert version was staged in London by the Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust, with Max Gold in the title role.

[The ReGroup Theatre Company presented two staged readings of the play directed by Estelle Parsons at the 47th Street Theatre in New York on 12 December 2011.  In November 1956, the MGM recording I mentioned above (which was unrelated to the contemporaneous Off-Broadway staging) was released and in November 1996, Erato Records released another album of Weill’s score for Johnny Johnson.

[I’ve written a little about this research and the writing of the report twice before on ROT.  First, because it was my first published essay, I included it in my discussion “Writing,” posted on 9 April 2010; then I included it in a compilation I called “Short Takes: Research Coups” on 5 August 2011 because I made  a  discovery in my research—Oenslager’s use of a turntable in the set design.]

'The Threepenny Opera' (BAM)

When the Brooklyn Academy of Music announced that it was hosting the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) as part of the 2011-12 Next Wave Festival, I knew I wanted to see it. I brought the season brochure to my frequent theater partner, Diana, so we could see if we could put together four Next Wave events in common to make up a discount and to settle on dates. Threepenny was one of the first productions in the fall season, and I was afraid it would sell out if we delayed too long. This was especially so because the production’s director was Robert Wilson, the renowned U.S. experimental theater artist; considering the three elements of the show—the play, the company, and the director—I was sure it would be hugely popular with the BAM audience. I would turn out to be prophetic: the run was sold out completely weeks before it opened and I overheard a BAM employee explain to a spectator at another Next Wave performance that very few ticket-holders canceled or didn’t claim their seats. (Scalpers were out the night I attended and while I was waiting in the lobby for Diana, I myself was approached to sell my seats.)

Unfortunately, I was also prophetic in my prediction that coordinating with Diana would be difficult. First, she absconded with the brochure, so I didn’t have it on hand to refer to. Second, she was tied up with personal affairs that kept her in New Jersey a lot of the time so I had trouble reaching her by landline, cell, or e-mail. By the time I did pin her down and we made decisions, the tickets had already gone on sale to the public (though we’d eventually decided not to take out a subscription because we couldn’t put together four events we really wanted to see), and when I called the box office, all that was left for the short residency of the Ensemble (4-8 October) were “partial view” seats. I knew that if I passed up this chance and tried to reach Diana to inform her and let her voice her preference, we wouldn’t have had any choices—it would have deteriorated to no seats available at all. So I made the decision for both of us to take the bad seats rather than not see the production at all. Happily, I made the right choice not only for me, but for Diana as well (and she’s less likely to be forgiving or accommodating than I am). So when we went over to Fort Greene on Thursday, 6 October, for the 7:30 performance of Threepenny at the Howard Gilman Opera House, the 2100-seat auditorium in the Peter Jay Sharp Building on Lafayette Avenue, we found that our seats were under the low overhang of the house-right box seats. Not only did we lose the view of anything above about halfway up the proscenium opening, but also anything to the far left of the stage. The performance was in German with English supertitles, but we also had no view of any title screen so we didn’t have the benefit of the translation of the dialogue and lyrics. (I’ll never understand why, knowing that those seats are out of sight of the screens—this isn’t the first time anyone’s sat there, for goodness’ sake—they don’t install a small screen under the boxes on each side of the house. Personally, I’d rather see a return to the old earphone system, but that’s labor-intensive.)

Fortunately for me, anyway, I still understand enough German that my familiarity with the play and the synopsis in the program helped me follow the performance quite well. That plus the excellence of the acting and directing made the experience not perfect, but well worth the decision I made. (Happily, Diana, who doesn’t speak any German, felt the same way and said so.) I had a bit of a stiff neck after the three-hour show, craning as I had to to see some of the stage we had left to us, but given the choice of seeing it this way or not seeing it at all, I made the right one. As one of the characters in Threepenny says, Gott sei dank! (“Thank God!”).

First, a little history and personal positioning. Brecht and Weill wrote Threepenny in 1928, an adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s 1728 parody of Handel’s operas. (Though the performance was in German, the Next Wave presentation was billed as The Threepenny Opera, its English title, so that’s what I’ll call it here.) Poet-playwright Brecht and composer Weill, two young novices (Brecht was 30 and Weill, 28), were satirizing the traditional operas and popular operettas of their day. The play premièred at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin on 31 August 1928 and was a great success, running over 400 performances. It opened in English in New York City at Broadway’s Empire Theatre on 13 April 1933, lasting only 12 performances. An Off-Broadway presentation at the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel) in Greenwich Village, opening on 10 March 1954, stayed on for 96 shows. That production reopened at the same theater on 20 September 1956, however, and ran until 17 December 1961, over 2600 performances—a huge and unequivocal hit. (With a book and lyrics translated by composer Marc Blitzstein, this production included Lotte Lenya, Weill’s widow, as Jenny, the role she’d played in the Berlin première. I believe it was this version to which Bobby Darin paid tribute in his 1959 rendition of “Mack the Knife”—the pop version of “Die Moritat vom Mackie Messer,” “The [Death] Ballad of Mack the Knife”—in which he invokes Lenya by name. I was 12 when the song was released, and I loved it immediately—I was way into rock ‘n’ roll already—but I had no idea who or what Lotte Lenya was. Of course, I wouldn’t have known who Kurt Weill or Bertolt Brecht were then, either. Years later—1963, when I saw From Russia with Love—when I found out, I thought it was even neater in retrospect! I’m such a sucker!!)

The script was translated into many languages—ultimately 18—and between the 1930s and 1950s the play was presented in England, Austria, Switzerland, France, Poland, Hungary, Finland, Russia, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries, among many others, ultimately totaling over 10,000 performances. It was broadcast on radio and adapted for film; portions of it were recorded in many versions on vinyl, tape, and CD. It was even rendered into a puppet play by the Stockholm Marionette Theater of Fantasy (Broadway, 1966). It became arguably Brecht’s most popular and well-known work, especially among less adventurous entertainment-seekers. (It’s less overtly political than Brecht’s later plays, written as it was before the playwright committed to Marxism.) The Threepenny Opera was revived at Lincoln Center in 1976, a production of the New York Shakespeare Festival starring Raul Julia as Macheath and directed by Richard Foreman that ran for 307 performances. In 1989, a Broadway production starring rocker Sting as Macheath played 65 regular performances, and in 2006 at Studio 54, the Roundabout Theatre Company staged a revival starring Alan Cumming and featuring Cyndi Lauper as Jenny in a script adapted by playwright Wallace Shawn. I saw the ’76 Foreman revival with Julia at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, which used a new translation by John Willett and Ralph Manheim (from which the titles at BAM were drawn), and I thought it was excellent. I remember specifically thinking that it was an exemplary rendering of Brecht’s theater ideas in a commercial Broadway venue, demonstrating what I understood by the distancing technique (the famous Verfremdungseffekt) in a late-20th-century application. I still feel that way, but I now have an even better vision of what a Brechtian production of Threepenny could look like in the now-21st-century theater. (I’m really building this show up, aren’t I? I hope my report can live up to the hype.) Wilson’s Threepenny started at the BE, where he’s directed other productions, in September 2007.

Brecht, born in 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, started writing for local newspapers in 1919 and later that year, his first theater criticism began to appear. In 1918, Brecht composed Baal, his first full-length play, and the next year he wrote Drums in the Night (Trommeln in der Nacht), his first play to be staged which opened in Munich in September 1922. In 1920 or ’21, Brecht started to attend the performances of Karl Valentin who presented a political cabaret in beer halls. Brecht compared Valentin to Chaplin, whom he admired greatly and held up as a model for Epic Theater acting. The budding playwright continued to write innovative plays and poetry, and in March 1924, he staged his own Edward II as his first directorial effort and the beginnings of his Epic Theater ideas. In September, he got a job as an assistant dramaturg for Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, bringing the young writer and, now, director to Berlin. His first play produced in Berlin, In the Jungle of Cities (Im Dickicht der Städte), opened in October 1924.

In September 1926, Man Is Man (Mann ist Mann) opened in Darmstadt, the first play by Brecht’s “collective,” a loose group of friends and colleagues that the playwright would depend on for the rest of his career. That same year, Brecht began studying Marxism seriously. With this group of artists, Brecht began to develop the theatrical theories and style with which he would become identified. In 1927, Brecht became associated with Irwin Piscator’s theater where the young writer learned many of the fundamental principles that would become the foundations of his own Epic Theater theories. Piscator’s overtly political theater was also an important lesson for the budding Marxist artist. That same year, Brecht began collaborating with Kurt Weill, starting with the Mahagonny project. The following year, Brecht and Weill adapted Gay’s Beggar’s Opera as The Threepenny Opera, which became the biggest success of the ‘20s in Berlin theater. In 1929, the two produced Happy End, but it wasn’t successful; 1930’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) opened in Leipzig and caused an uproar in the audience when Nazis began protesting. The new musical theater work, however, had a triumphant première in Berlin the next year.

Between 1930 and ’33, Brecht worked with his collective on his Lehrstücke, the teaching plays intended for small audiences of young communists, students, or workers. In 1933, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and Brecht left in February, fleeing first to Copenhagen. In April 1939, with war approaching, he left Denmark for Stockholm, Sweden. In April 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway and Brecht fled Sweden for Helsinki, Finland. Obtaining a visa for the United States in May 1941, Brecht settled in Malibu, California, where he expressed his opposition to the German Reich and fascism. He composed many of his greatest plays as well, including Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei, 1937-39/45-47), Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, 1938-39), The Good Person of Szechwan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, 1939-42), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, 1941), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1943-45), among others. He also collaborated with expatriate German film director Fritz Lang and composer Hanns Eisler on the film Hangmen Also Die! (1943), based on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the “Final Solution” who was known as “The Hangman of Prague.”

With the advent of the Cold War, Brecht was blacklisted in Hollywood and was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on 30 October 1947. Brecht denied membership in the Communist Party (a lifelong Marxist, Brecht never joined the Party) and gave no information on others; however, his HUAC testimony caused others to accuse him of betrayal and Brecht returned to Europe the very next day. He settled in Switzerland until 1949 when an offer by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) of his own theater and company drew him back to Berlin. The Berliner Ensemble opened in the Deutsches Theater (where Brecht had gotten his first job in Berlin) in what was then East Berlin in January 1949; the renovation of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (where Threepenny had premièred in 1928) was completed in 1954 and became the Ensemble’s longtime home. The playwright and director died of a heart attack on 14 August 1956 at the age of 58.

The Berliner Ensemble continued under the direction of his widow, actress Helene Weigel, and then a line of German theater artists, most famously playwright Heiner Müller in the 1990s. The company made several international tours even during the Cold War when the Soviet bloc kept its artists largely holed up behind the Iron Curtain. When I was in the army, my only overseas assignment was to West Berlin and I wanted desperately to go to the East to see a performance by the company that perpetuated Brecht’s theatrical heritage. I was frustrated by the Cold War, the same atmosphere that ultimately propelled Brecht to East Berlin. As an intelligence officer, I wasn’t permitted by my own side to enter Soviet-controlled territory; I was never allowed to go to East Berlin. In 2½ years, I never saw Brecht’s company perform his own works the way he ordained they should be staged. I didn’t get that chance until over 37 years after I left Berlin. Furthermore, this is apparently the 62-year-old Ensemble’s first visit to the United States. Given all that, it’s probably little wonder that I was thrilled to see this Threepenny Opera.

Now, I’m not going to write a treatise on Brechtian theater. Some of that may come up in my description and discussion of the performance, but that’s as may be. Otherwise, there are plenty of sources, both on paper and on line, for anyone interested in what Brecht believed and practiced. I will give a short synopsis of the plot, however, unlike the way I treated Oklahoma! in my last play report.

Written in three acts (but performed at BAM in two parts, with the break after the second act), Threepenny’s scenario is from Gay’s “ballad opera,” but transposed to the days before the coronation of Queen Victoria (1837). In act one, Macheath (“Mack the Knife,” or “Mackie Messer” in German, played at BAM by Stefan Kurt), leader of a gang of thieves, secretly marries Polly Peachum (Stefanie Stappenbeck). Her parents, Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Jürgen Holtz), the king of London’s beggars, and his wife, Celia (Traute Hoess), are furious and plot Macheath’s arrest. Tiger Brown (Axel Werner), London’s police chief and an old friend of Macheath’s who’s been protecting the thief all these years, visits Mack’s hideout. In the second act, Polly warns Macheath that her father plans to have him arrested, and Mack prepares to flee London. On the way, though, he stops at his favorite brothel to see his old lover, Jenny Diver (Angela Winkler), but he’s caught because Mrs. Peachum had bribed Jenny to turn Macheath in. In jail, Macheath is visited by both Polly and Lucy Brown (Anna Greener), Tiger’s daughter who helps him escape. When Peachum finds out, he coerces Brown into rearresting Macheath by threatening to let his beggars loose at the coronation parade. As act three opens, Macheath is found at the house of Suky Tawdry, another whore, and Brown arrests him and prepares to have him executed. Back in jail, when Macheath’s friends fail to raise enough bribe money to free him again, Mack prepares to die on the gallows outside his cell. Suddenly, a messenger from the queen (Gerd Kunath) arrives and declares that Macheath has been pardoned and must be freed immediately. Furthermore, the envoy announces that Mack has been granted a pension, a title, and a palace.

Wilson’s production, though set in the early 19th century, was costumed by Jacques Reynaud in the style of the Weimar cabarets (probably the kind performed by Karl Valentin and which also inspired Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret). The visual effect was reminiscent of some of the paintings and caricatures of Georg Grosz (who came from the visual wing of the same artistic milieu as Brecht and Weill). Nearly everything was in black and white, like old photos or silent film; even the make-up was pasty white (which, among other references, may have been an evocation of the 18th century of John Gay—when the upper classes took arsenic to make their skin pale—as well as Kabuki, which had been an inspiration for Brecht). There were touches of red, including one set of essentially giant red ribbons stretching across the stage, and the deus-ex-machina messenger of the queen was draped in a long, bright red, velvet cape. (The final curtain was also crimson velvet.) The rest was essentially monochromatic and high-contrast like a movie such as Robert Wiene’s 1920 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. (It also seemed as if the whole company, with the exceptions of Mr. and, especially, Mrs. Peachum and Constable Smith [Uli Pleẞmann], went on some kind of extreme diet—or Wilson hired the skinniest actors in Germany. Axel Werner’s a beanpole of about six-and-a-half feet who may have weighed all of 150 pounds! As if to accentuate his height and thinness, his Tiger Brown wore a top hat.)

A further word about the make-up: the white-painted faces had accents of black around the eyes and the mouths that emphasized the unnatural appearance of the actors. In the same way that some Kabuki characters are made up in Kumadori style that outlines the face’s musculature, the Threepenny actors had painted expressions like weird (one review said “dead”) dolls or macabre clowns. (Kumadori is much more elaborate than the make-up here was, but the technique is analogous.) If you picture just about any rendering of The Joker in a Batman movie or the TV show, particularly Jack Nicholson in the 1989 film or Cesar Romero in the TV series of the ‘60s (sans the red grimace), you’d be just about right on. Macheath also had marcelled corn-yellow hair, unnatural and stark in comparison to the other characters; Polly was also blond, but her hair was more natural-looking and didn’t stand out. A few of the women and one of Macheath’s thieves had brick-red hair. This was all enhanced because the backdrop was formed by black curtains against which the ghostly characters really stood out. (I’ll get to the sets shortly, but they were all discrete set pieces in the center of the stage so the black background was always prominent.)

Wilson, educated as an architect who’s worked as a sculptor and installation artist as well as a director, took charge of the other design elements, including the set (co-designed by Serge von Arx) and lighting. (I might describe the actors’ movements as “sculptural,” too.) If you’re at all familiar with Wilson’s stage work—I’ve seen a number of his productions, including Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (which I saw in 1992), The Black Rider (1993), Alice (1995), The Temptation of St. Anthony (2004), and Fables de la Fontaine (2007; with the Comédie Française)—you know that he’s renowned for his physical staging and visual work. (He’s also known for the stylized movements of his actors, and I’ll get to that in a bit.) In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz calls the Gilman production “a living art installation.” For Threepenny, Wilson was clearly visually inspired by the German expressionistic film of the ‘20s (like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which I mentioned earlier). Set elements were fragmentary and exaggerated or stylized to evoke a psychological state. The jail cell in which Macheath is incarcerated, for example, was represented only by a single barred wall in front (with lighted bars wide enough apart for a man easily to climb through)—possibly to indicate how easily people like Mack could come and go at will. The gallows behind the jail cell in the last scene was one of the few realistic elements in the production, depicting the apparent very real danger Macheath’s life is in at that moment. The backdrop that appeared behind the scenes in Mack’s thieves’ den was a series of vertical and diagonal light tubes that called to mind the off-kilter remains of the World Trade Center right after the towers fell. The image was so close to the iconic view of the buildings’ exoskeleton that I can’t help but think the parallel was intentional.

In all, the atmosphere of Wilson’s Threepenny felt a lot like that in movies set in Victorian London, like Sherlock Holmes mysteries or Jack the Ripper thrillers: an alley or a tunnel somewhere where it’s dark and dank and scary. The shadows permit no color to come though and everything you see and hear is exaggerated and threatening. Except that in Wilson’s vision, it was also cold—like ice. There was no warmth available anywhere, not even in the characters’ veins, and it’s not an agreeable place. As one of Brecht’s underworld types says, “It’s not nice, it’s art” (“Das ist Kunst und nicht net”). Ben Brantley in the New York Times describes the production as “as cold as a body on a mortuary table”; in Philadelphia’s Broad Street Review, Carol Rocamora records that Threepenny was a “blast of icy air that blew through the Brooklyn Academy of Music.” Death and cold were recurring images invoked by most reviewers; even the Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, who rejected the production and apparently thoroughly dislikes Wilson, calls the production “gelid,” though in his case it isn’t meant to be complimentary.

“Minimalist” was another descriptive used often to portray the show’s look, especially its set. Most of the scenery, including the set pieces—the jail cell, the “WTC skeleton” (my interpretation, of course; I don’t know what else to call it)—was made of light. (Other than furniture, only the gallows wasn’t.) Tubes of light made up the WTC structure and the jail bars, as I said, but light played a big part in other scenes, too. The opening moment, with the front curtain closed as the characters moved across the apron, was backed with flashing Op-Art-like swirls of light and other backdrops were similarly constructed of illuminated geometric designs. Needless to say, however, the lights were white and cold, of course.

This brings me to the movement of the actors. That opening scene was flat and one-dimensional as the actors moved across from stage right to left, facing the audience for the most part. Their movements were mechanical, like automatons of some kind. In the rest of the performance, the actors moved not so much robotically, but more fluidly and not solely facing front. They were a little like marionettes with some of their strings cut. (I suppose another image I could cite would be zombies, reanimated corpses—minus the outstretched arms. The truth is, while I was watching the play, I was trying to think of a way to characterize the movement, and I obviously still haven’t.) In addition, each character had a distinctive movement pattern, some in the way they stepped and others in the way they held their torsos—like demented Monty Python “Silly Walks” routines. While John Cleese was hilariously funny when he did the bit, however, the cast of Threepenny was just bizarre. Macheath, for instance, though dressed in a black suit that actually sparkled with sequins, walked with a thin cane and seemed to be channeling Chaplin’s Little Tramp—though Kurt was a little more the boulevardier than an everyman. I’m not particularly good at interpreting symbols, but if I had to guess at what this might mean dramatically, I’d say Wilson sees Brecht’s characters as, if not dead, then as good as: they’d essentially lost their souls to capitalist pursuits. This would align with my reading of the single realistic set element—the gibbet.

After the movement, the most salient aspect of this Threepenny was the sound. Brantley even specifies that “it’s your ears that keep you awake, anxious and often enthralled” in this production. This included both the singing and speaking, as well as the effects. (I don’t agree that the aural overpowered the visual, however.) I’ll leave the singing and speaking aspect until I talk about the acting, but the sound effects were very prominent here. No non-vocal sound was produced naturally from the stage (that is, by the actors or even the set); it was all produced artificially by an off-stage technician, Joe Bauer. When anyone paid another character money, for instance, it was always in change (Macheath did toss around bills in one scene, but he wasn’t actually paying anyone) and the mimed dropping of the coins into the receiver’s hands or pocket was accompanied by the exaggerated and prolonged clanking of the silver into a metal box or can. Footfalls at significant moments, like Tiger Brown entering Macheath’s cell block, echoed artificially and loudly, as if someone wearing wooden soles were walking heavily through a tunnel. When Mack’s cell door was opened, the sound of the lock—anachronistically, an electronic lock—buzzed noisily throughout the theater. (There were several allusions to the present moment in Wilson’s performance text, and I’m sure this was meant to be one.)

Entirely in sync with the visual and aural style of the production, Wilson developed a performance style for the cast that was equally cold, artificial, and stylized. In consonance with the actors’ movements, their vocal work, especially speaking, was also idiosyncratic. (The technical name for this highly stylized and non-realistic type of performance is “eccentric” acting. Usually a comedic technique stressing the exaggerated artificiality of an actor’s behavior, it’s most commonly seen in clowning. Historically, it was a common practice in the stage work of avant-garde Russian directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein in the 1910s and ‘20s.) Brecht didn’t want his actors to express emotions in the conventional way, empathizing with the characters and feeling the same emotions the characters did. The eccentric performances of Wilson’s cast here were intended, I believe, to create the impression of emotions and psychological states by abstracting the physical manifestations and reducing them to simple gestures or facial expressions—say, in the way a mask communicates an emotion or psychological condition. The actor doesn’t necessarily feel anything, but strikes a pose or makes a face and we read what the character is meant to be feeling. It’s an intellectual response, as Brecht demanded. The white make-up and the padded or severely designed costumes, as well as the stylized speech and singing were all part of this scheme. For me, it worked (though I read some reviewers who were put off by the tactic). I won’t say that Wilson is a Brechtian—he’s much too taken with stage pictures and the look of his productions—but the two artists’ styles coincided in this Threepenny, along with the talents and backgrounds of the BE actors, to generate a production that I feel was Brechtian. If there was a fault along those lines, it was that Wilson’s production was too fascinating and too engaging on the level of theatricality to let me focus full-time on the circumstances that Brecht was depicting and to make a judgment of it from his portrayal. That’s a fault, however, I can overlook—even if I can imagine Brecht wincing a little at the outcome. (As an acting teacher of mine would say here: “But we don’t have Brecht’s phone number.”)

The BE’s eight-player musical ensemble, directed by Hans-Jörn Brandenburg and Stefan Rager (they’re the keyboardist and percussionist as well), produced Weill’s sound in a way that conjured up for my unlearned ear the Weimar cabarets of Berlin—at least as I imagine them from the popular renditions in film and on stage. Like the singing, this was not the tunefulness of a Broadway musical: it was harsher, more dissonant, less melodic—“The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” though the tune was recognizable as “Mack the Knife,” wasn’t the pop song I grew up with (not that I expected it to be)—and less pretty. The singers came in on the same note, more like what I’d say was Sprechstimme than musical theater singing. (The closest easily recognizable example I can think of isn’t operatic recitative, but the singing of actors like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Robert Preston in The Music Man, and Richard Burton in Camelot. That’s not exactly right; the Threepenny actors sang more than those other performers, but none was a Julie Andrews or Robert Goulet.) Oddly (or perhaps not), the musical performances were covered by few of the reviews I read even though it’s such an important part of Threepenny.

Brecht and Weill transposed Gay’s conflict of the beggars, thieves, and whores of London with the British aristocracy into a struggle against capitalism and the bourgeoisie. (“Das Geld regiert die Welt,” sings someone early in the play: “Money rules the world.”) The present BE production had echoes of current events, not only the on-going worldwide economic crisis and the bailouts, but the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that started long after Wilson first staged Threepenny four years ago. There were snippets of Frank Sinatra’s and Lady Gaga’s songs (the latter of which I didn’t recognize until I read it since I don’t know Gaga’s music), the WTC image, and the modern electronic lock sound to help remind us that what Brecht saw in 1928 is still true today. In the final act, when Macheath is back in jail and expects to be executed, after having shown up at the whorehouse dressed like a Wall Street banker and tossing cash around so that it floated down like so much confetti, he makes an impassioned speech about the outrages of bankers and industrialists ("Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?")—as if he’d been down in Zuccotti Park a few weeks ago speaking at a rally. (The audience I was in gave out a knowing laugh at these lines. Most of them had the advantage of the English titles, but I caught enough of the German at that moment to understand what Mack was saying. I haven’t checked the Willet translation or the German original to see if the lines had been altered to make the contemporary reference clearer, but somehow I think it was just a happy coincidence enhanced by Kurt’s spin on the delivery.) Of course, one of Brecht’s targets is hypocrisy, so if Macheath acts like a toff when he’s up and then like one of the disenfranchised underclass ("the 99 percent”) when he’s down, that’s the world Brecht’s showing us. The author’s other targets include greed and corruption—which are in plentiful evidence here in 2011 so Wilson and the BE don’t have to stretch far to make the connection. As Amy Lee of the Huffington Post remarks, “Wilson's version . . . has more to say about contemporary society than about history, and it delights in the parallels.”

The critical reception of the BAM staging of Threepenny was almost universally positive. From the New York Times to the Daily News to the New York Post and through most of the on-line journals, the reviewers all relished the visit of this production and the world-renowned company that performed it. Several had quibbles and cavils with bits of the show (some way off base, I think)—the long first part, comprising the first and second acts of Brecht’s script and running two hours before the intermission, was a common complaint. (There were seriously slow moments in the second-act portion of the first part, exacerbating what seemed like an interminable act. I thought part one was ending three times before it actually did.) A few reviews were less enthusiastic than most, but by and large they were all pretty close to raves. Only the Village Voice, as I mentioned, absolutely hated the piece. Michael Feingold, it seems, has no love for Robert Wilson’s theater, writing in his review that “Wilson has never really had any interest in the theater. He actively seems to disapprove of the theatrical impulse and even to resent its continued existence.” Of the show itself, Feingold states that Wilson turned “Brecht and Weill's middle-class wake-up call into dead entertainment for rich people.” He was, however, the only reviewer to come anywhere near this opinion, as far as I could find. From my own perspective, I couldn’t disagree with him more strongly. Even from my terrible vantage point, I found the experience exhilarating and more than satisfying. Wilson’s stage work has always fascinated me—I was less than delighted with Fables de la Fontaine and I found The Temptation of St. Anthony more pretty than engaging, but Black Rider remains one of the most astonishing pieces of theater I’ve seen and Wilson’s staging of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, which I saw almost 20 years ago, still startles me when I think of it.