The Good Soldier Švejk

It was a little over 100 years ago that the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek died, leaving his satirical novel The Good Soldier Švejk unfinished, and providing theatre artists with the raw material for some of the most influential stage adaptations of the 20th century.

Director Erwin Piscator famously brought the novel to the stage as a piece of epic theatre in the 1920s, collaborating on the script with Max Brod, Hans Reimann, Erwin Piscator, Felix Gasbarra, and Bertolt Brecht. Švejk later became the inspiration for the 1936 musical Johnny Johnson by Kurt Weill and Paul Green.

The story follows Josef Švejk, a muddle-headed man who volunteers to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the breakout of the First World War. Authorities aren't sure if he belongs in the army or a mental institution. Eventually, however, he is shipped off to the front, but after he misses his train, he decides to walk there... only in the wrong direction.

Last night, I saw a puppet adaptation of the novel performed by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre. In this adaptation by Vít Horejš, different performers take on the role of Švejk in turn, as the Švejk puppet is passed from one person to another. While this might keep audience members from identifying with the protagonist, it also prevents them from getting bored with any one actor, as Švejk's voice changes periodically throughout the performance.

If you want to see the production, it's running until February 18th at Theater for the New City.

Johnny Johnson

Recently I was at Westsider Books, hoping to pick up some--you know--books, when I got distracted by the vinyl records they had, including a cast recording to the Broadway revival of Kurt Weill and Paul Green's Johnny Johnson.

The recording is from the 1956 revival, but Johnny Johnson originally premiered on Broadway in 1936, billed as a "play with songs" rather than a musical. It was based loosely on Jaroslav Hašek's novel The Good Soldier Schweik, which had already been turned into a piece of Epic Theatre by Erwin Piscator.

For the Broadway production, Green and Weill made the protagonist an American soldier during the First World War, and reportedly chose the name "Johnny Johnson" because that name appeared on American casualty lists more than any other. Johnny begins the play having sculpted a peace monument that is no sooner dedicated than the announcement comes that the United States has entered the war. Johnny becomes a soldier, and misadventures ensue, leading him to eventually be sent to a mental hospital.

For the score, Weill noticeably recycled a melody he had previously used in Happy End. Overall, the music is recognizably his, even when he isn't rehashing earlier material. A typical number is "Song of the Guns" in which the chorus chants: "Soldiers! Soldiers! / Sleep softly now beneath the sky / Soldiers! Soldiers! / Tomorrow under earth you lie."

Johnny Johnson is not as well known as Weill's earlier work he wrote in Germany, such as The Threepenny Opera, nor was it as successful as his later work for Broadway, such as Knickerbocker Holiday. Still, it's worth a listen.

Immigrant Dramatists

Today there were protests all across the United States in support of immigrants, so I wanted to blog about some of the great American dramatists who were immigrants:

Dion Boucicault - Born in Ireland, Dion Boucicault moved to England where he rose to fame with his play London Assurance, which Madame Vestris produced at Covent Garden. After a string of hits in London, he moved to New York, where he conquered Broadway with his melodrama The Poor of New York. The play was actual adapted from a French work, but Boucicault went on to write the quintessentially American play The Octoroon, which Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently adapted for the 21st century. Boucicault is perhaps the first truly great American playwright. (Though you could argue for the French-born Anna Cora Mowatt.) And, of course, he was an immigrant.

Kurt Weill - Don't you love "Mack the Knife," "September Song," and "The Saga of Jenny"? All of those hit Broadway songs were written by the German immigrant Kurt Weill. "Mack the Knife" of course came from The Threepenny Opera, which Weill originally wrote in Berlin with Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann. Being as he was a gay Jewish leftist, Weill had to flee Hitler's Germany, first to Paris, then London, and eventually New York. That's where he collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on Knickerbocker Holiday, which gave us the jazz standard "September Song." "The Saga of Jenny" comes from Lady in the Dark, and featured lyrics by the all-American Ira Gershwin, who was--incidentally--the son of immigrants.

Maria Irene Fornes - Born in Cuba, Maria Irene Fornes moved to New York in the 1950s. Her play Fefu and Her Friends has become a modern classic. I've always been a fan of her brutal one-act play The Conduct of Life, and spoke about it when she received the 2015 Edwin Booth Award. Recently, the Signature Theatre produced her short play Drowning, which reimagined a story by Anton Chekhov, but was told from the point of view of aliens from outer space. Fornes wasn't from outer space, but she was once an alien to this country, before become one of America's great playwrights of the 20th century.

Nilo Cruz - Speaking of Cuban-American playwrights, Nilo Cruz, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his drama Anna in the Tropics, was born in Matanzas in Cuba, but immigrated to Miami as a child when his parents fled communism. Cruz's play Sotto Voce tells the story of a woman mourning the failure of both Cuba and the United States to take in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. As a former refugee himself, Cruz certainly knows the importance of showing compassion to those who arrive on your borders.

Martyna Majok - And who won the most recent Pulitzer Prize for drama? That would be Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok. I haven't seen The Cost of Living, which garnered her the award, but her play Ironbound is wonderful, and deals quite poignantly with coming of age in urban America.

So thank you, immigrants. You make America great!

Anderson's Carol

I just watched the 1954 television version of A Christmas Carol adapted by the playwright Maxwell Anderson.

You would think I would have been familiar with it already. I'm a big fan of the works of Charles Dickens, and I even penned my own stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which was done in 2007.

However, I had never seen this version until I came across it on the blog Laughing Academy. CBS originally ran the hour-long program the night before Christmas Eve, sponsored by Chrysler, which comically interrupted the story to try to sell station wagons to viewers.

The version stars Fredric March as Scrooge and Basil Rathbone as Marley's Ghost, but I was more interested in the adapter. Maxwell Anderson was no mere hack. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1933 for Both Your Houses. I remember him more for his 1948 play Anne of a Thousand Days. (When I was in middle school, I played a choir boy in a production of it at the University of West Florida.)

Anderson is credited with writing both the adaptation and the lyrics, which might seem odd, until you remember that he penned the lyrics for the Kurt Weill musical Knickerbocker Holiday, including the hit "September Song":

                    But it's a long, long while from May to December
                    And the days grow short when you reach September
                    And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
                    And I haven't got time for the waiting game…

Yes, this adaptation is a musical, and though not every number is a "September Song," some of the lyrics aren't bad, including those for the opening carol, "On This Darkest Day of Winter."

The most interesting aspect of Anderson's script is the use of double casting. Belle also plays the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Fred is also the Ghost of Christmas Present. A stuffed blackbird in Scrooge's apartments (an allusion to Grip in Barnaby Rudge perhaps?) then becomes the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

This adaptation definitely feels like something from the early 1950s. It's not brilliant, but it is fun, and it's only an hour long, so if you're looking for a short adaptation of the classic story, it's worth watching.

It

I recently finished reading Joseph Roach's book It, which traces stardom from Restoration England to the celebrities of the present day.

Roach's introduction sets up his project by first identifying the intangible quality we mean when we say a certain person has "it." He quotes Elinor Glyn, who wrote in the forward to her novel called It:

To have "It," the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others.

In Glyn's novel, the charismatic protagonist with "it" is a man, but when it came time to make a movie of the work, Paramount wanted to turn the piece into a vehicle for their newest discovery, Clara Bow. Anyone who has seen the film knows that Bow definitely had It. There were plenty of other stars in Hollywood who were more beautiful of better actors, but it doesn't matter. When she's on screen, you can't take your eyes off of her. It's that elusive quality of attraction that Roach wants to chronicle throughout the Anglophone world.

Though the book does follow a loose chronology, it jumps around more often than not. Rather than organizing the chapters by time period, Roach groups his examples by metonymy, naming his chapters accessories, clothes, hair, skin, flesh, and finally bone.

The accessories chapter touches on a number of topics, including the Restoration's original It girl, Nell Gwyn. An accessory, Roach notes, is something supplementary that serves to identify the wearer, but is not itself necessary. So it was with the famed actress who became an accessory to King Charles II, a beautiful but ornamental mistress who served a political purpose in the king's retinue of women by serving no political purpose at all. Gwyn remained popular because belonging to no one she belonged to everyone. Roach cites Aphra Behn's dedication of her play The Feigned Courtesans to Gwyn, in which the playwright gushed:

...you never appear but you glad the hearts of all that have the happy fortune to see you, as if you were made on purpose to put the whole world into good Humour; whenever you look abroad, and when you speak, men crowd to listen to you with that awful reverence as to Holy Oracles or Divine Prophecies, and bear away the precious words to tell at home to all the attentive family the Graceful thing you uttered.

In his chapter on clothes, Roach backtracks a few years from Behn's play to focus more on George Etherege's 1676 comedy The Man of Mode. The play provides two archetypal characters, the seductive rake Dorimant and the outrageous fop Sir Fopling Flutter. The play underscores the importance of clothes to both these types by having the entire first scene take place in Dorimant's dressing room while the protagonist puts on clothes--in Roach's words--"as a well-attended knight dons armor to do battle."

The chapter on hair delves more thoroughly into the eighteenth century, quoting not just Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, but also Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. This was an age of wigs, and Roach gets much out of Old Hardcastle's reminiscence of how Tony Lumpkin "fastened my wig to the back of my chair, and when I went to make a bow, I popped my bald head in Mrs. Frizzle's face."

A chapter on skin cannot help but bring up the deathly pallor of Sarah Siddons, especially as depicted in her portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds as The Tragic Muse. Siddons, Roach notes, also played Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy's 1772 tragedy The Grecian Daughter. This role became the subject of another portrait of Siddons by William Hamilton.

The chapter on flesh jumps ahead to the twentieth century and George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. (Incidentally, this year marks the centennial of the play's premiere.) The famous opening scene of that play takes place in Covent Garden, a site already haunted by a great deal of theatrical history. Roach notes how the fascination Henry Higgins develops for Eliza Doolittle is mirrored in Shaw's own fascination with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress who first played the role.

Roach's final chapter on bone deals with the dark side of It, the attraction of the highwayman and the pirate. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera becomes a key text here, along with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's re-imagining of the play as The Threepenny Opera.  Roach makes an interesting case for using the original Marc Blitzstein adaptation that opened off-Broadway in 1954 rather than the more faithful translation by Ralph Mannheim and John Willett. Though Blitzstein had Jenny Diver sing the song "Pirate Jenny" rather than Polly, he did so with good reason. Lotte Lenya was playing Jenny in that production, and her interpretation of the song has deservedly been ingrained into our consciousnesses.

It is a delightful book, and I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone interested in celebrity in the theatre.

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/

Epic Theatre

Many of the revolts against Realism have been elitist in nature. They were preformed in small theatres for a select group of artists and thinkers. In the 1920s, however, the director Erwin Piscator tried to create a non-realistic theatre style for the masses known as Epic Theatre. In Epic Theatre, the audience is always aware that they are watching a play, rather than losing themselves completely in the action. This new style avoided escapism, instead trying to move the audience to action, usually political action.

A devoted leftist, Piscator frequently adapted and staged progressive works not originally intended for the theatre. In 1928 he directed an adaptation of the anti-war novel The Good Soldier Schweik. The production utilized film clips, cartoons, and other elements of mass culture to comment upon the action of the play. Though Piscator took the lead in adapting The Good Soldier Schweik for the stage, he used a collaborative approach, in which many people participated in a collective that shaped the production. One member of that collective was Bertolt Brecht, who would go on to make Piscator's style of Epic Theatre famous.

Brecht began as an Expressionist poet and playwright, gaining the attention of Germany with his three early plays Baal, Drums in the Night, and In the Jungle of Cities. He later teamed up with the composer Kurt Weill and fellow writer Elizabeth Hauptman on the musical plays The Three-Penny Opera, Happy End, and The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny. Due to his leftist leanings, Brecht went into exile in Sweden in 1933. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Brecht had to flee again, first to Finland and then to the United States, before returning to Germany after the war. It was while abroad that Brecht wrote his major plays, The Private Life of the Master Race, Mother Courage and Her Children, Galileo, The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

These plays relied upon what Brecht called the Alienation Effect. This was an idea he borrowed from the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky, who believed that the aim of all literature should be defamiliarization, making people see the ordinary in new ways. Brecht wanted audiences to think about his plays, not just to feel them emotionally. To do this, he would create scenes of intense emotion, but then force the audience to look critically at the characters provoking these emotions. For instance, in Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht has a heart-rending scene depicting the death of a mute girl, then he shows the selfish attitude of her war-profiteering mother, leading the audience to question many of the assumptions they have made about the characters and about the world in which they live.

In 1949, Brecht returned to Berlin and set up a theatre company in Communist East Germany known as the Berliner Ensemble. He directed many of his own plays and the company toured the world, introducing new audiences to the Epic Theatre aesthetic. Productions often featured Brecht's wife, the actress Helene Weigel, who took over the Berliner Ensemble after her husband's death in 1956. Of all the theatre artists who revolted against Realism in the early twentieth century, Brecht has had the clearest impact, both on playwrights and directors. Dario Fo, Augusto Boal, Tony Kushner, and Caryl Churchill are just a few of the many theatre practitioners that have been influenced by the Epic Theatre popularized by Brecht.