No Emperors

Yesterday there were "No Kings" protests throughout the United States, and at the Joyce Theater in New York City the anti-monarchal ballet The Emperor Jones by the Limón Dance Company.

I went due to the connection of the dance piece with its source material, the play The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill. The play, with its extensive stage directions and overwhelming focus on a central character whose internal fears are made manifest around him, seemed already halfway to being ballet when José Limón first adapted it to dance in 1956.

O'Neill wrote the play in 1920, and the Provincetown Players premiered it at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, starring Charles Sidney Gilpin. The show was a hit and had to be moved to a larger theatre to accommodate the large crowds who wanted to see it. It then toured the United States, providing many people in the U.S. with their first contact with Expressionism on stage.

When the play was revived on Broadway in 1925, it starred the previously unknown actor Paul Robeson, who went on to star in it in London and then on film in the 1933 movie version. The piece was thus already famous when Limón turned it into a showpiece for his own virtuosic dancing, taking on the role of Brutus Jones, who after rising to become emperor over a Caribbean island, disintegrates psychologically and is ultimately killed by a silver billet.

O'Neill's stage directions indicate that "Little Formless Fears creep out from the deeper blackness of the forest." The Little Formless Fears danced excellently in this production, though the forest was transformed into an urban jungle of skyscrapers. The company's revival kept Limón's original choreography, but adapted the costumes and sets to turn it into a parable about capitalism. They also allowed women to dance some of the roles, though Limón originally envisioned an all-male cast.

The piece was suitably creepy, though, which set the mood for the show I saw in the evening, Stephen Smith's One Man Poe, which he performed at Poe Cottage in the Bronx. Seeing Smith perform virtually every word of "The Black Cat" and "The Raven" in the house where Poe once lived was a real treat.

If you missed him, don't worry! He plans to be back with more Poe stories next October!

Thoughts on Futurism

While Expressionism was being born in Austria and Germany, a very different non-realistic style was getting started in Italy. In 1909, the same year Oskar Kokoschka premiered Murderer, Hope of Women, the Italian poet and playwright Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published a manifesto for a new movement he called Futurism.

"We wish to sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and audacity," Marinetti wrote, adding: "There is not beauty except in strife." Indeed, Futurism embraced violence and warfare, along with anything that could be considered modern: airplanes, motorcars, radios, bombs, and machine guns. Anyone who failed to revere the modern they considered passé and condemned as a "passatista," a term they used to ridicule old-fashioned critics and artists who did not agree with them.

The Futurists made bold claims that libraries and museums should be destroyed to make way for new, modern art forms. Though they might never have wanted to actually destroy Italy's artistic heritage, they claimed this as a goal in order to provoke outrage and controversy. The Futurists would read aloud manifestos by Marinetti and others in theatres, and then celebrate when audiences pelted them with vegetables.

Controversy was exactly what they wanted, and on at least one occasion the Futurist performers hurled the vegetables the audience had thrown right back at them. Marinetti would also insult audiences to their faces, for instance telling them that it would take a microscope to see their souls. Artists carried Futurist paintings onstage to exhibit them, and actors engaged in outrageous behavior just to provoke a response.

In 1913, Marinetti wrote a manifesto that dealt specifically with theatre. He called for a new type of drama that like the performances in variety theatres did not have to mean anything. The performance would be valued as a thing in and of itself, rather than creating an illusion of another world. He railed against the erection of an imaginary fourth wall and called for the performer and audience to relate directly to one another. He also called for the integration of film and other modern technologies into theatrical performance.

Like Expressionism, Futurism attracted figures interested in both drama and material arts like painting and sculpture. Umberto Boccioni, for instance, is mostly known today as a painter and sculptor, but he also wrote a number of short Futurist dramas known as "sintesi," or synthetic works. These were meant to be performed in rapid succession, shocking the audience out of their complacency. Boccioni's plays could deal frankly with sexuality, as was the case with Bachelor Apartment, make fun of critics, as with Genius and Culture, or sometimes be entirely surreal, as in The Body That Ascends.

When Italy entered the First World War, both Marinetti and Boccioni volunteered to fight. Boccioni was tragically killed during the war. Marinetti survived it, and after the war was over, started his own political party, which later merged with the Fascist party of Benito Mussolini. Though the Fascists and Futurists later turned on one another, Futurism's relationship with totalitarianism ultimately sullied the movement's reputation.

Herr Bertolt Brecht

Last night I saw Classic Stage Company's production of Brecht's A Man's a Man. Duncan Sheik provided the music for the songs, which included meta-theatrical references to "Herr Bertolt Brecht." The stand-out cast member was Justin Vivian Bond, better known as the Kiki half of the duo Kiki and Herb. He played Widow Begbick and also came out at intermission to sing a song that had been "cut from the second act."

Sheik used prerecorded music to accompany the actors, as the small three-quarter-round theatre used by CSC would never have been able to fit all of the musicians needed for the highly produced sound he wanted. (Not that the non-profit theatre could have afforded to hire them all, anyway.) The set, designed by Paul Steinberg, creatively used a number of what appeared to be orange oil drums. Justin Townsend's lighting design somehow managed to make the entire stage appear black-and-white at times, and other times in bright color. I'm still trying to figure out how that worked.

Brecht wrote A Man's a Man between 1924 and 1926, so the program said the play was set in "1925 or thereabouts, in an India that is suspiciously Rudyard Kipling-like." Brecht loved Kipling and was clearly influenced by his work, particularly in this play, which involves the construction of a fake elephant that then gets auctioned off as part of the plot. The play's climax actually takes place in Tibet. The anti-war sentiments at the end show that the disillusionment of WWI was another major factor in the piece.

By 1924, Brecht had written Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle of Cities, a trio of Expressionist works for which he had received the Kleist Prize for drama. (He had also written an early version of Die Kleinburgerhochzeit, which I saw in Germany last summer at the Ruhrfestspiele.) It was just after A Man's a Man, in the period from 1927 to 1930, that Brecht teamed up with composer Kurt Weill and fellow writer Elizabeth Hauptman on his most famous musical plays, The Three-Penny Opera, Happy End, and The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny.

CSC Artistic Director Brian Kulick helmed this production, following up another Brecht play he did last season, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. If you're interested in CSC's latest Brecht outing, it will be playing until February 16th. For more information go here:

Classic Stage Company

http://www.classicstage.org/season/productions/amansaman/

Machinal

This afternoon, I saw Roundabout's production of Sophie Treadwell's legendary Expressionistic drama Machinal. If you haven't seen it yet, do. This is the first Broadway revival of the groundbreaking play, and the production, directed by Lyndsey Turner, is stunning.

Treadwell was one of only a handful of American Expressionist playwrights (the others being Eugene O'Neill and Elmer Rice) who could hold a candle to their European counterparts. Though she wrote more than 40 plays, twelve of which received major productions, today she is remembered almost exclusively for her 1928 masterpiece Machinal.

The title is a neologism taken from a French word meaning mechanical, or relating to a machine. Pronunciations vary. Apparently, Treadwell herself preferred MA-shin-al, but I've heard folks at Roundabout are saying ma-SHIN-al. My old theatre history professor used to say MOCK-en-al. Whatever.

The point is, modern life is like a machine. (For its London premiere, the play was retitled The Life Machine.) The play shows nine episodes in and around New York City. Roundabout's production featured a revolving set designed by Es Devlin. Each time it turns, the audience sees a separate transitional scene in mime. A crowded subway car. A wedding. Couples necking in the shadows. Photographers getting a shot of the murder suspect.

And yes, murder is what it's about. Treadwell was a journalist who had covered a number of murder trials. She said herself that the play was suggested by the trial of Ruth Snyder, a long island woman who was executed at Sing Sing Prison the same year the play opened. Snyder had conspired with her lover to kill her husband and get his insurance money. Treadwell's heroine is far more interesting.

In this production, Rebecca Hall played the character identified as "Young Woman." Though we later learn her name is Helen, names are rarely important in Expressionist drama. Like in the plays of Reinhard Sorge and Georg Kaiser, this is a world where you are what you do: Telephone Girl, Doctor, Lover, Jailer.

In the first scene, Hall portrays her character as out of place. She wants to get out, to have space to breath, but she can't even get her typewriter to work in this world that is dominated by machines. The scene contains a harrowing stream-of-consciousness monologue that is prescient of the type of writing Samuel Beckett would do later on, and which Hall absolutely nails.

At home, we see the Young Woman with her mother, who is no model of maternal affection. As the scene is played out, the audience glimpses at the sides of the stage younger versions of the protagonist, her mother, and her now absent father. The intrusion of memory serves as another stream-of-consciousness device, as the Young Woman decides whether or not to marry her boss.

She does marry him--but to get away from her mother rather than for love. We witness their gloomy honeymoon, then see Young Woman in a maternity ward shortly after she has given birth. This is one of Treadwell's gutsiest scenes. The Young Woman admits that she never wanted a child and that she has no affection for the girl to whom she has given birth. The nurse, wonderfully played by Maria-Christina Oliveras, tries to convince her that her feelings aren't too out of the ordinary, and that once she has had some time with her baby in her arms, she will surely feel differently. The Young Woman knows better, though. Even motherhood is just part of the machine that dominates her. She might not know what she wants, but she knows it is not this. She must not submit to the machine.

Episode five is titled "Prohibited" and appropriately takes place in a speakeasy, but there are more prohibited things there than just the alcohol. An older man entices a young man for a homosexual encounter, a couple discuss having an abortion, and the protagonist meets the character known as "Lover," played by Morgan Spector. We next see them together sharing a joyful moment in his bed, and then see Young Woman back at home with her husband again. Her only possibility of escape seems to be murder.

Treadwell presents a compelling courtroom drama, complete with reporters who have completely opposite takes on the trial. She then follows Young Woman into her condemned cell, where a priest tries to offer comfort, but the Young Woman responds more to the singing of another prisoner, because he too knows what it's like to be condemned to die. Eventually, she must submit to her last, most brutal indignities, including the forced cutting of her hair, and a terrifying execution that brings out new meaning in the title of the final episode: "A Machine."

Treadwell lived into her 80s, dying in Arizona, where her will directed the Diocese of Tucson to use all of her royalties for the benefit of Native American children. So go see Machinal, experience some great theatre, and help some kids while you're at it!

Walter Hasenclever

When the German playwright Walter Hasenclever wrote his own version of Antigone, he took some of the Kaiser's statements and put them word-for-word into the mouth of the villain, Creon. Now that's guts.

Legend has it, Hasenclever wrote his Antigone while actually at the Western Front during the First World War. After writing his break-through expressionist play The Son, in 1914, Hasenclever had volunteered for the army. Once he saw what war was really like, however, he turned against it.

Unlike the Antigone of Sophocles, Hasenclever's Antigone makes Creon unambiguously a tyrant from the very beginning. In his very first speech he declares:

     God, who defeated our enemies, has
     Raised me up as king. Heralds have 
     Proclaimed my will.
     (translated by J.M. Ritchie)

Later on, when he changes his mind, it is only because of the most dreadful of visions. In the stage directions, Hasenclever describes: "Heaps of dead. People with gaping wounds. Women, men with knives in their chests. Demented bleating like animals. Smashed limbs. Children stumble among the bodies." These images of war were clearly personal for Hasenclever.

Faking mental illness, he got out of the war, but then had to spend years in a sanitarium. That didn't stop him from winning the Kleist prize for drama with Antigone, though. The following year, he wrote the play Humanity, which also takes on the traditional German power structure, but which utilizes brief staccatto lines of dialogue rather than long speeches.

Hasenclever later turned to film and supplied dialogue for the Greta Garbo movie Anna Christie. Once the Nazis came to power, however, his career was over. He moved to France, and died there during the war, a sad end to a great anti-war playwright.

Thoughts on Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka is a rare case in the theatre--a groundbreaking playwright who is actually better known as a painter. Shortly after his birth, a fire broke out in Kokoschka's hometown in Austria. As a young man, he took the story of that fire as an omen. Perhaps he should have, for Kokoschka would soon set fire to the arts throughout Austria and in fact across all of Europe.

Growing up in the late nineteenth century, Kokoschka attended schools that emphasized science and the modern world, but he found himself instead reading classics and experimenting in art. Against his father's wishes, he enrolled in the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna. This was the avant-garde art school in Vienna, standing out in opposition to the traditional Academy of Fine Art. It also emphasized more practical arts, including architecture, design, and furniture-making. Both the cutting-edge style and more practical bent of the institution served Kokoschka well when he debuted his short play Murderer, Hope of Women, designing the show and the publicity posters himself.

Kokoschka wrote the play in 1907, while he was still a student at the School of Arts and Crafts. It premiered in 1909 at the Kunstschau Theatre. This was an outdoor summer stage that was part of a temporary arts complex erected to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Emperor Franz Joseph I. During the premiere, soldiers watching from a nearby barracks saw the scene where a woman is branded onstage. They rushed in, provoking a riot. Police were called in, and the performance had to be broken off in the middle of the play.

Had the soldiers waited, they would have seen even more shocking events onstage. The play calls for the woman to then stab the man in his side and have her female companions imprison him in a tower. The man cannot live, yet cannot die, and the woman desperately tries to get into the tower to be with him. The woman finally opens the gate to the tower, and the man comes forth to murder her. In the last moments of the play, the man kills "like flies" both his own warriors and the maidens who accompanied the woman. He then exits through flames that have ripped open the tower "from top to bottom."

The apocalyptic fire that accompanied Kokoschka's birth seems to haunt the play. Also apparent is the artist's troubled relationship with women. Kokoschka already had problems when in 1912 he began an affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the famous composer Gustav Mahler and former lover of the architect Walter Gropius. While at the Museum Folkwang in Essen this summer, I saw this great double portrait he did of himself and Alma:

Check out the museum's Website here:

Museum Folkwang

http://www.museum-folkwang.de/

Ultimately, the two lovers went their different ways, with Kokoschka volunteering to join the Austrian cavalry in World War I. He never got over her, however. In 1918, he commissioned a life-sized doll to simulate Alma as he could no longer have the real thing. This is just depressing, and Kokoschka seems to have known it. He later destroyed the doll.

Alma went back to Gropius and married him, only to then have an affair with the writer Franz Werfel. Both of the Mahlers (along with Freud, Wittgenstein, Stalin, and others) are currently onstage in the Otho Eskin play Final Analysis playing off-Broadway. Eskin makes Alma out to be a sympathetic character, yet a very difficult woman to be with, both a passionate muse, and a dangerous adventuress. Like Kokoschka, Alma Mahler seemed to have enjoyed playing with fire.

Thoughts on German Expressionism

There have always been ties between theatrical movements and movements in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Those ties were particularly close in Expressionism, where the first Expressionist drama was actually written by the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. His short play Murderer, Hope of Women shows a woman being branded onstage. This is followed by the mass murder of nearly everyone in the cast. The play premiered in 1909 at an outdoor theatre in Vienna, but was interrupted when soldiers from a nearby barracks saw the branding scene from afar and rushed in to stop the performance. Kokoschka narrowly escaped being arrested for disturbing the peace.

Expressionism aimed to depict the subjective emotional experiences of characters rather than an objective reality. It deliberately distorted perspective for emotional effect. Both in painting and in acting style, it was harsh and angular. Actors frequently wore heavy make-up, and in the case of Murderer, Hope of Women, Kokoschka actually painted the bodies of actors to show the muscles beneath their skins. Expressionist writers railed against the dehumanizing effects of industrialization and the creation of massive, impersonal cities. Their work aimed to be universal and yet deeply personal at the same time.

In 1912, Reinhard Sorge won the prestigious Kleist Prize for his Expressionist drama The Beggar. The five-act play follows a young poet with a mentally disturbed father. As the poet tries to find his own voice, various friends and advisors attempt to counsel him, but he remains true to his himself, and the play ends with a hymn to the dramatic vistas of the future. As is typical of Expressionist drama, the characters are given generic designations such as "The Poet," "The Father," "The Girl," and "The Patron of the Arts." After writing The Beggar, Sorge converted to Catholicism following years of atheism and turned to writing religious dramas. Sadly, he died in the First World War at the age of 24 and was buried in a mass grave.

Also in 1912, Georg Kaiser wrote the Expressionist drama From Morn to Midnight, which was not performed until 1917. The play concerns a bank teller who steals money in order to run off with a mysterious and beautiful foreign woman whom he thinks is a criminal. When it turns out the woman is actually a respectable lady and not the con artist he took her for, the man realizes his life has been ruined for nothing. He spends the day wandering the streets and ultimately dies in a night that is both literal and metaphorical. Kaisar later explored themes of science fiction in his plays Gas I and II. Czeck playwright Karel Capek continued this trend in the play R.U.R., which first introduced the word "robot."

Not all Expressionist playwrights were dour. Carl Sternheim used Expressionism to lampoon the aspirations of the middle classes. His farce The Underpants is best known in the United States from an adaptation written by the comedian Steve Martin. In a later play, The Strongbox, a respectable professor actually locks himself in a chest to count securities rather than enjoy his beautiful young wife. Another comedy, Citizen Schippel, shows how a coarse lower-class clarinet player enters the ranks of society by helping a singing quartet win a crown of laurel leaves at a music festival. Sternheim's comedies are exaggerated distortions of daily life that are both hysterically funny and deeply disturbing.