Some Plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from the Archive

 

THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY
by Robert Wilson
(based on Gustave Flaubert)
2004 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
21 October 2004 

My first show in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave season this year was Robert Wilson’s gospel-inspired version of The Temptation of St. Anthony on 19 October [2004].  Wilson’s piece, presented in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, is based on a Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) novel (La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1874) of the spiritual torment of Saint Anthony the Great (251-356), but Wilson tells his version virtually without spoken dialogue at all, having turned the story into a gospel-music revival.  

Flaubert’s novel, written in the form of a play script (and itself inspired by a ca. 1557 painting of the same title attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1525-30 – 1569), details one night in the life of Saint Anthony who begins to question his years of self-imposed solitude and asceticism.  The devil tempts him with both physical pleasures—luscious food, a shower of gold, a beautiful woman (The Queen of Sheba) and man (Adonis)—and many different non-Christian beliefs and philosophies.   

(The painting referenced above as the inspiration for Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony was cited in the Wikipedia entry for the novel.  It was originally attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but has since been ascribed to one of his followers.  

(There were, however, at least two other canvases with the same title by painters in Bruegel’s family, including one painted by his younger son, Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1568-1625, in 1594, and another by his elder son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1564-1638, in ca. 1600.  [After 1559, Pieter the Elder dropped the h from his family name; his relatives continued to use Brueghel.] 

(The French Wikipedia page for the Flaubert attributes the inspiration to the version from Pieter Brueghel the Younger.  Unless Flaubert left something in writing to attest to his stimulus, I don’t know how scholars can be sure.)

Anthony’s desert retreat is visited by a phantasmagorical array of evil characters and visions.  He struggles, but he prevails.  Along the path, he’s questioned and challenged by his disciple, Hilarion. 

In Wilson’s more austere adaptation, gone are the wild delusions of diabolical temptations.  Many are represented by the gospel hymns (gluttony in “Table Is Spread”; lust in “God Is Love”).  The director’s spare style is punctuated by sections of vibrant dance (choreographed by Christalyn Wright) and spiritual Christian revelry.

As usual with Wilson, the piece is short on drama, but long on theatrical spectacle.  The music is glorious of course (more on this later), but the visual images Wilson evoked are stunning, whether enhanced by the movement (the movement coach is Valerie Winborne), set, or costumes (designed by Geoffrey Holder, a certified theatrical genius to be sure). 

I suppose that if you’re susceptible to being touched by the story of Saint Anthony, the hermit saint who went in search of the true faith by living alone in the Egyptian desert, the play (if that’s what you can call Wilson’s piece) may move you—but since I don’t have a dog in this race, I was taken by the spectacle alone.  Over a brief, intermissionless hour and forty minutes, that was enough sustenance.

Since the music is the center of this piece, I should say something about that up front.  In contrast to a musical I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown this summer, which was inspired by the clash of musical cultures in Texas (so the playwright/director said) but had no one working on it who had any background in Mexican, Latin, or Tejano music (or country-western, either), Wilson did this absolutely right.  [The play at CATF was The Rose of Corazon by Keith Glover.  I reported on it on Rick On Theater on 8 July 2015.]  

Wilson collaborated with Bernice Johnson Reagon, about as much an expert in gospel music as you can find.  She not only knows the music as an academic who has studied the background and origins, but she just retired from her own gospel group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Now, I’m not a great fan of gospel music especially, but the vocal harmonies are gorgeous, and the music—which carried all the verbal element of Temptation—is superb. 

Reagon used existing songs, some of which she adjusted to fit the Saint Anthony story, and composed some original pieces.  All of them are wonderfully executed by Wilson’s cast.  (There’s a tinge of African rhythms in some of the pieces, and some of the costumes also bear African elements, but that may be embedded in the gospel tradition.  In any case, it does nothing but enhance the performance.) 

As I indicated, there’s no real spoken dialogue—except for the songs, the only other words are recitative or chants.  It makes the whole thing seem like a church pageant.  (As you might have imagined, Wilson’s Temptation was compared some to Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus.  Gospel did, by the way, have something of a life after BAM in 1983: it was shown on PBS’s Great Performances in November 1985, which is where I saw it, and went to Broadway in 1988.  It appeared in the repertoires of several regional theaters in the years afterward, too, but it’s popularity may have faded substantially by now.)

The base set, designed and lit by Wilson, is a unit which never changes—a square room with windows on the side walls and arched alcoves in the rear, flanked by doors at right and left.  The floor is essentially bare except for thin, wooden benches parallel to the side walls, one on each side of the stage.  (As usual with Wilson, the floor lights up in various colors, and there are constant washes of light from above that change the color of the set and costumes.) 

The side walls are directly perpendicular to the proscenium so they’re all but invisible from the center of the house, and the alcoves up stage resemble nothing so much as a pair of tablets for the Ten Commandments, making the space remind me of a simple synagogue, the alcoves representing the Torah ark.  This may be Wilson’s intent—to evoke the First Temple in Jerusalem, say—or I may have been the only spectator to find this resemblance.

The set’s occasionally enhanced by movable additions as the narrative calls for them.  These, of course, are seldom realistic.  In the instance that impressed me the most, a mountain flows out and one of the deities Anthony encounters descends. 

The deity first appears as a small puppet at the top of the mountain, rounds the first peak, and disappears briefly between the parts of the mountain.  When the deity emerges around another peak, it’s a larger puppet identical to the first except for its size.  Rounding another peak and disappearing again, it emerges, this time as a live actor, dressed the same as the two puppets.  Accompanied by one of Reagon’s songs, it’s a simple, but effective and delightful effect.

Holder’s costumes are mostly brightly colored and richly decorated robes but often topped by very elaborate (and, to my eyes, African-inspired) headdresses.  The women also have highly styled (and styled high) wigs of different shapes. 

Only Saint Anthony (Carl Hancock Rux) and his student Hilarion (Helga Davis) are individually cast; the rest of the characters are played by members of the ensemble while, for the most part, the rest serve as a chorus.  (According to a note in the program, most of the members of this all-African-American cast have known and worked with each other for years.)  They often weave intricate patterns, moving around the stage as they sing.  The robes are floor length and this makes the actors look like they’re gliding on wheels rather than walking.  It’s wonderfully ethereal. 

Like I said, with Wilson, often the spectacle is all.  In this case, it was enough.  Sometimes, beauty for its own sake is sufficient.

*  *  *  *

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
by William Shakespeare
Watermill Theatre production by Propeller (London)
17 March 2004 

I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night [Tuesday, 16 March 2004], in the production by Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller company from London, presented in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, the former Majestic which had been recovered for Peter Brook’s Mahabharata back in the ’80s.  I didn’t know the company previously, though they’ve been around for seven years; they’ve done other Shakespeare (Henry V), but I don’t know if they do other writers or periods [apparently not—Shakespeare is their turf]. 

For the first time that I can remember, Diana, my frequent theater partner, liked a show that I didn’t; if we disagree, it’s usually the other way around.  (She said she liked the “energy” of the performers.  That didn’t do it for me, and I didn’t question her because I didn’t want to spoil her enjoyment.) 

I guess the actors do a good enough job (especially the rude mechanicals: Tony Bell as Bottom the Weaver, Vincent Leigh as Snout the Tinker, Jonathan McGuinness as Snug the Joiner, Chris Myles as Peter Quince the Carpenter, and Jules Werner as Flute the Bellows-mender), but I just don’t see the reason to do this with all men.  It struck me as a gimmick—Hamlet on roller skates; if there’s anything more to it, it went past me. 

It’s not really Elizabethan—these actors aren’t boys, they’re men.  They don’t impersonate women, though they wear women’s clothes: there are no wigs, the actors don’t do “female” voices, or otherwise try to present feminine characters.  (Think Jamie Farr’s Klinger from MASH.  I’d add the Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo, but that’s a deliberate travesty; this isn’t supposed to be.) 

As far as I can tell, the casting of men in all the roles doesn’t add anything to the play except one more layer of humor—but I don’t see that that addition is appropriate.  There are essentially three kinds of humor in this production: 1) the jokes Shakespeare wrote into the play; 2) the physical comedy added by the director and actors; and 3) humor that arises because men are saying lines intended for female characters.  1) and 2) strike me as perfectly legitimate, but 3) strikes me as gratuitous. 

The laughs don’t come from the writing or the acting—just the casting.  It’s not clever; it’s just opportunistic.  And I don’t see how it illuminates the play or its themes (not that Midsummer’s themes are so deep they need much illuminating). 

In the program, director Hall is quoted as saying that the all-male casting “is about ‘trying to give the plays back to the actors, so that they can really tell the story in a more one-on-one way with the audience.’”  I can’t imagine how that statement even makes sense.  It sounds like he’s saying women actors can’t tell the story or work one-on-one with the audience (if that’s even an important accomplishment). 

The whole thing—which runs two hours and 40 minutes—just didn’t work for me at all.  I thought it was silly—not funny.  It even qualifies as pretentious, considering Hall’s statement.

*  *  *  *

THE WILD DUCK
by Henrik Ibsen
National Theatre of Norway (Oslo)
2006 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
1 November 2006 

My theater companion, Diana, and I went over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday evening, 26 October, to see the National Theatre of Norway’s production of Ibsen’s Wild Duck.  Like most non-musical productions at BAM, this was at the Harvey Theater.  I’m always curious to see how the natives interpret their own playwrights.  It always strikes me as sort of like going back to the source. 

Also, those national companies are usually excellent; I don’t believe I’ve seen the Norwegian company before, but I’ve seen the Swedish counterpart (with Bergman often at the helm), and they’re superb.

(I was telling my mother about this show and it made me recall two other national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s director, Eimuntas Nekrosius, and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin.  I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages. 

(And both were magnificent performances—and experiences.  I think The Square, which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts—which may have morphed into the Lincoln Center Festival, but I’m not sure—may have had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy.  Fifteen years later, and I still remember it. 

(Retro, which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 [see my report on this international theater festival, 10 November 2014], didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely clear that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening.  The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue. 

(Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language.  A tape of that performance would have been a perfect training film for Stanislavsky acting.  I guess that my remembering these performances 15 and 20 years afterwards says something.)

The Wild Duck isn’t one of Ibsen’s well-known, frequently-staged plays—at least, not in the U.S.; it’s apparently popular and even beloved in Norway—so I’ll give a short synopsis of the plot:

Hjalmar Ekdal (Gard Eidsvold) is a photographer, but he lets his wife, Gina (Agot Sendstad), and daughter, Hedvig (Birgitte Larsen), run his studio while he devotes his time to loftier pursuits: supposedly working on a “great invention,” which he never identifies.  He spends most of his time hunting rabbits in the loft with his elderly father (Kai Remlov)—who’d been imprisoned for corruption and suffers from moral and financial bankruptcy. 

The Ekdals only get by thanks to the wealthy Haaken Werle (Bjorn Skagestad)—Old Ekdal’s former business partner who’d managed to escape the charges that had condemned Old Ekdal.  Without Hjalmar knowing it, Werle has been giving money to Gina. 

One day, Gregers Werle (Eindride Eidsvold), Haaken’s son and Hjalmar’s oldest friend, returns to his hometown following a self-imposed exile.  In his search for the truth about the two families, Gregers makes discoveries that jeopardize the happiness of the entire family and have tragic consequences.

This Wild Duck, an offering of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2006 Next Wave Festival, is a kind of trimmed-down version—not an adaptation, but it only runs two hours (without intermission) and the cast has been cut to just the nine most prominent characters.  The set reflects this slimming process as well: there are only a table and about ten chairs (all Scandinavian-modern design—very stark) and an odd wood-textured wall, about six feet tall, across the back of the space. 

Director Eirik Stubø moved the action up to the late ’50s or early ’60s—at one point Ekdal plays Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” on his flute and spins Gina around as he sings a few bars—though the text isn’t altered as far as I could tell from the supertitles.  (The translation for the titles is credited to Judith Messick and Katherine Hanson, but it looks a lot like the Rolf Fjelde rendition published by Signet that I own.  I looked up a couple of things after I got home, and the wording looks awfully close; I even spotted several exact phrases as I skimmed for what I was looking for.)

It’s an entirely minor quibble, I admit, but the juxtaposition of the 19th-century text (Wild Duck was written in 1884) and the mid-20th-century look is occasionally jarring.  Two instances that I noted in passing include an exchange between Hjalmar Ekdal and his wife regarding cutting the pages of some of his reference books and a mention of “freshly-churned butter.”  Unless Norway was way behind the rest of the Western world in the ’50s and ’60s, we pretty much stopped selling books with uncut pages and getting butter fresh from a churn, as opposed to a grocery store’s fridge, was relegated to farms. 

More of a problem for me is the total ambiguity of the setting—and especially that back wall.  The script says the first act is in the Werle house, and the other four acts are in Ekdal’s photography studio.  In the published translation, the studio is described as completely furnished, not spartan, so Stubø (and his designer Kari Gravklev) are making a stylistic decision beyond the period of the action—to make a Symbolically minimalist environment for the (essentially) Realistic acting.  I can only say that I had a hard time imagining where the people are in real space—and maybe that’s my failing. 

I don’t think it’s my failing, however, that I was bothered by the constant need for the cast to reset the table and chairs, including moving the table on and off stage and adding or subtracting chairs.  (There are only three chairs and no table when we first arrive at Ekdal’s house in act two.  There are no act breaks, except that needed to reset the stage—accomplished by the actors themselves with the lights up.) 

There’s also a lot of action devoted to setting and adjusting the table (which has extension leaves, stored under the table top, that are taken out and put in as the needs of the scene demand).  I remember seeing a production of The Duchess of Malfi (by Cheek by Jowl) at BAM in 1995, and it became a play about moving chairs.  (There was a staging of The Brothers Karamazov—not the acrobatic clowns—at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in 1994 that devolved into the same thing.)  This production almost becomes a play about moving the table!

Now, that wall.  It’s just a plain, blondish wood-pattern expanse that extends from stage right to stage left, about six feet high—just over head height.  It looks to be about six to eight inches wide—wide enough for Hedvig to walk or crawl along.  But, what the hell is it?  I mean, we know that the studio is indoors—it’s described in the text as a loft, suggesting that it’s above ground level.  (I always pictured it as a sort of attic space, in fact.) 

Except for the fact that this looks like wood, it otherwise seems like a garden wall of some kind, and seems, from the action, to separate the “indoor” area (that is, the studio) from the “outdoor” area (where the rabbits Old Ekdal shoots and the wild duck of the title live).  There are no door and no windows in the wall, so when someone goes into the area on the other side (which we can’t see), he climbs over, often using a tall, wooden step ladder he brings from off stage. 

When people look over the wall, they usually climb on chairs (which are either already placed against the wall on “our” side or are moved into position for the purpose of peering over the wall’s top.  As I said, Hedvig walks along the top of the wall once and crawls along it another time.  I’m sorry, but if all this is symbolic, I didn’t get it.  (I cop to not being good with Symbolism.  I guess I’m just too literal-minded.) 

If it isn’t symbolic, I can’t figure out how that wall works (along, of course, with the rest of the space).  I’m going on about this because it occupied my focus so much of the time I was watching, trying to understand what I was looking at, that it became a distraction.  (And, believe me, what with having to look up at the supertitles and then back down at the actors, an additional distraction is totally unnecessary!)   

I’m not sure I can articulate this, but using the chairs that way and carrying an actual ladder from off stage seems to make the wall real—it’s an actual wall.  But, then, what’s it doing there?  What kind of space has a tall wooden wall with no doors or windows like that?  If it’s a garden wall, it wouldn’t be wood (unlike, say, a fence).  If it’s a room wall, it’d have windows or doors. 

But if it’s symbolic, not “real,” it seems you shouldn’t have to use real, practical things to negotiate it.  Does that make sense?  Maybe I’m way off—as I said, I’m not good with Symbolism.  If I were designing a symbolic wall, I’d have made it low enough to look over without aids, or I’d make it a scrim or a latticework painted like a wall; I’m sure someone more imaginative than I, especially in stage design, would come up with more and better ideas.  The problem I see with most of my ideas is that if the director of Wild Duck deliberately wanted the area on the other side of the wall to be invisible to the audience, these wouldn’t work.

I’ve said on several occasions that I find trying to turn Ibsen’s Realistic plays into some other style, Symbolism among them, is a usually disastrous directorial decision.  I allow that Wild Duck is partway to Ibsen’s more Symbolistic period at the end of his career—according to director Stubø’s program note, Ibsen wrote his publisher: “This new play has in certain ways its own place in my dramatic production; its dramatic progress is in many ways different from my previous ones”—but it’s not there yet.  Maybe I am too literal minded to buy such a shift.  Maybe I only think it doesn’t work—but in reality, I just don’t like it.  I don’t think that’s the case, but would I know? 

It’s not that I mind a minimalist set, a suggested set without all the 19th-century trappings.  I did that myself in an adaptation of a Chekhov story—and I believe it worked.  I don’t even mind up-dating the look of a play; I did that, too, with an Oscar Wilde play I reset in the 1920s.  But when the director moves into an alien style, then I think the balance gets tipped.  Finally, if I can’t figure out what’s going on, then almost nothing else really matters—it’s just not working.  In my humble opinion, of course.

The acting all seemed fine, except that it was all on a rather even keel for the most part.  There are a few highs and lows—and some long silences while the cast takes care of tasks like setting that table and putting in or taking out leaves (I joked that maybe Stubø is trying to rip off Pinter, but it’s not much of a corollary.) 

I mean, Ibsen’s plays lean toward melodrama by today’s standards—there’s lots of emotion and psychological drama.  These folks are all moderated and even-tempered an awful lot of the time.  Now, maybe that’s a Norwegian character trait, I don’t know, but it struck me as odd, given the circumstances. 

The casting of Hedvig was also a little peculiar.  Ibsen says she’s 14—Juliet’s age—but the actress in this production, Birgitte Larsen, plays in her later teens (and, I’m sure, the actress is actually older than that [it turns out she was 25]).  She’s much more precociously sexual than I figure Hedvig is intended to be, though I’m not convinced Larsen is playing it that way.  She just looks more like a woman than a girl. 

Diana thought she was and that the others actors, especially the men (and her father in particular), were responding.  (Diana felt that Stubø might have been suggesting the daughter is starting to take after her mother.  That might not even be contrary to Ibsen’s creed, which held that the moral corruption of the parent is inherited by the children.  That’s why Nora couldn’t stay with her children or take them with her in Doll House.)  I didn’t get that impression, however—though perhaps I just missed it.

Finally, I’ve decided I don’t like supertitles.  I’ve had a series of bad experiences with this translation device—they’re badly located on the stage so that I can’t read them and watch the actors or they’re too small or distant so I just plain can’t read them.  In this instance, the screen isn’t too high above the actors, and it isn’t too small, but I found myself bobbing my head up and down so much and trying to catch the longer phrases fast enough to get back to the stage before the next text is projected that I was losing far too much of the theater for the logistics. 

When BAM used the infrared earphones, I used to keep the volume down low so I could just hear the translators and still hear the actors’ actual speech, even if I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t have to bop back and forth between a text and the action—I didn’t have to choose where to look at a given moment—and I didn’t have to worry about reading a line or two of text instead of listening and watching. 

I’m sure paying live translators every night, maintaining the transmission system, and keeping track of those earphones was both more cumbersome and more costly than the projection system, but it was a lot easier on me.

I guess I have to come down on the side of disappointed with this experience.  It isn’t bad—say, like Nora, the German up-date of Doll House a few seasons back at BAM [see my report on ROT, 18 June 2016]—but I didn’t really enjoy it or get much out of it.  It certainly didn’t reveal anything new about Ibsen or the play for me.  Charles Isherwood had a pretty decent review (a “stark but perceptive production”) in the New York Times on Friday, 27 October, the day after we saw the show, but I can’t say I saw the benefits he did.  

'Rhinoceros'

In 1953, the world première of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot opened in Paris and Western theater changed forever.  It was the height of the popularity in the West of theatrical Realism, the 19th-century style of writing and staging that essentially took over the stages of Europe and America, and by the time Godot reached New York in 1956, critics, academics, and audiences were thoroughly confused for the most part about what to make of this new Absurdism (a term, of course, that didn’t really come into use until Martin Esslin used it as the title of his 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd.)  Absurdist theater seemed to come largely out of France at first, as Beckett (who was Irish but lived in Paris and wrote in French) breached the dam for Eugène Ionesco, Boris Vian, Jean Genet, Jean Tardieu, and Arthur Adamov.  (Godot was not the earliest absurd play; others of these writers had had works staged earlier, but Beckett’s masterwork, especially with its staging in London and New York, brought the genre to mainstream attention.)  By the mid-1960s, Absurdist theater was, while still avant-garde, widely accepted as a legitimate expression of the state of civilization the in the post-World War II, nuclear, Cold War world.  I first saw Godot in 1965, my freshman year in college, and it mesmerized me, causing me to see theater as a whole new realm of possibilities.  My university theater went on to introduce me to Ionesco (Exit the King) and Vian (The Empire Builders), Edward Albee (The Sandbox, which I directed in my first-ever effort; I’d seen a reading of The American Dream when I was in high school, but I didn’t understand what I was witnessing), and Harold Pinter (The Homecoming).  In the years immediately following graduation, before I moved to New York City, I saw Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which became one of my all-time favorite plays) and a French staging of Tardieu’s La Sonate et les trois Messieurs (The Sonata and the Three Gentlemen).  Needless to say, I’ve seen many more productions of Absurdist and Absurdist-influenced plays since then (see my recent reports earlier this year on Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot, 28 February, and Pinter’s The Caretaker, 14 May), but back in 1965, at that first exposure to Waiting for Godot, the Theater of the Absurd took up residence in a corner of my imagination which it has never relinquished.

So when I got the season brochure for this fall’s Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and saw that it would include a revival of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, I knew I had to try to catch it.  My usual theater partner, Diana, expressed no interest in this season’s offerings at BAM, and there weren’t enough other events in the Next Wave schedule for me to put together a subscription, so I had to wait until single tickets went on sale and hope that the production wouldn’t be sold out.  (The performances were being given in the vast, 2,100-seat Howard Gilman Opera House, so I had some hope that the short appearance would yield at least one single seat, and I was just barely correct.)  So on the evening of Saturday, 6 October, I headed over to BAM’s Peter Jay Sharp Building in Fort Greene for the 7:30 closing performance of Rhinoceros presented in French (with English supertitles) by Théâtre de la Ville of Paris. 

Ionesco’s best-known play was first presented on BBC radio on 20 August 1959 and first staged at the Schauspielhaus in Dusseldorf on 6 November of the same year, directed by Karl-Heinz Stroux.  Rhinoceros didn’t première in Paris until it opened, to excellent reviews, at the Odéon on 25 January 1960 under the direction of Jean-Louis Barrault, who also played Bérenger; on 28 April that year, its English-language stage début was directed by Orson Welles, with Laurence Olivier as Bérenger, at London’s Royal Court Theatre.  It was probably the 9 January-5 August 1961 Broadway production at the Longacre Theatre (with a return from 18-30 September), however, that gave Ionesco unexpected celebrity.  With Eli Wallach as Berrenger [sic] and Zero Mostel as John (for which he received his first Tony), it was directed by Joseph Anthony.  Multiple television versions (De rhinoceros directed in Dutch by Henk Rigters and the German Die Nashörner by director Gustav Rudolf Sellner, both in 1961; El rinoceronte for Spanish TV in 1966) and at least three film adaptations have also been made of Ionesco's best-known three-act play: a German animated short, Die Nashörner, by Jan Lenica in 1964; Næsehornet, directed in Danish by Søren Melson in 1972; and in 1974, an adaptation directed by Tom O'Horgan (best known for staging Hair) with Mostel again as John and Gene Wilder as Stanley (AKA, Bérenger).  There was an Off-Broadway revival in 1996 by the Valiant Theatre Company at Theatre Four on W. 55th Street, starring Zach Grenier, an actor I recently praised for his performance in  John Patrick Shanley’s Storefront Church (see my blog report of 16 June), as John.  Of the many regional revivals of Rhinoceros, I caught one at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in October 1986, directed by my friend Kazimierz Braun. 

Théâtre de la Ville’s Rhinoceros was first staged by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, the company’s artistic director, in 2004.  Revived in 2012 principally for a U.S. tour, this production had its American première in Los Angeles at Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, 21 and 22 September, with subsequent performances at UC-Berkeley on 27, 28, and 29 September and, following Théâtre de la Ville’s BAM début, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University Musical Society on 11, 12, and 13 October.  Part of the 30th Next Wave Festival, Théâtre de la Ville’s Rhinoceros played at the Gilman from 4 to 6 October.  

Théâtre de la Ville, an entirely new company to me, was started in 1968 under the auspices of the City of Paris.  Dedicated to “art in the diversity of its theatrical, choreographic, and musical forms” in the words of founder Jean Mercure, Théâtre de la Ville has since become one of the major cultural outlets in Paris, due largely to the company’s multidisciplinary and multi-national productions in dance and music.  Théâtre de la Ville is funded by the City of Paris and, with its two theaters, a 1,000-seat hall in the heart of Paris and the more intimate 400-seat house in Montmartre, presents about 100 different programs each season.  Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, who became the company’s youngest director at 38 in 2008, has continued to broaden the audience by introducing productions in foreign languages, educational events, and programs for young people.  In 2011, the theater’s attendance was over 280,000. 

Born Eugen Ionescu in 1909 in Slatina, Romania, Eugène Ionesco has become one of the most significant figures in modern theater alongside Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.  (The playwright shaved three years off his age and claimed 1912 as his birth year, an inaccuracy reflected in many reference sources.)  Though he insisted he preferred the phrase “theater of derision,” coined by writer Emmanuel Jacquart, the playwright is sometimes dubbed the Shakespeare of the Absurd.  Ionesco’s father was Romanian, but his mother was French and his parents moved to Paris a year after his birth (his first language was French), but he returned to live in Romania when he was 13.  A precocious boy, he’d already written his first play that same year, a patriotic drama called Pro Patria.  (He’d previously written a film script at the request of his classmates who wanted to make a movie.)  In 1938, the writer left his home country again, this time principally because he was appalled by the fascism to which many of his countrymen were flocking.  “I hated Bucharest,” said Ionesco in a 1984 Paris Review interview, “its society, and its mores—its anti-Semitism for example. . . .  It was the time of the rise of Nazism and everyone was becoming pro-Nazi—writers, teachers, biologists, historians . . . .  It was a plague!” 

Rhinoceros was largely inspired by the political atmosphere in the writer’s native country which had effectively become a dictatorial monarchy, later joining the Axis in 1940 under the control of the fascist Iron Guard.  The play’s leading character, Bérenger, whom Ionesco declared “represents the modern man,” has many parallels to the real life of Ionesco, who from 1948 to 1955 worked, much like his Everyman, as a proofreader at a legal publisher.  Bérenger, observed the author, “is a victim of totalitarianism—of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left”; and, as the dramatist acknowledged in the Paris Review, “I have never been to the Right, nor have I been a Communist, because I have experienced, personally, both forms of totalitarianism.” Having begun with an attraction to theater, Ionesco became discouraged with the state of both dramatic writing and performance in Europe, so he concentrated on prose and poetry.  He returned to playwriting after World War II, composing The Bald Soprano in 1948, and became one of the most prolific writers for the modern stage.  His famous works, beginning with the one-act plays The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve, premièred 1950), The Lesson (La Leçon, premièred 1951), and The Chairs (Les Chaises, premièred 1952), are too numerous to list.  Rhinoceros, Ionesco’s third full-length work, was first published as a short story (in Les Lettres nouvelles) in September 1957, before being adapted into a three-act play (published—incorrectly under the title Le Rhinocéros when the publisher erroneously added the definite article—in 1959). In 1970, Eugène Ionesco was made a member of the Académie Française; Ionesco died in 1994 and is buried in Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery.

Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses as one by one the citizens are caught in the transformation.  Ultimately, only one hold-out refuses to succumb to this mass metamorphosis.  Defying the mass hysteria is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is often criticized throughout the play for his drinking and tardiness.  “I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end,” declares Ionesco’s protagonist at the end of the play.  Rhinoceros is often considered a response to and criticism of the sudden upsurge of fascism, Nazism, and communism in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.  “I know what’s involved,” the playwright insisted, explaining the phenomenon as he has seen it unfold.  “All my anti-Fascist friends have become absolute, fantastic Fascists because in the beginning they gave in on one little detail.  I am well acquainted with this phenomenon . . . .”  Ionesco, however, also explores conformity, mass movements, crowd mentality, and the tyranny of the mob: “Rhinoceros is . . . mainly an attack on collective hysteria and the epidemic that lurk beneath the surface of reason and ideas but are nonetheless serious collective diseases passed off as ideologies. . . .”  The playwright had explained in more expansive terms in 1960:

As usual, I went back to my personal obsessions.  I remembered that in the course of my life I have been very much struck by what one might call the current of opinion, by its rapid evolution, its power of contagion, which is that of a real epidemic.  People allow themselves suddenly to be invaded by a new religion, a doctrine, a fanaticism. . . .  At such moments we witness a veritable mental mutation.  I don’t know if you have noticed it, but when people no longer share your opinions, when you can no longer make yourself understood by them, one has the impression of being confronted with monsters—rhinos, for example.  They have that mixture of candour and ferocity.  They would kill you with the best of consciences.  And history has shown us during the last quarter of a century that people thus transformed not only resemble rhinos, but really become rhinoceroses. 

As Kaz Braun, the director of the 1986 Minneapolis production and himself a refugee from communist Poland in 1985, noted in the Guthrie program: “Beware of all collective hysteria.  Do not trust too much in fashion—widespread common beliefs and common convictions.  Try to find your own belief, attitude, life which you like to follow.  Defend your individuality.  Be free.” 

Staged without intermission over an hour and 45 minutes, the Théâtre de la Ville revival was spread out along the full width of the 46-foot stage to create an outdoor café, the publishing firm where Bérenger works, and the apartment building where Jean lives.  Yves Collet’s set was a sort of minimalist design—the town-square café in the opening act was just a bunch of molded-plastic chairs, for instance, and the office was a sort of two-level box with movable platforms for the second floor.  As the rhinos destroyed the office building, the upper levels started to slant, the two ends lifting up at the outer edges sliding everything and everybody towards the center platform.  Jean’s apartment building in the last act was a smaller version of the office block, without the moving platforms.  The cast of 13 balanced precariously on the sloping platforms like passengers on a listing ship, clinging to the set and one another to keep from slipping off.  The sets were generally lit (also by Collet) dimly with spots of brighter illumination and at moments of turmoil as the rhinos rampage, the lights flickered and shifted like symbolic lightning.  There wasn’t any color anywhere on stage, including Corinne Baudelot’s costumes, which were essentially shades of gray—charcoal business suits for the men, for example, and the equivalent office wear for the women.  The rhinoceroses are often described by the characters as green-skinned, but this vision of Ionesco’s world is gray.  Jefferson Lembeye’s music, which combined electronic sounds and instruments according to the publicity material, approximated the soundtrack of a slasher film, raising the intensity level of the performances. 

In ’86, Kaz Braun actually built full-sized, realistic-looking prop rhinos because, as I recall, he wanted the threat and fear to be real, not imaginary or psychological.  In Théâtre de la Ville’s staging, aside from Jean's transformation in front of us (nicely performed by Hugues Quester, but much less detailed than I think Mostel's Tony-winning turn was on Broadway in ’61, judging from the photos) and shadows from behind a scrim, all the rhinos were invisible.  If the play's about the destructiveness of joining mass movements and going along with the mob, we have to consider that Braun had only escaped from communist Poland a year before.  Ionesco was supposed to have been inspired to write the play by the rise of the fascist Iron Guard in Romania before he left in 1938 and the complicity of Romanians in following its authoritarian leadership when the country joined the Axis.  So Braun escaped a communist dictatorship and Ionesco a fascist one—I don't think either artist was dealing in theoretical situations.  But in today’s France, indeed all of Western Europe, those threats are no longer imminent: Franco’s gone, Portugal’s Antonio Salazar is gone, European communism is all but gone (though there are local tyrants in the east).  Perhaps director Demarcy-Mota has in mind the threat of radical Islamism—or the West’s response to it (France has some of Europe’s most repressive defensive laws such as the banning of the hijab, a Muslim woman’s head scarf), but even that actual danger isn’t as palpable as fascism was for Ionesco or communism was for Braun, so a fear that might be hypothetical or general is a plausible target for a modern mounting of Rhinoceros.  Theatrically, however, the imaginary rhinos put the entire burden on the cast to create the image of the charging beasts (aided, one hopes, by the active imaginations of the audience).  That wasn’t a burden for this company, as you’ll hear.

Aside from stylistic variations, well within the purview of the director, Demarcy-Mota also made a textual insertion.  He added a prologue, delivered by Hugues Quester, the actor who plays Jean.  A passage from Ionesco’s one novel, The Solitary (Le Solitaire, 1973), Demarcy-Mota feels it ”can be read as an intuition of the rhinoceros world to come,” according to the company.  While cutting scripts occasionally makes sense in production, I generally feel that when a director takes it upon himself to add to one, it’s usually at least extraneous.  If Ionesco’d wanted a prologue, he’d have written one.  Demarcy-Mota’s said reading the novel helped him understand the importance of Ionesco’s “conception of solitude.”  Maybe I’m obtuse, but I don’t see that the idea, especially as expressed in Rhinoceros, is that complex.  If the director needs the additional help, fine—but slapping it onto the beginning of the play is unnecessary: the play’s pretty straightforward with its internal symbolism.  (A general note to all directors: we theatergoers don’t need to see all your homework.)  Besides, and perhaps more importantly, prologues delivered by an actor in front of the empty set is about as anti-theatrical as anything I can imagine—and Rhinoceros is nothing if not theatrical.  So, Demarcy-Mota has this spirited, frisky dog who’s ready to run and frolic and he holds him back so he can explain to us what the frolicking to come is going to be about.  Yeah, that makes sense.

Don’t let me get too far ahead of myself.  This is an excellent company, young and energetic and more than up to the task Ionesco’s set.  (All the more reason to let them get right to it.)  The performances were outstanding, and though my French is out of practice, I had no trouble getting Ionesco’s point.  (I did learn that my rusty French isn’t up to Ionesco's absurdist dialogue.  I watched the supertitles—a synopsis is also provided in the program—and they went by so fast, they were practically a blur.  You needed to be a speed-reader to keep up and watch the actors below.)  Aside from the prologue, Demarcy-Mota’s one bad choice in my opinion was that the energy level of the performance was very high.  That isn't necessarily a good thing because, first, it's exhausting (for the spectators, I mean, not just the actors) and, more significantly, it leaves nowhere for the performance to go since it’s so intense from the start.  By the time Bérenger watches Daisy leave to join the rhinos, the last human among his fellow townsfolk, he’s off the meter.  Furthermore, part of the point Ionesco’s making—or part of the way he makes his point about conformity and conceptions of normalcy—is that many of the townspeople, particularly those in Bérenger’s office, accept the potential threat of rhinoceritis with complacency until it literally assaults them in their office building.  When some of Bérenger’s colleagues join the transformed rhinos, they do so relatively calmly.  (I don’t imagine that Ionesco’s friends back in Bucharest ran off in a tizzy when they became fascists.  His alarm was that they followed the Iron Guard as if it was the local book club.)  When Demarcy-Mota has the actors all running at high revs, this shocking acquiescence is diminished.

On the other hand, the director’s focus on the human, rather than the political, point in Ionesco’s play assured that the 2012 revival wasn’t mired in 50-year-old history.  Rhinoceros isn’t a political statement, a warning against totalitarian forces like fascism or communism, irrespective of its inspiration; it’s a cautionary declaration against any kind of monolithic ideology, whether political, religious, or social.  Demarcy-Mota’s stripped-down approach, removed as it was from either Ionesco’s origins or Kaz Braun’s personal history, kept the play alive for us today.  It also meant that the actors could concentrate totally on their roles and not have to portray political stereotypes. 

Rhinoceros is a peculiar kind of ensemble play.  The roles of Bérenger (Serge Maggiani), Jean (Quester), and Daisy (Céline Carrière) stand out because Ionesco’s script throws a spotlight on them, but in performance, all the townspeople have to work together with equal effort and effectiveness, both to establish the performance style and to make the dramatic point.  The Théâtre de la Ville production enhanced the need for that style because Demarcy-Mota depersonalized the characters so much.  As the director wrote in a program note: “Individualism is not considered positively.”  (This is apparently where his absorption of The Solitary came into play, either as inspiration or reinforcement.)  The company came through magnificently, demonstrably controlled and disciplined even as the characters descend into chaos.  You might have an argument with the interpretation—I don’t—but not with the execution.  The cast worked like a single entity or, if you’ll pardon the constructivistic allusion, like parts of a flesh-and-blood engine.  The progress (and especially the end) of the opening scene, the appearance of the first rhino in the town square, was illustrative.  Remember that the rhinos were invisible—no one played them on stage—and that the café was just a collection of white plastic chairs set before a non-descript abstract background.  When the rhino careered through the café, the chairs went flying as the actors knocked them about—but it wasn’t the people wrecking the restaurant, it was the beast, and it was never a question because the actors’ focus wasn’t on the flying chairs, but the animal in their midst.  This split attention established clearly that the devastation was being caused by a rampaging rhino and that the people were all concerned with dodging it and saving their own lives.  It was masterly misdirection, the kind magicians and three-card Monte dealers use but on a mass scale.  While all this physical work was going on, the actors were also speaking their lines in a kind of unnatural rationality—there was a logician present who was being entirely pedantic about what kind of rhino it was, Asian or African, and whether there’d been one or two of them.  This company can walk and chew gum even while they’re spinning a yo-yo.

As Bérenger, Maggiani, was thoroughly enveloped in the ensemble, but it wouldn’t be right to ignore him individually as well.  Now, Bérenger isn’t a hero—he’s not even really an anti-hero.  He’s more like the odd man out, responding individualistically not because he’s Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood, but because his programming’s incomplete.  He looks like everyone else, except he’s a little unkempt, and he drinks, and he behaves badly.  Maggiani played him as a sort of blank slate who didn’t know any better than to buck the crowd.  He wasn’t strong: he loved Daisy but couldn’t say anything to her; he was tormented by office colleagues, but couldn’t fight back.  When he and Daisy were the only humans left in town, he proposed they repopulate the species like Adam and Eve, but Daisy didn’t react positively and left to join the rhinos.  When he finally defied the attraction of rhinoceritis, I was left with the suspicion that it might not be an entirely triumphant act and Maggiani didn’t do it out of nobility or fortitude.  It was the act of a man who didn’t know what else to do.  Maggiani’s Bérenger was so much a misfit that he didn’t even fit in with mass hysteria!

It seems that most of the press decided not to cover this brief visit.  (There were a few reviews on the Internet of performances at previous stops on the U.S. tour.)  The only local reviews I found were in the New York Times, Back Stage, and the website TheaterMania.  (The other New York dailies would have been out by the time I published this report, but it’s possible—though unlikely at this point—that the weeklies hadn’t come out by then.)  In the Times, Charles Isherwood called the Théâtre de la Ville’s Rhinoceros a “grandly scaled production” sporting a “superb cast” which “marshals a host of stylish theatrical effects.” Andy Propst of Back Stage described Demarcy-Mota’s “tautly choreographed production” as a “viscerally charged new staging . . . that’s both emotionally compelling and intellectually gripping. . . .”  When all the elements are combined, Propst concluded, “the effect is spine-tingling.”  On TheaterMania, David Finkle, characterizing the staging as “abundantly theatrical” which “never loses sight of the need for humor,” dubbed the company “exceptional artists . . . who make the work consistently vital.” 

Though the troupe’s been around for almost 45 years, this was Théâtre de la Ville’s first trip to the U.S. and New York City.  Over the years, we’ve gotten to see a fair number of German, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, and Spanish companies bringing their best and most interesting work here.  Aside from a couple of visits of the Comédie Française, we don’t get to see a lot of French theater.  (I’m not counting those translated megamusicals like Les Misérables and Miss Saigon that were staples of Broadway for a few years.)  I hope Théâtre de la Ville felt its visit here was gratifying and will be coming back often.  The company’s work in Rhinoceros was estimable, and I’d really like to see how they handle some other scripts from the French canon.  I don’t doubt it’d be a worthy addition to New York cultural scene.

'The Speaker’s Progress' (BAM)

When my friend Diana and I selected two shows in the Brooklyn Academy’s Next Wave Festival this fall, we chose two that overlapped and we ended up going to BAM two nights in a row. It’s not that that’s a lot of theater, or even a lot of traveling to Brooklyn, but it’s hard to write reports back to back and say anything cogent. I’ve just posted my attempt to describe the Berliner Ensemble’s production of The Threepenny Opera directed by Robert Wilson (published on 22 October), and then I immediately started on this unusual performance, Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Speaker’s Progress. A short play (in Arabic and English with English supertitles), it lasted only 90 minutes—but there’s much to sort out and a lot to say, if I can get it down.

Diana and I saw The Speaker’s Progress at the Harvey Theatre on Friday, 7 October. Neither of us had much idea what to expect from the intriguing blurb in the BAM catalogue for the fall portion of this season’s Next Wave Festival: “a story of censorship, sexism, and insurrection inspired by the revolutionary spirit pervading the Arab world.” Admittedly, we don’t get a lot of Arab or Middle-Eastern theater here, not in comparison with the European, Latin American, or even African performances we get to see fairly frequently. I was enticed by the prospect of seeing a play from that part of the world, hearing those voices directly rather than filtered through the Western media or spun by politicians and spokespeople whose jobs are more often to obfuscate than to clarify or inform. “There are so many prejudices and so many ready-made formulas to identify that Arab world and identify that gulf world that are negative preconceptions and that are negative prejudices,” Al-Bassam, 39, has said. “And equally, on the other side, on our side, the same kind of reasoning through prejudice exists and fuels disaster, in fact, you know, and this kind of theater work is our way of trying to engage with that.”

I’ll assume that few readers will have heard of Al-Bassam or his company, SABAB, before now. (It turned out I had, but I didn’t recognize that I had until later.) Born in Kuwait in 1972, the playwright (who also directed the production and plays a pivotal role in it) started his troupe, then named the Zaoum Theatre, in London in 1996 after attending university in Edinburgh. After he returned to Kuwait, Al-Bassam, who writes in both Arabic and English, started what he styles the “Arabic arm” of the company, SABAB, in 2002. (According to the company’s website, sabab is an Arabic verb that mean “to cause, bring forth, provoke, trigger, arouse, inspire, prompt” and a noun meaning “reason, cause, motive.” I’ve wondered why it’s written all in caps, and though I haven’t found an explanation, I can’t avoid the fact that the playwright’s initials are “SAB” and the company is also known as the Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre. I was unable to learn to what zaoum refers.) The company is international and pan-Arab, with members coming from Europe, Australia, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Kuwait. The playwright has said he felt that because of the changes in the Gulf region, from the great oil revenues through the introduction of modern infrastructure to the rise of modern education, the Gulf societies had “been ripped out of the past very fast.” That, of course, was nine years before the current upheavals, known as “the Arab Spring,” that have rocked the Arab world. Those changes, we know, haven’t always been liberal nor have they all been greeted with equal appreciation by all parts of the society. Increased wealth has also brought millions of guest workers and immigrants from poorer Arab countries and they now make up a majority of Kuwait’s population. A parliament shares power with the hereditary emir, but the Al-Sabah family appoints many of its members. The consumer society has generated a culture that includes Western style cafés, restaurants, and shopping malls, but the country still maintains a ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol and a resurgence of strict Islamic practices has arisen. The modern education Al-Bassam applauded is dispensed in a national university system that separates male students from female in classes and on campus. “We’re in a crash scenario, time and culture,” said Al-Bassam. “Culture, society, globalization, all of that coming together and reactions to that, you know, sometimes violent reactions.”

I’d have guessed that SABAB would have had difficulty performing political satire in Kuwait, even be unsanctioned there: criticism of the emir, for instance, is forbidden and punishable by law. But Al-Bassam’s troupe performs both in Kuwait and in Beirut and occasionally other Arab capitals (including Damascus before the uprising), so it travels back and forth with some freedom apparently. (If you think of the old Soviet Union, where some dissident theater companies and artists were tacitly tolerated as long as they stuck close to home. If they left the county, as happened to Yuri Lyubimov, they were stripped of their citizenship and refused reentry.) The playwright asserts that Kuwait permits greater freedom of expression than other Arab nations. The writer said, however, “It remains a conservative society, and there are de facto rules. You know, the three taboos are religion, politics, sex, not necessarily in that order . . . .” Yet, that’s precisely what SABAB covers; Al-Bassam’s plays are political and socially critical, though he apparently doesn’t name the country in which he sets his plays, so that may be his shield. “[T]hat this type of work is produced and supported by the State of Kuwait is an indicator of the robustness of its democracy and commitment to the institutions of civil society,” contends Al-Bassam.

Al-Bassam wrote The Speaker’s Progress in October 2010, but when it went into rehearsals in January 2011, the Arab world had already changed drastically. Popular uprisings, protests, and rebellions in what would become known as the Arab Spring had started in Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Western Sahara since December 2010. By the time the play premièred in Kuwait on 20 February, the dictator in Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had fallen (14 January) and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had stepped down (11 February). The play, intended to chart “a decade of turbulence in the Middle East region, was to be concluded with a black satire on the inertia that crippled the Arab World, a bleak cry of despair and an avowal that theater—political theater—could change nothing in a world where nothing could be changed.” But the upheaval across the region required Al-Bassam to revise the script’s conclusion to reflect the historic changes. The play was reworked for its Beirut staging this September (as Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, another Arab strongman who’s since been killed, was “about to be hounded out of power onto the dust heap of history,” as the playwright put it). Al-Bassam and his troupe view “the metaphor of theater as an expression of freedom” and The Speaker’s Progress is meant to spotlight the importance of free artistic expression which, the writer warns, is always the first victim of oppressive regimes. (Though Shakespeare wanted to kill all the lawyers first, we remember that Plato would ban the poets—they are far more dangerous to a controlled society.)

The Speaker’s Progress, one of Al-Bassam’s series based on Shakespeare, revolves around the archival film of a performance of an Arabic adaptation of Twelfth Night. In an unidentified totalitarian Arab state where all theater performances and public gatherings have been banned, a condemned 1963 performance of Twelfth Night, an artifact from an earlier period of political radicalization and upheaval, has become the focus of resistance blogs and dissident underground social networks. (There is some mention of the 1642 closing of the theaters in England under the Puritans.) The state wants to silence this dangerous mix of nostalgia and defiance and to improve its image in the outside world. It commissions The Speaker (Al-Bassam), a once-radical theater artist who’s now become an apologist for the regime, to stage a “forensic reconstruction” that recreates and denounces the performance, captured on film. They are in a lab, not a theater, surrounded by technicians sitting at consoles and monitors of various kinds. (The production was designed by Sam Collins, an Australian artist and designer based in London.) As The Speaker and his group of volunteers (representing the Council of Virtue, the Writer’s League, the Democratic League of Students, the Tourist Board, and the Women’s League), only one of whom used to be an actor, dig into the demonstration, they become more and more caught up in the banned play, discovering in their performance a solidarity among their group that transforms the presentation into an open act of defiance towards the state. The Tourist Board representative is the government watchdog and there’s a camera placed ominously right in front of their reconstruction. The team follows the transcript, including all the blocking which is precisely dictated by a clinician following a script derived from the filmed performance—but at the same time, they all must follow the strict rules of social interaction such as the mandated distance between male and female demonstrators. They don’t wear costumes at the outset, but lab coats—though as the reconstruction develops, more and more of the performative trappings, including colorful Western costumes (designed by Abdullah Al Awadhi) and even emotional and psychological subtexts, are reintroduced into what’s becoming a true performance. Even The Speaker finds himself falling back into his old life and near the end of the demonstration, which has taken on a life of its own by now, The Speaker attempts to swallow a piece of paper containing information he doesn’t want to fall into the hands of the government minder overseeing the propriety of the project. (This, I believe, is The Speaker’s “progress.” He’s advanced from being a government toady to taking independent action, all because of the power of art.)

The Speaker’s Progress plays out in three forms of performance. First, of course, is the live demonstration, presented to us by living actors in real time. Second is the filmed performance from 1963, projected in black and white on a large screen behind the demonstrators, shown when the transcript is unclear or has gaps. This is the presentation of a long-past performance by actors who not only aren’t present but may not even still be living. Finally, there’s a “live” video interview with a former actor (“The Actor from The Golden Era,” played by Sa’ad El Farraj) who isn’t present in the lab but is speaking in real time as well. (This is a conceit, of course: the video conference isn’t actually real but taped. In the context of the play, however, it’s supposed to be live. There was also a brief fourth performance level, but it only occurred once. In order to simulate the forbidden contact between male and female characters, the actors playing the Viola part, here called The Boy-Girl, Amal Omran, because she’s dressed in male clothes—another sensitive act in this strict society—and Orsino, called simply The Ruler, Faisal Al Ameeri, go behind the projection screen and perform the action in shadow play so that they seem to be touching hands but aren’t really making skin-to-skin contact.)

The whole play—that is, The Speaker’s Progress not Twelfth Night—is also on multiple levels. There’s the production we’ve come to see at BAM, the present-moment performance. Then there’s the forensic demonstration at which we are the audience as well, but a diegetic audience, cast in a role within The Speaker’s Progress. And then there’s the performance inside the demonstration as the participants become engaged in the drama of the adaptation of Twelfth Night. At that last level, we as witnesses to the reconstruction are supposed to be part of the shift, but since as BAM spectators we’re not really in on the dynamic taking place, the SABAB actors have to imagine we’re shifting along with them. All these levels are working at the same time, of course, but they don’t really merge.

The actors, too, function on several levels. They are, of course, actors in the SABAB Theatre, performing a play called The Speaker’s Progress at the BAM Harvey Theater. Then they’re citizens of the unnamed country with pasts and presents, sketched out a little in the script. But they’re also representatives of various organizations which sometimes requires them to perform certain functions. And finally, they’re characters in the Twelfth Night adaptation. Only The Speaker has no role in Twelfth Night. (These several roles can overlap in a contrived—but amusing—way: the state minder plays the Malvolio role, here a Mullah (Fayez Kazak), the self-appointed guardian of proper conduct for both the characters (as The Mullah) and for the demonstrators (as the envoy of the Tourist Board). As the plays (The Speaker’s Progress and Twelfth Night) unfold, these roles become more and more entangled as the conscience of one role begins to impinge on the actions of another. (I’m not including here the level all performers have, that of their actual identities from off stage. This isn’t a play in which the actors appear as themselves and as characters.)

See what I mean about this little comedy having a lot to sort out and a lot to say? And I’m not getting into all of it because, as Al-Bassam told us after the performance (we had a brief conversation with him in the lobby), there are parts of the play that Arab audiences “just get” but that he hasn’t made clear to Westerners yet, and it has nothing to do with the language or the supertitles. He was very simply talking about the cultural divide—which is one excellent reason we need to see more theater from his part of the world. (The playwright’s still working on how to communicate those points.)

(I’ve said this before, and I will probably keep on saying it: I believe we learned more about life in South Africa under apartheid from the plays of Athol Fugard and Mbongeni Ngema or about living under communism in Czechoslovakia from Vaclav Havel’s plays than from all the lectures, essays, and newspaper columns on the subjects. We’re not just poorer for not being exposed to theater and art from distant cultures, but we have less understanding of the world. We remain more provincial and closed off, and that’s dangerous. Sulayman Al-Bassam may not be in the Fugard-Ngema-Havel league yet, but the impulse is the same. Sorry; I’ll put the soapbox away now.)

Al-Bassam wrote and staged a political comedy, with a message—or lesson, if you will—that’s intellectual and analytical. He wants to tell us something specific about his society and others like it and to reflect the current events in the Middle East he adjusted not so much his point as the way he makes it. But if Al-Bassam intended the play to be “an anguished cry of despair at the inability of art, and even people, to make change happen,’’ as he says, what he and his troupe have actually created is a palpable demonstration of the power of theater and art to defeat willful ignorance and censorship. Not only can’t The Speaker and the sole former actress among the demonstrators resist the pull of art, the non-actors among the team can’t, either—even though they all know that they have a government minder on duty and an all-seeing camera recording their conduct as they begin to project greater and greater involvement in the circumstances of the Twelfth Night adaptation and violate more and more of the imposed taboos. We’ve seen throughout history, including recent history in our own lifetimes, that art in repressive regimes, from the Nazis and Fascists of mid-century Germany and Italy to the Falangists of Franco’s Spain, to the Stalinist and Maoist authorities in the Soviet Union and China, to the revolutionary societies of Cuba, Iran, and Iraq, somehow manages to flourish and even excel, finding ways of exposing the truth to the world at large in lasting ways. Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1942), a disguised indictment of French collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and an exaltation of the French Resistance, still speaks to us long after the political situation it limned has passed. Little by little, the clinical presentation of the reconstruction of Twelfth Night in The Speaker’s Progress morphs into a real theatrical production, with the demonstrator-actors experiencing more and more of the emotions felt by the characters in the filmed play. The characters in Al-Bassam’s Speaker’s Progress are infected with the art in the adaptation of Shakespeare’s play—they can’t resist it because its pull is too strong to be suppressed by the machinations of the state. (Art may be long, but it’s also powerful.)

I believe, from the evidence of the energy and apparent commitment of the SABAB cast, that the actual actors genuinely and fiercely feel the same way. In fact, The Speakers Progress may have more cogent things to say to an initiated—that is to say, an Arab—audience, but the play works at all for us Westerners because of the players’ faith in what they’re doing. It’s always been my opinion that political theater, which Speaker’s Progress is, often works better as politics than as theater. Only occasionally have I seen a political play that communicates its point of view and still comes out theatrical; the best example of which I can think was Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice as it was presented on Broadway in 1986. (If you consider Tony Kushner’s Angels in America a political play, then I’d have to put that at the top of the list. I rather think of it as a socially-aware drama, though.) In any case, Speaker’s Progress is undoubtedly political and as a play, it’s more interesting than good. In production, however, it did have much to offer—and I believe that was due to the way the company attacked the material: their energy and enthusiasm, I’d say their belief in what they were doing (perhaps especially for a foreign audience), informed their performing and infected us—much the same way that the characters’ growing engagement with the force of the art of Twelfth Night infected them and “their” audience in the diegetic performance.

I feel it’s necessary to say something about the obvious fact that SABAB is, by my own definition, a vanity company. Al-Bassam, clearly the inspiration for the company and its efforts, is the founder and artistic director of the troupe, and the writer, director, lead actor of this production. I’ve written of my disdain for such operations (“Vanity, Thy Name Is Actor-Director,” 22 September), and I’d seem hypocritical if I didn’t say something here. I made an exception for cases where “there’s a special talent at work” and I think Al-Bassam and SABAB are examples of that. Al-Bassam may not measure up to Orson Welles or Mel Brooks but he’s obviously the spiritual force behind this company in more than the artistic sense. It’s his vision that’s being put forth here, and that may take the hand of one visionary at the tiller. I don’t know enough about the company’s other work to be sure, but for now, I’ll have to accept that this is the explanation.

[The Speaker’s Progress is the final part—after The Al-Hamlet Summit, 2002, and Richard III—An Arab Tragedy, 2007, of the “Arab Shakespeare Trilogy.” (Richard III is the play I’d heard about earlier because it had played at Washington’s Kennedy Center in 2009 as part of “Arabesque,” a festival of Arab plays.) Other Shakespeare-based plays by Al-Bassam are The 60 Watt Macbeth, 1999; Hamlet in Kuwait and The Arab League Hamlet, 2001 (both early versions of The Al-Hamlet Summit); and Trading, 2003, based on Romeo and Juliet. Other scripts inspired by Western classics include Hayyal BuTair, 2010, based on Molière’s Tartuffe, and Everyman (Dreaming in Car Parks), 1996, inspired by the medieval morality play

[Richard III was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in its 2006-07 Complete Works festival. In 2008, at the final performance of a tour to Damascus, the company was surprised by the attendance of President Bashar Al-Assad and his wife. I imagine that could be a little daunting. (I wonder if the Assads would turn out these days.)]

'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.