Alban Berg | Lulu / 2015

desire severed from reward

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alban Berg (libretto, based on Frank Wedekind’s Der Erdgeist and Die Büche der Pandora, and composer) Lulu / live HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York / the production I saw with Howard N. Fox and Pablo Capra was on November 21, 2015

 

The plays of Frank Wedekind, in their combination of naturalist issues and Expressionistic methods—despite their often somewhat clumsy plots and confusing character delineation—seem to be continually ahead of their times, finding major re-adaption within later theatrical conventions. The recent musical adaptions of his Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) of 1891, for example, reveal that the social-sexual issues of young adolescents at the turn of the 20th century have much in common with the problems of today’s 21st century youths.

    Similarly, composer Alban Berg found the perverse sexual and social actions of Wedekind’s two Lulu plays, Der Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büche der Pandora (1903) quite perfectly summed up the outrageous mores and extravagant behaviors of his Weimar Republic.

     Alas, because of the Nationalist Socialist rise and Berg’s early death, the opera was left unfinished in 1935, and would not receive its full three-act version, completed by Friedrich Cerha, until 1979.  But that fact, along with Berg’s innovative use of the musical twelve-tone system, has perhaps helped to make Berg’s version appear far more modern and ahead of its time than even G. W. Pabst’s credible and quite remarkable Weimer- period film, Pandora’s Box, of 1928, starring the unforgettable Louise Brooks (see My Year 2001).

      Today, with the India-ink projected images by artist William Kentridge and the consummate singing and acting skills of Marlis Petersen as Lulu (who has declared this as the last of her Lulu performances), the Metropolitan Opera production which my companion Howard and my editor Pablo Capra attended with me in a high definition live production—even while placing the work and very much establishing it as part of the years just prior to Hitler’s rise—seemed fresher than ever, as if Wedekind’s dialogue might be playing out in the headlines of today’s tabloids.

      Berg’s Brechtian prologue, his reorientation of the work to balance Lulu’s lesbian encounters with the series of male lovers whom she destroys, and his emphasis on the play’s clearly feminist themes (Pabst omits most of Lulu’s later relationship with Countess Gerschwitz [Susan Graham], and, accordingly, cuts her declaration that she will return to school and fight for women’s rights), along with his closer loyalty to the original plays throughout, which, although sometimes clutters up the landscape, nonetheless further modernizes the work, revealing the utter audacity of Wedekind’s originals.

    Berg, far more than Pabst, convinces us of Lulu’s immoral madness, revealing her unfeeling consummation of her lovers: her physician husband; her painter companion (Paul Groves); the newspaper owner Dr. Schön (Johan Reuter)— the only man she personally kills, and perhaps the only man she truly loves—Schön’s son Alwa (Daniel Brenna), and Countess Gerschwitz. Yet he also, more successfully than Pabst, shows us how Lulu, out of true love through the limited views of each of her lovers, is manipulated by them. The tragedy of this work, much as in Berlin Alexanderplatz, emanates from the reality of how much these figures use each other purely for their own needs, ending in a necessary bloodbath—which, on a far larger scale, is precisely what happened, of course, to the whole of Germany under Hitler’s control. The only major figure of this opera to survive is the man who may have fathered her and, more definitely, “created” her—through his lessons on how to survive as a prostitute-courtesan—is Schigolch (Franz Grundheber), who like Alexanderplatz’s Franz Bieberkopf survives only because he has become, by work’s end, utterly insignificant.

     Indeed, both Berg and Wedekind, more than Pabst, reveal that everyone in this tragedy, including Lulu, by the time of her death, has become meaningless. Each of them simply desires—revealed in Kentridge’s expressionist emblems such as Lulu’s and other characters’ donning of outsized white gloves—without offering much in return. Lulu’s world is one in which nearly everyone is seeking love, money, and fame without sacrificing themselves. In the end, only two characters actually are willing to give of themselves—and both of them are women.

     Countess Gerschwitz allows herself to be imprisoned in Lulu’s stead, and attempts to raise money to help her friend-lover to survive and to escape. And even after she is rejected endlessly by the object of her desire, she returns to Lulu’s hovel, only to be killed by the Jack the Ripper-like figure who destroys her after killing Lulu.

     Lulu, strangely enough, offers up not only her body, but is willing, at least in Schön’s case, to give up her heart; and ultimately, she prostitutes to save the starving Alwa and Schigolch.   

     Although the males of the tale strut the stage and destroy themselves out of what they describe as Lulu’s betrayals, they give nothing in return except financial support, which is always proffered as a transaction instead of presented as an outright gift. Although Lulu may pretend that some of her relationships have nothing to do with prostitution, in the society that Berg and Wedekind present, all human relationships seem to be built on transactional involvements. Even Gerschwitz hopes that her money might buy her love.

     In such a world, everything ends where it has begun, with someone demanding something from or swindling something from the other. Berg emphasizes this in not only through the predetermined musical structures of his twelve-tone system, but in the palindromic system of the work’s structural events. Not only are characters intentionally asked to portray others—Schön becomes Jack the Ripper, the Painter is the African Prince, etc.—but everything happens again and again. As if they were hamsters on a treadmill, the men Lulu encounters destroy themselves and each other like late 19th century dualists who fight for something that they do not truly control, but rather controls them. Berg makes clear that the society in which he lives—extending back even to Wedekind’s pre-World War drama—is doomed to destruction.

     If by opera’s end, Lulu has become a hag, of so little value in the thinking of her murderer, that she is better off dead, Lulu, unlike any other figure in the work—except perhaps for Gerschwitz—finally is willing to offer herself freely, without financial, societal, or even sexual ties. Human needs and desire have finally been severed from reward.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2015).

Eugene O’Neill | Ah, Wilderness! / 2015

sitting in the moonlight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill Ah, Wilderness! / San Francisco, A.C.T. (American Conservatory Theater) at the Geary Theater / the performance I saw was the matinee of October 24, 2015.

 

As numerous critics since its first appearance in 1933 have noted, Eugene O’Neill’s comedy Ah, Wilderness! is almost the mirror opposite of his great family drama of 1957, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Reviewing the 1988 New York revival of the comedy, Frank Rich argues that the life of the central character of Ah, Wilderness!, Arthur Miller, represents the boyhood O’Neill might have wished for himself instead of one he lived out with his penurious, unloving father, his drunken brother, and his drug-dependent mother.

     Certainly, the early work has intimations of that world. Arthur’s uncle Sid (Dan Hiatt) is known as an alcoholic and returns from the play’s 4th of July picnic so inebriated that he dares to entertain the family with his satiric reiteration of his brother-in-law Nat’s (Anthony Fusco) often told stories by claiming to have invented the lobsters heaped upon their table, and, is soon after trotted off to bed. Sid, furthermore, has just, once again, lost his job.

 

    The family’s aunt Lilly (Margo Hall), is a woman so opposed to alcohol and unforgiving about those who imbibe that she is determined to remain a lonely school teacher, forced to live at home, rather than marry Sid, the man everyone recognizes she loves.

     Arthur’s elder brother, Richard (Thomas Stagnitta), a student at Yale, is seemingly as empty-minded as Arthur is a passionate reader. Deeply affected and troubled by everything he reads—which includes a great many works by the likes of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Emma Goldman, and Omar Khayyám—Arthur, in his despair over his girlfriend’s Muriel’s seeming abandonment of him, not only sneaks out of the house without reporting to his family, but visits a local “dive” with two “tarts,” one of whom, Belle (Caitlan Taylor), gets him drunk and attempts to seduce him to join her in an upstairs bedroom.

     Yet, all in all, family life in Ah, Wilderness! is as innocent and sentimental as The Music Man or Meet Me in St. Louis, and even uses some of the same tropes (Mrs. Shinn, the mayor’s wife in The Music Man is also outraged by her daughter’s reading of Omar Khayyám, and the mayor of the small Iowa town is convinced of the young Tommy’s deprived behavior as is David McComber [Adrian Roberts] of Arthur’s moral upbringing in the O’Neill play). It is no accident that O’Neill’s play was transformed, somewhat successfully, into a musical, Take Me Along.

     The Miller family, for all their worries and fears about each other, is full of love and desperate to protect one another in a way that O’Neill’s real family might never have imagined possible. The playwright’s view of the small New England community wherein the Miller’s reside is so idealistic and hopeful, in fact, that it makes Thornton Wilder’s Grovers Corners look like a bit like dreary depressed village.

    Even punishment here is postponed and eventually abandoned. Apparently Mr. Miller and his loving wife Essie (Rachel Ticotin) have never laid a hand on their children. Late in the play, when the large moon has seemingly covered the entire town in its glowing light, Nat and Essie and their son Arthur all discover themselves surrounded by a love so inclusive and abiding that it seems to embrace every aspect of the American Dream that their celebration of the country’s liberty appears to symbolize. Why then, does all of this somehow ring hollow? Why does O’Neill’s comic vision of the world not quite convince one as does his otherwise tragic outlook?

     Of course, as I have previously written, there are also dark shadows that lie over works such as The Music Man and Meet Me in St. Louis as well. Both are works in which we realize reality is being transformed at the very moment it is hugged into being. These worlds no longer exist—and perhaps never did, except in our collective wishful thinking.

     Rather than featuring the realism that O’Neill’s detailed plotting seems to require, scenic designer Ralph Funicello transforms this work into a kind a gauzy fantasy play with scrims, silhouetted figures, and stark evocations of space (particularly in the beachside, moonlit meeting of Arthur and Muriel). Only at the dinner table does the family fully come into full realistic perspective, which, because of various events—including the family maid’s clumsy attempts at serving and Sid’s comic acrobatics—the children are determined to and sometimes encouraged to abandon. From the very first scene the youngest son, Tommy escapes the family circle to play with his fireworks. And soon after his elder sister, Mildred (Christina Liang) is sent away to lead him into the backyard. Others gradually move away from this realist “hearth” as well, with only Arthur left at table, he having already traveled thousands of miles away through his intense involvement with his book.

     In Funicello’s beautiful set, most of the family members sit out their familial encounters in isolated stations upon couches and chairs, or, in Arthur’s and Richard’s cases, in concerted escapes from family life, rather than remaining together as a unit. In short, the family members, despite their deep love and communal values, are almost always moving away and apart. The men plan to go to their annual male picnic, while the women assent to remain at home—only too delighted to be invited on a morning drive, one of the few times they are included in the male activities until the very end of the play. Although Sid has invited Lily to the evening fireworks, his drunkenness destroys their plans.

     If O’Neill’s play represents such an idealized picture of family life, accordingly, why does this family so seldom act as a unit?

     In part, of course, the symbolic communality is a myth. If O’Neill’s world appears to be so open-minded that it seems absolutely natural, as the A.T.C. theater production has, to apply color-blind casting, there are still, within the folds of the play itself, a series of deep segregating furrows between women and men, children and adults, siblings, neighbors, and even masters and servants.

     Some of the deepest of these oppositions are revealed in Nat’s ineffectual attempt to explain to his son Arthur, the facts of life. In this comic, yet quite shocking speech he attempts to explain the differences, as O’Neill might describe them, between “pure” women with whom one should not have out-of-marriage sex and “tarts,” women who, Nat declares, have existed since time immemorial to service men who need sexual release. In so dividing the opposite sex into two, Nat also reveals some of the differences between him and his wife. And, later, together, they even quip of their own intellectual perceptions of one another, as well as their expectations for their gifted son.

    Even though they both agree that he will be “great,” we see that Arthur may still have some very hard times ahead, despite his sensation at play’s end that “all’s right with the world.” Surely, given his brother’s taunts, he will have to face some difficult hazing and unpleasant adventures when he attends Yale next year. Will Muriel truly wait for him to graduate? The events of this play occur in 1906, and a few years after Arthur graduates, he most certainly will discover himself serving in World War I. It is clear, that long before graduation, he will learn facts (that Wilde was not, for example, tried for bigamy) that will change his idealized conceptions.

     Will Lily grow more bitter, Sid more self-mocking and lost? Will the seemingly open-minded world around the Miller family continue to be so or turn, as it appears the town might, to the prejudiced narrow mindedness of townsmen like David McComber?

     O’Neill obviously provides no answers and does not even bother to ask some of these questions. But they are there, nonetheless, casting shadows over the dream-like end of this playwright’s comic masterwork. The characters, after all, are sitting in the moonlight, not standing in the sun.

 

San Francisco, October 25, 2015

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2015).