Thoughts on Wedekind

In my last post, I mentioned that Carl Sternheim married Frank Wedekind's daughter Pamela. Literally, he was the older playwright's son-in-law. Spiritually, Sternheim also saw himself as the artistic son of Wedekind.

Well, Frank Wedekind, it so happens, ran off with August Strindberg's second wife, Frida Uhl. Literally, he slept with Strindberg's wife. By extension, we might say that Wedekind took Strindberg's artistic legacy, grabbed it, ran off with it to the nearest hotel room, and....

Okay, it's not a perfect metaphor, but Strindberg's ideas do seem to come back in the plays of Wedekind in a new and rougher form. Strindberg's frank discussion of sexuality, his problematic view of male-female relations, his testing of the limits of patriarchal authority, all these return in Spring Awakening, Earth Spirit, and Pandora's Box. With Wedekind, however, caution is thrown to the wind, and the drama is more raw, exciting, and for many people (perhaps even most), downright offensive. (Or does the average theatre-goer think it's perfectly acceptable to portray a circle-jerk onstage?)

After deciding to drop out of law school, Wedekind had an argument with his father in which he physically struck the old man, an act of rebellion against the older generation that the playwright never quite left. Still, when Spring Awakening premiered in Berlin in 1906, Wedekind literally put himself onstage as a representative of the older generation, playing the Masked Man.

Who was that Masked Man? Well, when Melchior, the protagonist in Spring Awakening, asks that very question, the man responds, "That will become clear." He makes it clear he is not Melchior's father, but that he wants the boy to get out of the graveyard, escaping a potential death. If Melchior is a semi-autobiographical character, the Masked Man, played by the author himself, might be seen as an adult version of Melchior, warning his younger self away from a possible suicide.

The stranger's warning, that suicide will seem ridiculous to Melchior once he has a warm dinner under his belt, is the advice of an adult. It is an instruction given by someone no longer subject to the vast and violent emotions of adolescence. It works, however, and it works perhaps because it does not come from the father. Like Christian in Sternheim's The Snob, Melchior can become a truly self-made man. His salvation comes not from his society, but from the moral courage he finds within himself.

Thoughts on Sternheim

This summer, I had the pleasure of seeing two Sternheim plays in one with David Mouchtar-Samorai's mash-up of Die Hose and Burger Schippel at the Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen. Both plays satirize the pretensions of the would-be bourgeois, so they very much fit together.

Carl Sternheim had a habit of recycling his characters. In fact, Die Hose began a cycle of plays by Sternheim on what he called "The Heroic Life of the Bourgeois." He followed up Die Hose with his 1914 play Der Snob. This play continues the story of Theobald and Louise Maske, as well as letting the audience in on the life of their son, whose birth is alluded to in the previous play.

The first act of Der Snob opens with the ironically named son, Christian Snob, breaking off a relationship with Sybil, a lover who helped him rise in society but whom he has now outgrown. He offers Sybil cash to pay for her services, with interest, so he can be completely independent and owe nothing to anything. Next, he tries to make the same arrangement with his parents, paying them for everything they spent raising him. It's as if he wants to be a truly self-made man.

Christian aims to marry Marianne, the daughter of a count. In the second act, he makes progress toward this goal and becomes engaged to Marianne, in spite of the count's reservations. The presence of his father, however, becomes a source of continual worry. Christian seems to vacillate between being embarrassed by his father and wanting to use Theobald to rub the count's nose in the fact that his daughter is marrying such an upstart.

In the third act, the story of Louise's courters in Die Hose comes back, and Christian begins to wonder whether or not he might be the bastard son of a Viscount. This becomes a source of both shame and titillation. In the final scene, Marianne discovers the secret on her wedding night. She enthusiastically greets a portrait of Louise as "sweet mother adultress" and Christian as her "dear husband and lord."

With such complicated psychosexual messes in his plays, it's as if Sternheim is the spiritual son of Frank Wedekind. In fact, Sternheim married Pamela Wedekind in 1930, becoming the great playwright's son-in-law. Wedekind was dead by that time, but still, you can't make this stuff up!

Read my next post for my thoughts of Wedekind.

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.

Recklinghausen Recap

Now that I'm back in the States, I wanted to post these publicity shots of some of the great shows I saw at the Ruhrfestspiele in Germany. First of all, here's the wonderful cast of Heute: KOHLHAAS, based on the novella by Heinrich von Kleist.

And here's that great scene with the fabric in Red Giselle.

This photo doesn't quite capture the mask puppet in Songs for Alice, but it can give you an idea of what it looked like.

Here's the dish-smashing scene in Carl Sternheim's Die Hose / Burger Schippel.

Dancing maenads from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.

The cast of Maria Milisavljevic's Brandung in front of their ice set.

The cast of Der Weibsteufel with their equally impressive set.

Why don't we get theater like this in the U.S.?

Sternheim Mash-up

I have to admit, it was with more than a little trepidation that I approached David Mouchtar-Samorai's adaptation that brings together Carl Sternheim's comedies Die Hose and Burger Schippel. (In the U.S., Die Hose is better known by the title of Steve Martin's adaptation, The Underpants.)

The adaptation alternates between scenes from the two plays, with each actor taking on parallel roles. So for instance, the guy playing Theobald Maske plays Paul Schippel, and the woman playing Maske's put-upon wife also plays Thekla Hicketier in the scenes from Burger Schippel.

Towards the end of the play, the characters start to blend together. At the end, when Schippel is crowned with laurels and welcomed into respectable society, he is addressed as Herr Maske. The conceit seemed unnecessary to me, but the actors definitely pulled it off.

Adding to the production was a superb set that was filled with photographs, some in negative, of various respectable members of society from throughout history. This served as a constant reminder of the world into which Maske and Schippel wanted to enter. At the rear of the stage was a circular door through which actors could make exits and entrances.

This was a very earnest production, showing the true human emotions behind Sternheim's characters. That sometimes took away a few laughs, but it made up for it in emotional intensity.

Recklinghausen - Day Two

So my second day at the Ruhrfestspiele I saw two plays. The first was Le Navire Night, a "dialogue for voice and cello" performed in French (and cello). The music was provided by American cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, while French actress Fanny Ardant recited a story by Marguerite Duras about a passionate love affair that takes place over the telephone. There was no set and very little movement, which fit the play, which is essentially an ode to the power of the human voice.

The other play, Songs for Alice, was performed in one of the tents set up for the Fringe Festival. Figurentheater Wilde und Vogel performed scenes and songs from Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books, though in no particular order. The play alternated between English and German, sometimes with the two being spoken simultaneously by different performers. The unifying piece was "The Walrus and the Carpenter," which was sung in snatches (in English) throughout the play. Interestingly enough, they translated "The Jaberwocky" into German, which had to have been a feat. I imagine the nonsense words are only truly effective if the rest of the poem is easily understandable, thus the decision to have that piece in German.

Tonight I see Carl Sternheim's Die Hose and Burger Schippel (yes, there should be an umlaut there, but my keyboard is limited right now) in the smaller theatre of the festival house. It's a coproduction of the festival and the Staatstheater Nurnberg. (Again, sorry for the lack of an umlaut.)