'Judgment Day'

Performances at the Park Avenue Armory, also known since 2015 as the Thompson Arts Center, are more than just play productions, as you may see from my report on Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape from two seasons ago (18 April 2017) and before that, Théâtre du Soleil’s Les Éphémères (15 July 2009).  Productions at the Armory are either conceived for that huge, open space (the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall) or specially adapted to it.  And when the director is someone like Richard Jones, who mounted The Hairy Ape and clearly knows how to use the space, it can be extraordinary.  (I included a very brief historical description of the Park Avenue Armory in my report on the art installation Drill, posted on Rick On Theater on 15 July 2019.)

So when I read that Jones, a British theater and opera director, was returning to the Armory for another production, my ears pricked up.  I wanted to know more.

On offer was the world première of a new adaptation (by 44-year-old Obie Award-winning American playwright Christopher Shinn, a Pulitzer Prize finalist) of Austro-Hungarian playwright and novelist Ödön von Horváth’s (1901-38) 1937 play Judgment Day (Der jüngste Tag), I was interested.  The whole package was intriguing.

I’d had a taste of Jones’s work and was interested in seeing more.  I’d been hearing about Shinn a lot lately, a theater artist who falls into that group called “emerging”—not quite famous yet, but on the verge.  All I knew about Horváth was his name, but there’s something fascinating about him.  He had the air of a ground-breaker, an iconoclast.  He was vaguely like Georg Büchner (1813-37) or Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), theater innovators who were poised to make a splash and then died young, leaving a handful of remarkable plays and unfulfilled promise.  (Büchner died of typhus at 23, but Mayakovsky died an apparent suicide at 36.  Horváth died in a freak accident at 37.)

So, I brought the production to the attention of Diana, the friend with whom I usually go to theater—I’m supposed to be touting her onto unusual productions—and we booked it for 8 p.m. on Friday, 3 January—our first show of the new year.  It was an excellent decision—Judgment Day was a fascinating experience. 

As you might guess, Horváth’s plays—he left about 18, maybe half of them available in English translation—are not frequently produced in this country.  Aside from the Armory’s Judgment Day, in New York City, I found only two productions of Don Juan Comes Back from the War (1936) Off-Broadway in 1979 and 1986.  I didn’t do a thorough search—he might be popular in regional rep companies, though I doubt it, or college and university theaters (more likely), but I can say that his name hasn’t otherwise arisen on the pro or semi-pro theater (Off-Off-Broadway) scene here in the 46 years I’ve been in New York.

Abroad, however, there has been something of a resurgence of interest in Horváth’s work.  In 2009, for instance, the Almeida Theatre in London staged Judgment Day in a translation by playwright Christopher Hampton (Total Eclipse, 1967; Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1985) directed by James Macdonald.  Richard Jones himself previously directed Tales from the Vienna Woods, Horváth’s best known play, at London’s National Theatre in 2003, and in 2013, Berlin’s Deutsches Theater staged Tales. 

Last April in Berlin, the Maxim Gorki Theater presented an adaptation by Swiss writer Tina Müller of Horváth’s novel, 1937’s Youth Without God staged by Turkish director Nurkan Erpulat.  Last Summer, another staging of the novel by Thomas Ostermeier was seen at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and in 2018, an earlier production was mounted in Stuttgart.  That same year, Faith, Hope and Charity was presented in Vienna.

A three-act German opera adapted from Der jüngste Tag composed by Giselher Klebe (1925-2009) premièred in 1980 in Mannheim, Germany; the composer’s wife, Lore Klebe (1924-2001), wrote the libretto based on Horváth’s play.  English translations of Horváth’s text of Judgment Day are published in Judgment Day (Faber & Faber, 2009), translated by Christopher Hampton (b. 1946); and Ödon von Horváth: Plays (PAJ Publications, 1986); Judgment Day is translated by Martin and Renate Esslin.  Christopher Shinn’s adaptation of Judgment Day was released by Methuen Drama in 2019

Richard Jones’s Judgment Day was commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory—that is to say, the Armory commissioned Jones’s next project following the success of The Hairy Ape and he selected Judgment Day and got Shinn (Dying City, Where Do We Live?, and Now or Later) to make the adaptation.  It’s the Armory’s first foray into producing from the get-go; future commissioned projects will include work from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage (Ruined, 2009; Sweat, 2017) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (twice Pulitzer-Prize finalist for Gloria, 2016, and Everybody, 2018).  The world première of the new Judgment Day started previews on 5 December 2019 at the Armory and opened on 11 December; the production closed on 10 January 2020.

Born Edmund Josef von Horváth on 9 December 1901 in what is now Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary) into an aristocratic Hungarian family, the playwright and novelist, who wrote in German, lived in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s and ’30s.  He preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von Horváth.  In 1931, he was awarded the Kleist Prize for Tales from the Vienna Wood, Horváth’s most successful and best known play.  The Kleist Prize was the most prestigious literary honor in Weimar Germany, discontinued after 1933.

Horváth witnessed at first hand the rise of Nazism and his plays often explore popular culture, politics, and history, with a particular focus on fascism and its dangers.  Written on the eve of World War II, Der jüngste Tag (sometimes translated as The Last Day) is set in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.  That year, Horváth left Berlin and returned to Austria.  A prolific writer of plays and novels, Horváth’s works were banned when the Nazis came to power.  

Horváth’s last play (some sources say his next-to-last, but I can’t find one later), Judgment Day has been seen as an allegory for the indoctrination of Nazi ideology; it was published in 1937, a year before Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) with Germany.  The writer lived in a fraught part of the world at a particularly fraught time, and I suspect his plays, especially Judgment Day, manifest that. 

Of course, I am working through a filter—Shinn’s adaptation—so I may be misperceiving the evidence.  Indeed, the adaptor remarked that, though Horváth died at just 36, “As I adapted Judgment Day, he felt older to me—his dark, wry vision is startlingly mature.”  Shinn added that this play “still feels ahead of us in revealing who we are and where we might be headed.”

Horváth fled Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and moved to Paris.  On 1 June 1938, he was struck by a falling tree limb and killed on the Champs-Élysées during a thunderstorm.  He was buried in Paris, but in 1988, on the 50th anniversary of his death, his remains were transferred to Vienna and reinterred. 

Christopher Shinn was born in 1975 in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Wethersfield; he currently lives in New York City.  He’s the author of Dying City (2007, Lincoln Center; 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Where Do We Live? (2004, Vineyard Theatre; 2005 Obie Award for Playwriting), and Now or Later (2008, Royal Court, London; Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play shortlist), among other plays.  The Royal Court Theatre in London produced his first play, Four, in 1998, garnering rave reviews. 

His most recent play, Against, had its world première at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2017, starring Ben Whishaw.  A revival of Dying City at Second Stage in New York City, directed by the playwright, ran from 4 to 30 June 2019. 

His plays have also been premièred by the Royal Court Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, Donmar Warehouse, Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Soho Theatre (London), and Hartford Stage. 

Shinn graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dramatic Writing in 1997.  A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches playwriting at the New School.  His work is published in the U.S. by the Theatre Communications Group and in the U.K. by Methuen.

In a 2013 Los Angeles Times article about Shinn, Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre and a theater writer for numerous national publications, explained, “If playwright Christopher Shinn has a signature character, it is the manipulative victim—the half-sympathetic, half-deplorable sort of person whose suffering is real but who uses it as rationale for bad behavior.”  

This description fits the playwright’s depiction of Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz, the central character of Judgment Day.  Whether the Hudetz on view at the Park Avenue Armory is Shinn’s creation or whether the adaptor adopted him from Horváth’s original is irrelevant: Shinn is working in familiar territory.

In the same article, Shinn was very explicit about his dramatic focus:

We’re living in a time where people think of themselves as victims, whether they’re oppressed or the oppressor, whether they’re doing violence or violence is being done to them.  This is what compels me and keeps me going: I’m so sympathetic to the way trauma shapes people, but as a dramatist I’m also interested in questions of agency and responsibility.

This is precisely what Jones’s production of Judgment Day explores.  It sounds to me as if Jones found his perfect collaborator in Shinn—and perhaps, at least for Judgment Day, Horváth’s doppelgänger.

Shinn’s version of Judgment Day, rendered from a literal translation (by Tessa Keimes-Kin and Susan Salms-Moss), is performed in one 90-minute act divided into seven scenes.  The year of the setting isn’t specified in the program, but the clothing worn by the characters and the use of Frakturschrift (sometimes called the “German alphabet,” the official typeset of the German-speaking world until 1941, when it was abandoned by the Nazi government) for all signs and banners on the set put the period in the mid-to-late ’30s. 

Other aspects of the clothing—dirndls for some of the young women, shorts with long socks and short, sturdy boots for some men—suggest southern Germany or Austria (the costume design was by Antony McDonald); the mix of German (Frau Liemgruber, Herr Koller) and Hungarian (Thomas Hudetz, Pokorny) names pinpoints the locale as most likely Austria.  (Late in the play, a wanted poster offers a reward of 1,000 schillings, the former currency of Austria—except for the World War II period—before the euro was introduced.  Germany’s currency in the 1930s was the Reichsmark)

At the train station in a small Austrian town (Scene I), several prospective passengers are waiting for the delayed train. Frau Liemgruber (Harriet Harris), the town gossip, and a local lumberjack (Andy Murray) are sharing rumors about their fellow townsfolk with a traveling salesman (Jason O’Connell).  

The station manager, Thomas Hudetz (Emmy Award-winner Luke Kirby of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), a dutiful civil servant, is on duty.  Frau Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan) says goodbye to her brother, Alfons (Henry Stram), the town pharmacist, who was visiting her.  She complains about her husband.  

The waiting passengers gossip and Frau Liemgruber is pleased to tell everyone that Frau Hudetz is 13 years older than her husband and that he no longer goes anywhere in town, but stays in the station, where the couple have a comfortable apartment overlooking the tracks with a view of the surrounding forest.  

A couple of express trains hurtle through the station (portrayed by flashing lights and the loud sound of a speeding train, courtesy of lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound designer Drew Levy) and the stationmaster throws the lever that sends the all-clear signal down the track.  Fearing they might be late, a young man, Ferdinand (Alex Breaux), a butcher from a nearby town, arrives in a rush with his coquettish fiancée, Anna (Susannah Perkins), whom he’s been visiting. 

When the local arrives and all the passengers board and the train leaves, Anna, who’s the innkeeper’s daughter, starts flirting with Hudetz and finally kisses him.  Frau Hudetz watches the scene from their apartment window. Another express train passes and the station manager, distracted by Anna’s advances, forgets to give the caution signal.  There’s a horrendous collision with a freight train down the track.  Eighteen people, including the train driver, Pokorny, are killed; several more are injured, like the stoker (George Merrick).

At the scene of the accident (Scene II), people are gawking and the police start the investigation.  A drumhead tribunal is set up at the base of a viaduct and the injured stoker swears to the prosecutor (Maurice Jones) that his train driver has never run through a signal.  Hudetz repeats that he’s “always been a diligent official” and that he’s not to blame.  Anna testifies in his favor, but Frau Hudetz charges her husband with lying.  Hudetz is arrested.

Four months later (Scene III), a reception is being prepared in The Wild Man inn to celebrate Hudetz’s acquittal and release from jail.  (In German, the inn’s name is Der Wilde Mann, which can also be translated as The Savage Man or The Crazy Man.)  The waitress, Leni (Jeena Yi), is hanging a banner saying “Willkommen Herr Stationsvorstand” (Welcome Mr. Station Manager) as the innkeeper (Tom McGowan) makes the preparations for the party.  

Hudetz is wheeled into the inn in triumph, standing in a railroad luggage cart—like a Roman hero in a chariot—with banners on the sides reading “Herzlich Willkommen” (Hearty Welcome).  At Anna’s urging, Hudetz agrees to meet her at the viaduct the next evening.  

Alfons, Frau Hudetz’s brother, comes to the inn to talk to his brother-in-law.  He’s become a pariah in town because of his sister’s betrayal of Hudetz and is almost attacked by the gathered party-goers who’ve turned into a vengeful mob, but Hudetz stands up for him.

The next evening, Hudetz waits for Anna at the base of the viaduct (Scene IV).  A policeman (Charles Brice) atop the overpass calls down to him in a challenge.  When he recognizes Hudetz, the guard warns the stationmaster of roaming Gypsies.  Anna appears and expresses remorse over her perjury and because of the train accident for which she feels partly responsible.  As the two cast huge silhouettes against the monumental viaduct, she tells Hudetz that she loves him.

In the inn (Scene V), Hudetz drinks a glass of wine, contrary to his habit.  Anna has gone missing; Leni, the waitress, is worried.  The policeman brings the news that Anna was found dead at the viaduct.  Hudetz, now suspected of murdering Anna, hastily sets off to hide from the search parties.  

Frau Liemgruber, shopping at Alfons’s pharmacy, talks about Anna’s funeral (Scene VI).  She’s brought along a photo of her dead body.  She also reports that Hudetz is the suspect.  But Alfons doesn’t want to take part in the gossip.

Frau Hudetz now lives with her brother in his apartment above the pharmacy.  While the two are eating, Hudetz shows up.  He’s being hounded and wants to flee, but he can’t hide in his railroad uniform.  He asks Alfons for a suit.  When he discovers the picture that Frau Liemgruber left behind of Anna lying dead, he runs out without the suit.

The entire town—both men and women, many carrying rifles—is out hunting down Hudetz  The innkeeper and Ferdinand, Anna’s fiancée, are with the police looking for Hudetz near the site of the train accident (Scene VII).  Alfons reports that his brother-in-law had been at his apartment.  The search of the viaduct is shifted to the accident site.  

Pokorny (Jones), the locomotive driver, and a trackworker (O’Connell), two fatalities of the accident, appear to  Hudetz.  They encourage him to kill himself, but the spirit of Anna appears and tries to persuade him to live.  When the police come back, Hudetz faces his arrest. 

We never learn how Anna died, whether she committed suicide over her false support for Hudetz in the accident inquiry or whether the station manager killed her to keep her from recanting her testimony or whether someone else, like Frau Hudetz, who was jealous of her youth and her attraction for Hudetz, killed her.  The play never reveals the truth.

I haven’t entirely come to grips with Horváth’s play—or Shinn’s rendering of it.  The adaptor himself finds that it’s “very hard to know what the play was saying. There’s no character that you can look at as a stabilising point.”  Shinn continued: “It feels like our society is without a centre. Nobody quite knows where to look for how it will get better.”

But Jones’s production is astonishing.  It’s stunning.  (Talk about the opposite of “simple setting,” as my friend Kirk Woodward writes about in “Gospel of John in Stage,” posted on ROT on 11 January.)  There’s not a lot of scenery, but what there is hardly “simple.”  Wait and see (assuming I can describe it accurately!  That’ll be a challenge.)

The play is peculiar—at least in the adaptation—but deceptively so.  It looks at first encounter like a typical translation from German of a pre-World War II script—a little stilted, tinged with German Expressionism, but fundamentally Realistic.  (The production picked up a number of little “Germanisms” that rang especially true—like what I saw in the film The Big Lift about which I blogged on 13 August 2017: little formal bows people made when greeting or departing from one another, for instance, or the small leather pouch the waitress at the inn had at her waist for collecting payment or making change—such identifiably German cultural things.)   It turns out that it’s not so simple—at least not in Christopher Shinn’s version.  

Judgment Day’s physical production is more than just a performing environment.  I don’t want to give the impression that the set is more important somehow than the acting or the writing, but I will venture that it’s an equal partner.  Theater and opera scenic designer Paul Steinberg created a monumental set, towering at over 25 feet high. 

When we enter the Drill Hall, we’re confronted with a huge, wooden structure facing the seats.  Diana and I were on the far left of the first row, so the wall, which stretched all the way across the front of the bleachers, was only a few feet in front of us.  This is the train station and platform; the tracks would have been under us and there’s a door to the office in the wall on our left, a ticket window (“Fahrkarten”) just to the door’s right and a window, which turns out to be the Hudetzes’ apartment, high up on the far right.  The fateful levers for the train signals are on the platform at the left end, almost in front of where Diana and I were sitting.

We were so close that I felt a little uncomfortable, thinking that if any scenes took place at the right end of the set, we’d have to strain to see them.  The wall’s already extreme height was greatly exaggerated by our closeness to it.  Diana asked if I thought the set was going to move, and I figured it was—little did I know—because it appeared to be flat—that is, two-dimensional—looked as if it were sitting on wheels, and was encircled on the sides and back by trees which would only be truly visible if the wall weren’t there.

As I observed, the Drill Hall is lined on three sides by a forest of trees—some flat, cut-out silhouettes and others look like unsold Christmas trees—shrouded in ground-hugging fog.  A huge, ominous clock hangs above it all in the rear of the space, lit like the moon.  The floor of the Drill Hall, as big as a quarter of a Manhattan city block, is covered in a glossy, black material, making the set seem to be gliding on black ice.  This gave the performance an air of a dream—perhaps a nightmare.

After Scene I, the wall moves around the space by means of a hydraulic cart driven by a stagehand.  Another architectural set piece, the arch of a viaduct, also moves into place.  The company of 17 also moves onto the stage at the same time, moving in large groups, sort of marching (but not quite like soldiers) between the sliding wooden behemoths. 

My thought was that the technical rehearsals for Judgment Day must have been something to see—and that the production must have begun rehearsing the scene changes—there are six of them—from the very first day.  Not just the actors, but the set pieces, described by Helen Shaw of Vulture and New York magazine as “like a giant’s building blocks,” really had to be choreographed by movement director Anjali Mehra (for the actors), and production stage manager Lisa Iacucci and stage manager Janet Takami (for the set pieces).

Angled obliquely for Scenes III and V, the long wall, with the addition of a blond wooden bar, becomes the back of The Wild Man inn, with the viaduct in place perpendicular to it as a sort of tunnel leading to the inn.  In Scene VI, the wall opens like a pop-up book to reveal the two-story interior of Alfons’s pharmacy downstairs and apartment above.  The set pieces, in a way, are two giant characters in the play.  (I can see how this might get in the way of the performance, and some reviewers felt it did, but I didn’t.  On the other hand, as I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for theatricality.)

Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting does more than create the illusion of speeding trains with the help of strobe lights—an excellent conceit, incidentally: effective in a practical sense and, at the same time, artistically and theatrically satisfying.  (And, since Diana and I were seated right where the “train” was traveling, it was also a teeny bit scary—especially the first time.)  Since Jones’s production leans toward Expressionism—I’ll address how I think this applies to the acting shortly—Sherin’s lighting adds to this stylistic choice.  Some scenes, like the train depot, The Wild Man inn, and Alfons’s pharmacy, are bright, almost blazing, and mostly white. 

These contrast with scenes like the viaduct, the crash site, streets, which are shadowy and gloomy, somewhat menacing.  The background of the forest, where occasionally spooky figures lurk, are always in semi-darkness so that, with the shiny black ground, it creates the impression that the town is isolated from the rest of the world, like a sinister Brigadoon.

Sound designer Drew Levy, like Sherin, contributes to the passing-train effect, a significant contribution to the production considering how the railroad, the trains, the viaduct, and the crash loom over the town and its citizens.  (If the set is another character in Jones’s Judgment Day, then so is the invisible train.) 

The Armory’s Judgment Day has two sound designers; the other one, Daniel Kluger, is also responsible for the music.  Though, like a movie sound track, the production’s musicscape uses various period-evoking types of music, the most prominent is the oompah sound of German traditional music.  It’s so identified with Germany and Austria that it inevitably establishes a cultural milieu. 

(When oompah music is played in The Wild Man, I was immediately transported back to the early-1960s in Koblenz, Germany, when my teenaged friends and I used to hang out sometimes at a restaurant/Weinstube called the Weindorf—literally ‘wine village’—where that kind of music was the regular accompaniment.  It was positively Proustian!  I wrote about this eatery in “An American Teen in Germany, Part 2,” 12 March 2013)

I’ve delayed writing about the Horváth/Shinn play as long as I can now.  As I said earlier, it’s deceptively straightforward, for all intents and purposes the story of a horrific train accident near a small town for which the local stationmaster is blamed.  He’s exonerated on the perjured testimony of a young woman who’s later tortured over her lie.  When she’s found dead, the stationmaster is accused of her murder.  It’s almost Hitchcockian—a sort of The 39 Steps with psychological overtones and a film noir dynamic.

But the twist, dramatically speaking, is that the townspeople develop a mob mentality that’s flexible: they fit up anyone who threatens their collective sense of moral responsibility, irrespective of its validity.  At first, the town backs Hudetz in his claim of innocence, supported by Anna’s testimony that he pulled the signal lever on time as always. 

They never liked Frau Hudetz (“a really hateful woman,” says Frau Liemgruber) whom they consider an older woman who seduced a young man (“the most wonderful man”) and then kept him tied to her out of jealousy, so when she testifies against her husband, the townsfolk believe Anna and Hudetz, who’re lying, and ostracize Frau Hudetz, who tells the truth, and her brother, Alfons.  Alfons’s mere appearance at The Wild Man is enough to generate the people’s anger and a mob almost attacks him but for Hudetz’s intercession.

Later, when Anna is found dead, the town turns on Hudetz, suspecting him of murdering her because she was about to recant her testimony from the accident investigation.  Now the townspeople stalk the town carrying rifles and axes, searching for Hudetz like a lynch mob (or the villagers in Frankenstein hunting for the monster).

This is all supposed to represent a fascist mentality, but it doesn’t come across to me.  It’s mob justice, a kind of mass paranoia and hysteria—sort of like what Arthur Miller exposed in 1953’s The Crucible.  But Miller (1915-2005) was writing specifically about Joe McCarthy (1908-57) and commie witch-hunts of the 1950s and the analogy he’s drawing is clear.  Fascism doesn’t say “mob mentality” to me, so the connection is weak.  Fascism to me means a regimented society, required to follow orders blindly.  There’s no Duce or Führer in Judgment Day telling the townsfolk whom to believe or what to do.

What is clear from the play is that the train wreck represents the National Socialist take-over of Germany’s government; Horváth wrote Judgment Day after fleeing Germany when the Nazis took power.  Hudetz, as an official of the state, symbolizes the Weimar government that was unable to stop Hitler and his party before they seized power because it was, as it were, asleep at the switch.  Note how the waiting passengers on the platform flatten themselves against the station wall as the rushing train barrels unstoppably through town. 

The townspeople are the citizens of Germany who run from one power base to another, believing whatever dogmas promise them what they want at the moment and putting the blame for the country’s woes on whichever suspect is convenient.  (This is the consequence of a small-town version of Hitler’s technique of the Big Lie, which advocates telling a lie so immense that no one will believe that someone would be so audacious as to think he could get away with it.) 

Meanwhile, Hudetz’s conflict over his responsibility for the accident and even Anna’s death is a reflection of the conflict the German people felt collectively over their complicity in the Nazi horrors.  Isn’t that the plot of Judgment Day, reduced to a skeletal outline?

I know what Horváth and Shinn want to say in this production; if it’s not clear from Horváth’s rep as a writer—though he was never affiliated with any political movement, he was sympathetic to the left and his writing often exposed the dangers of fascism—the Armory production’s publicity made it explicit.  But it isn’t in the play as far as I can tell.  The thing I don’t know, though, is whether it’s in Horváth’s original but lost in Shinn’s adaptation, or if it’s missing from both.  (Max McGuinness, theater reviewer for the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, says that Shinn “sticks closely to the original text while adding occasional Americanisms.”)

If Judgment Day  had been set in 1950s Poland or Czechoslovakia (or Horváth’s ancestral Hungary, where an anti-Soviet uprising took place in 1956), it could be read as an anti-communist play.  In Iran in the 1980s or ’90s, it could be in opposition to the Ayatollah’s theocracy.  Hell, you could put it in Louisiana in 1928-32 and say it’s an exposé of Huey Long’s (1893-1935) reign as governor.  This Judgment Day is only anti-fascist because someone says it is!

Movement director Mehra does her bit, with the coordinated movement of the cast in groups as if they were some sort of paramilitary cohort; in a couple of sequences, they come awfully close to goose-stepping (which, of course, is indelibly associated with Nazis—but which many totalitarian armies use, including the Soviets and their satellite states, Iran, and North Korea).  Mehra and Jones have Luke Kirby’s Stationmaster Hudetz moving around the depot performing his duties in a walk that’s stiff and march-like (he even squares his corners); I could almost hear a snare drum marking the cadence.  (In the New York Times, Jesse Green likens Kirby’s movements to “a figure that got loose from a Swiss clock.”)

It’s not really fair—or even accurate—to speak of individual performances in Jones’s Judgment Day.  Kirby and Susannah Perkins as Anna set a tone, under Jones’s guidance, but the whole cast works as a unit stylistically to establish and maintain the world of this play.  In fact, there are moments when the entire cast is the world of this play—say, when they are about to gang up on Alfons in The Wild Man or, more pointedly, when they are prowling the streets like a demented posse.  (That latter bit was clearly set up by movement director Mehra.)

Together, the company works to sustain the atmosphere of the little town under the thrall of groupthink.  I’ve spoken of the way they move, but their speech, though subtly, follows a similar pattern.  Jones has not guided his cast into eccentric performances, but there is a sort of automaton-like quality to their speech—not so much like robots but living Stepford people.  There’s a kind of soullessness in their voices.  It works rather well for the most part, though occasional jolts occur when an actor encounters one of Shinn’s anachronisms.  (I’m pretty sure that no one in 1930s Austria ever said anything about “downsizing.”)

My survey of the published criticism of Richard Jones’s Judgment Day at the Armory will include 14 reviews from various outlets.  Unlike the review round-up for my last report, for One November Yankee on 6 January, this one includes several print notices, along with numerous on-line reviews and one radio review. 

In the Financial Times, McGuinness remarked that this Judgment Day “seems particularly timely.”  McGuinness reported that scenic designer Steinberg “aims to give the set ‘a dreamlike quality’ using the reflective floor, while the forest is intended to supply ‘a fairytale aspect’ reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm.”  This “otherworldly vision suggests a counterpoint to the language of the play, which is deliberately flat and clichéd,” found the FT reviewer. 

McGuinness observed that “there is no mention of the Nazis, nor any political discussion in Judgment Day, which helps give Horváth’s play its lasting allegorical resonance.”  He also felt that all the characters “seem rudderless and lacking in self-awareness,” which “supplies a parallel with the contemporary US.”  The FT journalist ended by warning that this “guilt trip into the twisted psyche of 1930s Europe promises to illuminate the corrosiveness of our own time.”

“With ‘Judgment Day’ . . . [Richard] Jones seems eager to top his previous achievement,” asserted Green of the New York Times.  “The Armory production . . . feels even more monumental than ‘The Hairy Ape,’ both larger and grimmer.”  Green described Steimberg’s set as “a giant’s playthings,” which, “[l]it gorgeously by Mimi Jordan Sherin . . . slide and twirl about the huge space in various combinations that fascinate and appall the eye, like de Chirico paintings come to life.” 

Then the Timesman lamented, “If only the play would come to life too.”  Green found that “Horvath’s brand of social critique and political allegory . . . feels overwhelmed here by the physical production.”  He reported that “Jones makes exciting stage pictures out of that group chaos” and that “[a]urally, too, the production tells a coherent and emphatic story of people too easily manipulated by their drive for excitement.”  Green continued, however: “But with a few exceptions, the characters’ interior lives are invisible and inaudible to us.” 

“Clearly,” added Green, “this is Jones’s way of dealing with the strangeness of the play, which isn’t amenable to naturalism.”  The Times review-writer affirmed that Jones’s Judgment Day is “not the kind of drama that expresses itself best in subtle acting, even aside from the monumental staging with which the actors must fend.”  He felt that the leads didn’t present the kind of “great-face bigness—the kind you see in silent movies” needed to convey Horváth’s point, several of the supporting characters did, naming Alyssa Bresnahan’s Frau Hudetz; Jeena Yi’s Leni, the barmaid; and Harriet Harris’s gossip, Frau Liemgruber. 

Asserting that in a vast venue like the Park Avenue Armory, “[y]our patrons expect epic art that exploits the scale of the building (not to mention its history of wealth and militarism) to comment on a meaty issue,” David Cote extolled Judgment Day as “a fairly obscure German drama about guilt and mob mentality, , , , staged with smart, handsome efficiency by veteran English director Richard Jones” in the New York Observer. 

Cote put Horváth, had he lived, in a category with interwar German and Swiss dramatists like Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), Carl Sternheim (1878-1942), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and Max Frisch (1911-91), whom he labeled “unsentimental social critics who mingled gimlet-eyed satire with surreal or grotesque effects.”  Cote also compared Horváth with visual artists of the Weimar era Otto Dix (1891-1969) and Georg Grosz (1893-1959), “who saw decaying flesh, venality, and creeping fascism everywhere they looked.”  (I don’t know Dix’s art, but I’m well acquainted with Grosz’s grotesque caricatures of German life, and the connection to Horváth, at least as exemplified by Judgment Day, is spot on, I think.)

Of the visual effect of Steinberg’s set design, the Observer writer affirmed: “The imagery is stark, monumental, and very German.”  He added: “Lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin’s chilly shadows and Daniel Kluger’s ghostly sound designs contribute to the overall morbid, tense atmosphere of repression and dread.”  The reviewer’s final assessment of the production, which he tarred with “pretentious gigantism that is the unfortunate byproduct of Armory presentations,” is:

The cast is solid; Jones’s direction is clean and forceful; the design is impressive and engaging; and Horváth’s cautionary message comes through clearly in Shinn’s lean script.  But Judgment Day is, finally, a small play in an oversize production that dilutes any ripple effect the fable might have in 2019. 

“The human element feels like an afterthought in Richard Jones’s staging of Ödön von Horváth’s dark morality tale,” wrote Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New Yorker.”  The set is “pharaonic,” the lighting is “stunning,” and “[t]he over-all effect is breathtaking, with the actors often looking like figurines in a giant model.”  With the exception of Harriet Harris’s “vicious gossip,” however, “the performances are haphazard, which defangs the story.”  Vincentelli concluded, therefore: “The extravagant design is never less than entrancing, but we are far from Jones’s 2017 masterstroke, ‘The Hairy Ape.’”

In Vulture/New York magazine, Helen Shaw declared, “On the bright side (or maybe the dark and primeval side), Judgment Day at the Park Avenue Armory is a visual feast.”  After describing in detail the visual and aural production (“It’s entrancing”) and naming the accomplished artists in the creative team, however, Shaw continued:

And . . . yet . . . the big names and the big set don’t quite come together to make a big production.  The dancing architecture works, but the human components seem unchoreographed; any time there’s more than four people onstage, the mise-en-scène looks sloppy and astray.  More importantly, the expressionist environment asks for stylization from the actors, but Jones seems to have left them confused about what that should look and sound like.

The review-writer was also displeased with the adaptation, reporting that “Shinn, perhaps with his mind on Brecht, deliberately leaves the stilted tenor of translated text in place:  Speakers can sound as though they’re shouting subtitles at each other.”  With the exception of Harris (“as exaggerated as a George Grosz painting”), “everyone else, even strikingly fine actors, seems stranded.”  Shaw found that “Jones seems to be moving his cast from image to image rather than moment to moment.”  Her conclusion?  That “the show seems to have been made from the perspective of the huge, beautiful monoliths: It’s vast and slow and cold, and not, ultimately, all that concerned with the people on the ground.”

Zachary Stewart labeled the Armory’s Judgment Day “a jaw-dropping production” on TheaterMania.  “Even if you are turned off by the icy chill of the script,” Stewart promised, “Jones’s production draws you toward its bewitching flame.”  Shinn’s adaptation into modern English is “a surprisingly excellent job” that still “maintain[s] the prewar tone of the piece.”  Stewart found, “There's a lot to chew on in Judgment Day,” including instances of “contemporary resonance.”  In Stewart’s eyes, “Judgment Day is a withering take on the tribal instinct, and the centrality of myth in reinforcing that instinct.  When everyone in the room believes one thing, it is almost certainly not the truth.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale felt that “Judgment Day, may seem on paper to be an introspective drama about guilt and punishment,” but he asserted that “such intimacy doesn’t fly on the massive stage of the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall.”  The BWW reviewer posited, therefore, that director Jones, adaptor Shinn, and set designer Steinberg “have created a huge, cold, emotionally stark production that is chilling in its inhumanity.”  Dale reported that “Steinberg’s imposing set pieces, harshly lit by Sheri[n], emphasizes an attitude of individual insignificance deferring to the greater good as enormous structures appear choreographed along with the movement of actors.”  The review-writer concluded his notice by pointing out:

As with any political piece or social commentary, there's the temptation to compare the era of the play with contemporary times.  Certainly, themes of technological advancements diminishing opportunities for workers, the dangers of mob mentality and society's leanings towards gender-based sympathies are still with us.

David Finkle credited Jones with “[e]stablishing his own fearlessness” on New York Stage Review, finding that the director’s “staging [of Judgment Day in the Armory] gives it an enormous size and scope.”  The production’s “locomotive pace holds Judgment Day to a parable’s effectiveness.”  The NYSR writer found that “the drama is as efficient, yet as narrow, as an arrow hitting a target’s center.”  In conclusion, Finkle judged:

There’s no denying that in his momentous Judgment Day production, director Jones knocks patrons over the heads.  It’s an alert from a sober decade in which a fascist leader was blowing heavy clouds over the Continent and the globe.   When ostensible autocratic leaders appear to be emerging in growing numbers today, it seems as if von Horváth’s work has a potent relevance to a swelling contemporary plight.

In NYSR’s second review of Judgment Day,  Elysa Gardner exclaimed:

Let us now praise melodrama, at least conditionally.  Coarser examples—say, soap operas, or mega-musicals involving bloody wars or misunderstood creatures besotted with nubile women—may not offer much to recommend the form.  But approached with imagination, skill and a clear sense of purpose—and a few dashes of knowing irony, where appropriate—it can provide riveting and even thought-provoking entertainment.

“A case in point is on ravishing display at Park Avenue Armory,” Gardner wrote, calling Judgment Day a “socially, morally and psychologically charged thriller [that] has become a triumph of overstatement in service of plain but difficult truths.”  She specifically praised the design team, “who have turned the vast space at the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall into a glorious (and essentially minimalist) landscape” and said that the actors all “deliver memorable individual performances.”  The overall production, which the NYSR reviewer labeled “breathtaking,” “leav[es] us jarred and mesmerized throughout.” 

“Once in a while, a powerful play blows in from the past to hit you with the force of a gale wind,” wrote Carol Rocamora on Theater Pizzazz, referring to Horváth’s “chilling . . . moral fable.”  Judgment Day is “a thrilling production directed by Richard Jones,” Rocamora continued; “it’s a dark play for dark times—both then and now.”  The TP reviewer asserted, “The astonishment of this production is its jaw-dropping scale,” with a “dazzling design . . . by Paul Steinberg.”  “Jones’s sweeping directorial style,” she declared, “combined with an exquisite attention to detail and precise timing of so many moving parts, is incomparable.”  Additionally, Rocamora praised all the designers:

Enhanced by Mimi Jordan Sherin’s dramatic lighting design, Antony McDonald’s colorful costumes, Daniel Kluger and Drew Levy’s powerful sound design (including bells, whistles, screeching brakes, and crashing train sounds), and Daniel Kruger’s haunting music design, the cumulative, larger-than-life results are overpowering—more impactful than anything you’ll see on a New York stage this season.

“Shinn’s timely adaptation of Judgment Day leaves you with haunting questions about truth, conscience, and responsibility to society despite the personal cost,” concluded Rocamora.  “These are the very questions that resonate sharply and urgently in today’s turbulent times.”

On TheaterScene.com, Arney Rosenblat characterized the play as a “cautionary parable's over-arching themes of the complicit nature of guilt and destructive nature of mob mentality,” which “has been cleanly and effectively adapted by Christopher Shinn.”  Rosenblat reported that director Jones “choreographs, with the aid of Movement Director Anjali Mehra, a character ballet across the shifting stage to establish an unrivaled visual experience.”  The reviewer explained, “To fill both the enormous space of the Armory and the larger than life goals of the parable, Jones encourages his actors, for the most part,  to give larger than life performances.”  Rosenblat gave extra praise in this regard to Harriet Harris for her portrayal of Frau Liemgruber, but he generally complemental all the cast. 

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp proclaimed, “Christopher Shinn . . . and director Richard Jones . . . have given von Horváth’s work a slick production that feels remarkably of the moment.”  It’s staged with the “operatic grandeur the Armory’s vast stage calls for,” she affirmed, but added, “For all its pertinent issues and stylistic diversity, Judgment Day doesn’t quite make the grade as a memorably great play,” in part because “the spectacular staging does tend to upstage the actors.”  Nevertheless, “the entire cast meets the challenge of playing to the top row of the Drill Hall’s raked seating area.” 

Victor Gluck, reviewing for TheaterScene.net (not associated with the similarly-titled TheaterScene.com, quoted above), dubbed the Armory’s Judgment Day “a superb production” that “seems as powerful and relevant as if it had been written in this decade, not 80 years ago.”  Gluck added, “The production makes this expressionistic drama as contemporary as if this style were newly born.”  Interestingly, Gluck, like a number of his colleagues in criticism, noted, “The monumental set pieces . . . dwarf the characters,” but found method in this set-up, “suggesting that people are pawns in some cosmic pattern bigger than themselves.”  His ultimate assessment of the Armory staging of Judgment Day was: “Richard Jones’s huge production gives the play the breadth that it needs to tell its story with stunning visual effects.”

“Ödön von Horváth is in fashion these days, because he wrote about how the threat of fascism affected ordinary people,” noted WNYC’s Jennifer Vanasco in a radio review, continuing, “But this production of his 1937 play ‘Judgment Day’ . . . fails to make that threat feel real, or important.”  Vanasco explained that Judgment Day “should be an interesting morality play about the fickleness of crowds, yet the story doesn’t wrestle with guilt or complicity in an interesting way.” 

“Horváth’s point is that everything is connected, that every wrong action sets off a chain of additional bad actions.”  But the reviewer on the New York City outlet for National Public Radio felt:

This doesn’t really make sense.  But then, a lot of the play doesn’t.  It’s never clear why Anna kisses the stationmaster to begin with.  More importantly, some of the villagers are survivors of the crash, but they don’t seem upset about the incident.  No one is mourning those whose lives were lost.  Instead, they just gossip about why the train barreled through the signal.

Vanasco reported that “the Armory stage is enormous and the actors are dwarfed by the impressive set,” a sentiment shared by several other review-writers.  “The structures are a wonder,” she affirmed, observing that “[a]t the close of the first act, one of them smoothly recedes into the distance—and Anna gets smaller and smaller.”  Vanasco added, “Unfortunately, so do our hopes for a meaningful performance.”

The WNYC reviewer thought, “It could be that in a more intimate space, the audience would more easily connect with the characters.  Perhaps the play would feel relevant and hot-blooded, instead of the chilly work we have here.”