Benjamin Britten | Noye's Fludd / 2011

children’s delight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Britten (based on the Chester Miracle Play) Noye’s Fludd / 2011

 

The day before we attended Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, Howard and I, along with our cleaning woman and friend Ana-María Abraham, saw a production by the Los Angeles Opera, with various young orchestras and choirs, of Benjamin Britten’s setting of the Chester Miracle Play, Noye’s Fludd.

    The groups included members of the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, the Hamilton High School Academy of Music Orchestra, the Colburn School String Orchestra, the choir of St. John Etudes Church and School, members of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Choir, the Colburn School Children’s Choir, Pueri Cantores San Gabriel Valley Children’s Choir, the Padre Serra Parish Choir, the Jubilate Catholic Korean Choir, the St. Mel Parish Choir, and the Musical Youth of California Children’s Choir. Eli Villaneuva directed, with opera singers Richard Paul Fink, performing Noye, and Kate Lindsey, performing Mrs. Noye, along with Richard K. Price, singing the voice of God.

     Like past productions at the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels, the production was a joyful one, which included the participation in three songs from the congregation, along with lovely costumes—particularly with the entry of dozens of pairs of animals performed by teens and young children—and with the joyful music of the entire work, conducted by the beloved LA Opera conductor James Conlon.

     Perhaps the most fun of this piece involves the stubborn refusal of Mrs. Noye to join her husband, as she remains on land surrounded by her gossiping friends until finally Noye and his sons drag her onto the ark and into salvation!

     It was a perfect afternoon, which we followed with an excellent dinner at Los Angeles’ famed Pacific Dining Car with Ana.

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2011

The Harry Partch Ensemble and Lyris Quartet | Partch: Daphne of the Dunes / 2018

hovering over and beneath

by Douglas Messerli

 

The Harry Partch Ensemble and Lyris Quartet Partch: Daphne of the Dunes (music by Ben Johnston and Harry Partch) / performed at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), Los Angeles / the performance I attended was on June 15, 2018

 

The other evening, I attended a concert at Redcat that presented two works performed by the Harry Partch performers—which, in this case, included Erin Barnes, Cory Beers, Alison Bjokedal, Dustin Donahuem, Vicki Ray, John Schneider, Nick Terry, T.J. Troy, and Alex Wand—playing on Partch-invited instruments such as the Gourd Tree, Canons, Chromelodeon, Boo, and others such as the Diamond Marimba, the Surrogate Kithara, and Spoils.

      This, second part of the program, presented his Daphne of the Dunes (1967), a kind of comic short opera, with choreographic flourishes by Casebolt and Smith and with video art by Joel Smith.

     Partch called this work, which he expanded at least a couple of times, as a “dance-drama,” and this production retained his verbal introductions which he hoped would serve as “a guide to the prospective choreographer.”

      To play out the encounter of Apollo, the god of music (and Zeus’ son) who fell in love with the river Naiad Daphne, the performers used comic masks, and presented the work itself in a somewhat comic manner—despite the beautiful shower of quivering music, particularly when Ray played Chromelodeon, with Barnes on the Diamond Marimba, and John Schneider on Viola—that satirized “music’s” attempt to charm the hard-hearted woman, who was protected by an arrow of lead.

     I had previously seen and heard this group’s performance of Partch’s long-gestating work Barstow—created first in the 1940s and 50s, and finalized in 1968—in which, somewhat in the manner of Woody Guthrie, Partch sets to music the hitchhiker graffiti of several travelers wandering through that San Bernardino County desert town, known as a hub for various forms of transportation. As I wrote in My Year 2009:

 

…Upon first hearing each of these numbered pieces, presented in a Sprechstimme-like performance by guitarist John Schneider, the words are almost laughable. But Partch allows us after the original statement to hear the echoes of those words, by repeating them with emotionally-charged aftertones and dramatic additions (“ha-ha-ha” “dum-de-dum,” etc.) that transform them into haunting expressions of fear and joy.

 

     Yet, somehow, that appeared to have missing from this performance, and it seemed as if the whole piece had somehow been cut back. Perhaps it was just that, since this was the last piece of the evening, my mind was still filled with the sounds and sensations of the other works I describe below; but I do feel the small choreographic additions to this piece, probably inspired by the fact that the dancers had temporarily joined the company for the evening, literalized these pieces and stole some of the haunting quietude surrounding these pencil and ink musings.

     Indeed, the Partch works seemed, this time around, almost an afterthought to the great works that began the evening concert. Performed by Lyris Quartet (Sara Andon, James Sullivan, John Stehney, and Scott Worthington, Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 9 (1988) and the American premier of the same composer’s Octet (1999/2000) were clearly the featured pieces of the concert.

Johnston, now 92, was as close as one can get to having been a “student” of Partch. Yet Partch and Johnston, despite both their use of “just intonation,” in some ways couldn’t be more different.

       Whereas, Partch was a kind of American eccentric, Johnston, who describes his musical annotations as “extended just intonation,” allows the great musical traditions of the past, Haydn, Mendelssohn, and American folk music (much like Copland) to permeate his works.

      Although I have studied music, playing saxophone in high school and almost majoring in voice in my early university years (I did sing in the major University of Wisconsin choral groups and performed in a musical production there as a singer and dancer), I find it almost impossible to comprehend “extended just intonation” and its effects. Although I can certainly read music, I am afraid I could not quite interpret a musical score that transforms musical notes into numerical fractions. But the effects of this, so I believe, is that the compositions allow the musicians to work between the rigid structures of traditional scoring to create a music that sometimes hovers just below or over the pitches (what are described as “microtonal variants”) that create a very different sound overall, allowing for the natural harmonic pitches which are preferred by the human ear.

     Particularly in the very first movement of String Quartet No 9, Johnston’s work immediately alerts us to a fresh expression of quartet music, spirited and lush at the very same moment. The audience is immediately awakened from the pre-concert silence. The program notes include a long paragraph by Bob Gilmore which describes the entire piece, but I’ll quote simply his comments of that first movement, titled “Strong, calm, slow”:

 

             …the most extraordinary movement is surely the lst, where Johnston achieves

             a real compositional tour de force in creating a six-minute movement, the pitch

             world of which remains entirely between middle C and the C an octave above

             and yet retains our interest throughout. Here the richness of just intonation with

             its luminous pure intervals and their microtonal variants, lets us hear as never

             before one of Western music’s familiar clichés: the C major scale. Like all of

             Johnston’s best music, this movement looks both backward (to a musical 

             heritage that he feels is still vital to our contemporary world) and forward, 

             to a world of new sounds and untried harmonies that will continue to engage 

             us as his compositional achievement becomes better known.

 

     The newer piece, Octet, takes as its central tune Folk musician Jay Unger’s famed tune “Ashokan Farewell,” a piece used notably as the theme of Ken Burn’s PBS television series, The Civil War. Such a beautiful tune, as the program notes, made the film series’ audiences believe that the work was from the 19th century; but Johnston’s final variation of this piece deracinates the prettiness of the piece through his just intonation dissonant harmonies, helping us to see this work as a far less sentimental song, while revealing some of its darker elements which were at the heart of the terrible war.

       In this concert it seems as if the always inventive “father” was wonderfully outshined by his quite brilliant “student.” And I praise the Partch group for allowing their hero to share the stage, so to speak. Surely, I will now attempt to see any concert with Johnston on the program—of which I hope there will be many.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2018).

 

 

 

 

Samuel Beckett | Waiting for Godot / 2012

living in the details

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum (the production I saw was on April 7, 2012)

 

Witnessing the brilliant production, directed by Michael Arabian, of the Mark Taper Forum's Waiting for Godot, I was struck by something that I had not previously noticed by viewing or reading the play. Watching Alan Mandell (as Estragon), Barry McGovern (as Vladimir), James Cromwell (as Pozzo) and Hugo Armstrong (as Lucky), one gets the sense that, except for an occasional overlong pauses which slowed down this production a bit, that the performances were about as close to perfect as one gets. Particularly the long-time Beckett thespians, Mandell and McGovern, spout the often fast-paced dialogue in a rhythm that is pitch perfect, along with bodily motions that reveal their every thought.

     Yet, for the first time in this moving production, I became aware of just how spare Beckett's great work truly is. My companion Howard, enjoying the first act, however commented on the obvious: "Beckett seems to have presented all his themes in the first few minutes. I can't imagine what he might have to say in the second act."

     Well, I mused, "That's true. But his themes are really not what matter most. The fact that we live in a universe promising the return of a missing God, that some men, like Pozzo, are entirely about themselves, mean men of power who do nothing but to rule over other lives—while those themes are certainly there in Beckett's work, they are not central of the play at all. Suffering, despair, pain, boredom, yes, these are the givens of Beckett's universe, but they are not what makes his work so remarkable. It is the various ways, the numerous things we do each day to get through the suffering, despair, pain, boredom, loneliness, etc. that are at the center his plays and fictions. And that is everything, isn't it?"

      By the end of the 2nd act, Howard, who had never before seen a production of the play, understood what I was talking about. Beckett, more than nearly any other playwright, takes chances in Waiting for Godot by so pruning down the play's large themes that the work almost mocks itself. Particularly Estragon, who is always about to or, at least, declaring himself ready to do so—even though his time apart from his long-time companion, Vladimir, results in endless beatings in a ditch—is reminded again and again by his friend that their existence on this bleak plateau with only a tree and a rock is to wait, to wait for Godot. That is their only purpose, despite the seeming meaninglessness of that. Whoever this Godot is, whether he is the personal God of vengeance (if they don't wait, Vladimir suggests at one point, they will be punished) or a New Testament God of love, it is clear that Godot may never come, may never return their patient and often impatient waiting on earth. He may not even be a loving God; after all, so we are told by the messenger boy, he beats the boy's brother. What kind of deity is that?

      It hardly matters, so reverent are these two clowns who represent us. What is important is the waiting itself. But how to survive that? How to live through each day? That is at the heart of Beckett's play, is at the center of Beckett's melodious language. How might these two men, not necessarily "gay" men, but men who have, nonetheless, lived together for 50 years, get on. Fighting, contradicting one another, attacking each other, cajoling, complaining, laughing, watching, hugging, comforting, hating, and threatening to part (particularly Estragon), and even contemplating suicide, they entertain one another, they talk and haggle, and cry and laugh the way each of us does daily. Godot may be what they think they are waiting for, but what these men do with their lives is try to communicate in the hundred ways man communicates with one another and himself. The play is such a moving work of art not because of its over-arching thematics, not through its structure, but because of its presentation of everyday life, its barebones revelation of how mankind converts the emptiness of daily living into something of worth, of meaning, sometimes even rapturous joy, mostly ridiculous acts.

      Living, suggests Beckett, is not played out in the tectonics of great ideas, but in the details of everyday life. In Waiting for Godot it can even take on the accidental encounter, much like that of theater itself, of two ridiculous strangers, Pozzo and Lucky, the second tortured by the first, while the power-hungry man is equally dependent upon his servant, a kind of lesson in Marxist-like theory. Or it can focus on the simple rediscovery of one's own boots. For Didi and Gogo—their personal nicknames for each other—getting through each day is sometimes even centered upon just talking about how they might get on or the contemplation of separating, the observation of tree suddenly spouting leaves. For Vladimir, in particular, surviving depends upon memory, while for Estragon, survival requires sleep. Beckett moves his play forward, in short, through his characters' attempts to move forward, to get on through just one more day and another after that.

      Such a structure, wherein the author reveals the creative act itself, is a dangerous one, particularly for an audience which may desire to be told everything, to be led forward by the author himself. In Waiting for Godot, however, the audience is put on edge, wondering what these two fools will come up with next, how will the plot move forward, how will they get through yet another day? But in that wonderment, the audience members are forced to reimagine their own lives. Even the theater piece they are attending is a kind of way to pass the time, to move forward through the day. They too must go home, eat a carrot, chew on a piece of radish, crawl into the ditch of their beds to be pummeled in lonely dreams throughout the night. Some may even contemplate bringing it all to an end. But most will arise to meet again, to work, to talk and haggle, cry and laugh, just like the two clowns of Beckett's play do through the two days we witness of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 9, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater (March 2012). 

George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell | Suppressed Desires / 1915 [reading of play]

celebrating suppression

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell Suppressed Desires / Provincetown Playhouse, July 15, 1915

 

George Cram Cook's and Susan Glaspell's satire on Freudian analysis was first produced in Provincetown in July of 1915, as the very second play performed by the company. There is some question whether Cook and Glaspell arrived in Provincetown with the play in hand, or whether, naive as they were about theater, they presumed that, since they themselves were to be the major actors, they could simply ad lib the work. What that might mean for the character of Mabel, played in Provincetown by Lucy Huffaker, is not clear. But perhaps, since she was a close friend of Glaspell's, she knew the subject intimately.

      The issues which the play satirized were well known throughout Greenwich Village, where psychoanalyst A. A. Brill had introduced Freud's and Jung's theories, and numerous essays had been written and published, particularly Max Eastman's two-part article in June and July in Everybody's Magazine. Theater historian Jeff Kennedy argues that the playwright couple had obviously read Eastman's piece—which gives further credence to the idea that they were writing the play at the very time of the production—because of its reference to a Freudian case in which a woman had repressed feelings for her brother-in-law and Eastman's mention a quote from A. A. Brill about a woman who dreamt she was in a street with a flock of chickens.

     Some critics argue that the performance occurred before Glaspell actually wrote down most of the play's best lines, but the couple would have had to be brilliantly clever performers to ad lib some of the most hilarious of the psychoanalysts' interpretations, namely that the command Mabel hears, "Step hen," actually calls up her brother's-in-law's first name, Stephen, and that the whole image of a hen derives from her sister-in-law's first name, Henrietta. And the play, although at times no more than a one-line joke about psychoanalysis, is overall far more sophisticated than its structure might suggest.

     Henrietta may be laughed at for her complete immersion in and belief of Freud's and Jung's theories, but she is also presented as an intelligent, strong-willed, and free-wheeling woman, able—even with great pain—to give up her husband if he truly feels walled-in by their relationship. What she cannot endure is that her sister might also be in love with him and all too willing to run off with the man for whom the psychiatrist has convinced her she is repressing her love.

     This short play is a long ways from almost any other work of its day in presenting a woman who is able to speak intelligently on psychology and even write layman essays on the subject. Although Henrietta is not trained as a psychologist, she nearly as convincing in her interpretations of her sister's dream as the psychiatrist; and she is most perceptive in observing her own husband's disenchantment with his life, part of which involves her compulsion to awaken him several times each night, demanding to hear his dreams. The situation reminds me of the incidents in Marianne Hauser's novel, Dark Dominion, a work which did not appear until 1947!

     Even if upon discovering that those around her have been suppressing desires that exclude her— Henrietta changes her entire viewpoint of the psychoanalytic world too quickly—the play still reveals that she is open-minded about life, and if, at play's end, although both she and Stephen suggest that Mabel should suppress her desires, the irony of their statement is that they are not likely to celebrate suppression. For is it is clear that the couple at the heart of the play will continue being quite forthright about their likes and dislikes.

     If Suppressed Desires is not a great satire, seeming at times to be more a skit than a one-act play, it is an intelligent skit, witty and, in many respects, far ahead of its time.

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (June 2011)

 

Richard Wagner (composer), Robert Lepage (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) | Die Walküre / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production 2012]

casting out the self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Wagner (composer), Robert Lepage (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Die Walküre / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

 

One of the major questions of Wagner's great opera, Die Walküre, is how it is possible to cast out or renounce oneself, and a great deal of the argumentative and pleading discussion between Wotan and his warrior daughter, Brünnhilde, is precisely about this issue. She claims, rightfully, that in protecting Siegmund she has only followed the will of Wotan, even if it is no longer his stated command. She is, she argues, only a manifestation of his will, and has no other existence. On his part, Wotan must suffer the strictures of his own laws, particularly since he has himself ignored those laws in search of power and love. Fricka, who insists on his destroying Siegmund in favor of Hunding, may seem unable to comprehend love or even less, unable to forgive, but she is right: Wotan has disobeyed his own rules, and so too have his offspring, the brother and sister lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde.

     In this opera, Wotan painfully loses those whom he loves most, Siegmund and Brünnhilde, in order to obey his own proclamations. Suddenly the omnipotent god must be punished for his own sins. And, in that sense, he is, symbolically speaking, renouncing his own power; by casting out Brünnhilde from Valhalla, he is also assuring his own destruction and, ultimately the fall of the gods. Brünnhilde, now human, becomes a kind of Christ-like figure who shifts the center of reality from heaven and the underworld to earth itself.

    It is for these very reasons, I would argue, that, although there is great music and drama in the other operas of the Ring cycle, Die Walküre is the most poignant, the easiest of all to hear and love.  

     Strangely, a similar "outcasting" almost happens with the god of this new Met production, director Robert Lepage, and most of the opera's characters. The final Met live-in-HD broadcast production of the season began 45 minutes late, having suffered, we were told during the first intermission, computer difficulties of the great, galumphing, set of 24 rotating planks at the center of this production.

    People patiently waited it seemed, both inside the opera house and at my movie theater, yet there was a sense, that only grew as the production got underway, that the wonderful performers— Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Eva-Maria Westbroek (Sieglinde), Stephanie Blythe (Fricka), Jonas Kaufmann (Siegmund), Bryn Terfel (Wotan), and Hans-Peter König (Hunding)—were now subject to the directorially created machine. Kaufmann was a stunning Siegmund, portraying a character with whom the audience could not help but be sympathetic, as he and the lonely wife of Hunding, Sieglinde, slowly fall in love. The planks, standing linearly to suggest a forest of trees, was quite effective, except that the image projected upon them also was reflected across the faces of singers (primarily Hunding).

      The great ride of the Valkyries was quite terrifying given the see-saw movements of Brünnhilde and her sisters, particularly after we had been told, during another intermission, that in some of the early productions, some of their dresses had been caught in the apparatus. I am afraid that I missed a few of the Valkyrie's cries simply worrying about the actors as they slid one by one down the planks to the floor.

    At one stunning moment, as Brünnhilde was left by Wotan on her burning rock, the apparatus rose to the heavens, with a body-double Brünnhilde suspended upside down over the fire, one felt that the machine had finally done something, created a kind of cinematic effect, that would have been otherwise impossible. Yet, for the most part the expensive contraption (estimated at costing over forty million dollars), so heavy that the Met needed to reinforce the underpinnings of the stage itself, was more an intrusion than a delight. As some critics have suggested, it seems that the singing, excellent as it is in this production, was sacrificed to the art of staging.

    It seems to me, moreover, that the kinds of effects achieved—far tamer than the recent Archim Freyer production in Los Angeles—might have been accomplished with more standard stage devices, light, scrims, etc.

    Let us hope that in Siegfried and Götterdammerung Lepage might find a way to justify the immense cost of his device without ousting Wagner's singers from the stage!

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2011

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (May 2011).

 

 

Matei Visniec | Angajare de Clovn (Old Clown Wanted) / 2018

the mirror of truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matei Visniec (author, the script adapted into English by Jeremy Lawrence), Angajare de Clovn (Old Clown Wanted) / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, directed by Florinel Fatulescu / the performance I attended was the matinee on September 23, 2018

 

The last time I remember loving clowns was as a child when my father took me and my brother to the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus in the 1950s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There we saw the great Emmett Kelly and the famed circus clowns piling out of impossibly small cars and somersaulting over one another with absolute abandonment.

        Since then, clowns and mimes have been my least favorite of entertainers. So perhaps I was not the best critic to determine to review the play by Romanian playwright Matei Visniec’s production at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. Yet I love Visniec’s major theatrical influences, Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter—the playwright who now lives in France even did his own version of Beckett’s most famed play, Visniec’s titled The Last Godot—and I love film director Federico Fellini, whose movie The Clowns initiated the Romanian playwright’s Angajare de Clovn (Old Clown Wanted).

        I also love the Odyssey theatre’s continual adventurousness and their strong commitment to foreign plays as well as to new American theater and revivals. Two of the actors in this play, Alan Abelew and Beth Hogan, also recently appeared in a production at the Odyssey of five short Beckett plays which I greatly enjoyed. So, I reasoned, perhaps I can simply overlook my aversion to “clowndom,” and take the play as the grand metaphor for life that it intends to be. Ignore the red noses (which are at one point even tossed into the audience, along with candies), and just sit back and enjoy the fact that these old-timers, come to audition for what will apparently be the very last venue of their lives. Even old clowns, whose bones can hardly support an easy somersault—although the thin Abelew, playing Niccolo, does attempt a few—deserve some respect if, for nothing else, trying to endlessly convince us that they represent, in their ridiculous actions, a kind of mirror of truth.

       These are poignant beings, Niccolo (who arrives to the audition door first), the heavier-set Filippo (the excellent José A. Garcia), and much later, the heavily burdened Peppino (Beth Hogan), are all old friends but now poised as competitors for the last phase of their lives, fighting and loving tooth by nail, kiss by reminiscence.

       Unfortunately, in the long space of their own wait for “Godot”—the simple opening of the door by a producer who might offer one of them the opportunity of, as Beckett is fond of saying, “going on,” there isn’t much to do. And despite Visniec’s love of the great Irish-French playwright, he doesn’t have the linguistic chops to significantly explore their existential position. Their memories are thin, as they exaggerate, forget, and reenact their past lives and mutual involvements. Mostly, they compare their different circus companies and their daring dos. It’s certainly not very scintillating and at moments is rather boring—at least until Peppino shows up.

     Throughout the early part, the two old males, one by one, take out their skimpy posters and reviews to compare their careers, and pounding their chests to prove which of them was a better clown. But Peppino pulls out an entire theatrical flier, arguing, somewhat solipsistically, that she was also an actress on the stage and, therefore, a far greater performer than a mere clown.

     The issue is a fascinating one, particularly given the facts I’ve recounted above. Is acting a greater art than pratfalls and silent imitation? We never quite get the answer, since her proof of her talent lies in dying, the first time rather inexplicably but convincingly enough that the two males attempt to provide her some oxygen through Filippo’s “black box” of balloons.

      When they give up, she quickly comes back to life claiming that her “silent act” is superior to their buffoonery, since she has been far more believable. When they react with slapsticks and rubber hammers, besieging her behind a slight curtain, it appears that they really have killed her, and they back off, distraught, terrified by their own violent behavior. This time, they briefly pray over and cover her body before escaping into the night—or, in this case, the afternoon.

      Peppino slowly rises, Chaplin-like cane in hand, to finally enter the suddenly open doorway to the audition studio, clearly the “winner”—if there might ever be one, of the oldest clown competition. And we perceive her entry into that space also defines her death.

      The moral, I presume, is that acting does best comic mimicry. Yet, isn’t that precisely what she has done, played dead, like the La Dame aux Camélias, surely not a sign of great talent, despite the tears it aroused in the eyes of hundreds of audience members in the late 19th-century.

      In the end, this is a kind of sly play in its investigation of the differences between buffoonery, mimicry, and true acting. And along the way, there were a great many moments of simple fun. But I am not sure that I might define this as a profound theatrical event.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2018

Reprinted in USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2018).

Václav Havel | Largo desolato (translated from the Czech by Tom Stoppard) / 2020

the orange door

by Douglas Messerli

 

Václav Havel Largo desolato (translated from the Czech by Tom Stoppard) / Frédérique Michel (director) / I saw I production with Thérèse Bachand at the City Garage, Santa Monica, California, on January 24, 2020

 

Václav Havel’s 1984 play, Largo desolato, concerns a series of semi-autobiographical events that reminds one of numerous works regarding the paranoid world of Soviet-influenced spies and intrusive governmental officials that, in turn, takes us back to another Czech (Bohemian)-born writer, Franz Kafka. Havel’s play is absolutely haunted by Kafka’s own figures, terrified that a sudden knock on the door—in this production, a bright orange door, which might be said to even suggest the orange prison costumes worn by today’s inmates—in which they might be taken away to incarceration. In Havel’s case, it happened, and this play written after his 1984 release was soon after translated by the great British, Czech-born writer, Tom Stoppard.

     Leopold Nettles (Kopřiva in the original, in this production performed by Troy Dunn, a veteran on this company’s works) is a philosopher, professor, and author of other texts, who has reason to be terrified. Not only has he recently published a rather controversial text, but he is also haunted by his several women lovers, whom—because of his increasingly insecurity and neurotic behavior—come and go with the repetitive patterns of Nettle’s own neuroses.

     This play, in fact, is structured according to the professor’s repetitive actions—a jump to the couch where he hugs its pillows, leaps to peer through the peep-hole of his orange door, and his often uneventful, non-committal relationships with his apparently live-in companion/perhaps wife, Suzana (Emily Asher Kellis), his current lover Lucy (Angela Beyer), and a young female philosophy student, Marguerite (Marissa DuBois), all-too-ready to try to seduce him, which results in an extreme case of coitus interruptus.

      Along with these female comings and goings, are the visits of male friends and colleagues, Edward and Bertram (performed by Gifford Irvine and Truce Taylor) and the papermill workers, simply identified as “Two Sidneys” (Anthony Sannazzaro and Aaron Bray), all of whom admire what the philosopher has written. It might be remembered that in East Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and other Communist controlled countries of the day, limiting the supplies of paper was a way to control authors and publishers from expressing their viewpoints. Without paper the free press could simply not exist, so the gift of stacks of paper they leave behind is a profound statement of their caring.

      We don’t ever quite discover what this supposedly great man has actually written, and when we do get some clues about his writings, it appears to be int the vein of the empty 1960s pap about free-living and loving. He may not be the profound thinker that even he imagines himself to be.

      When the governmental authorities actually do knock on his door, described in Stoppard’s script simply as “Two Chaps” (again performed by Sannazzaro and Bray), they do not so much outwardly threaten him with arrest as beg him to take away his name from his most recent manuscript in order to help them keep him out of imprisonment.

      What they are truly asking, obviously, is for the philosopher to give up his very identity, to deny who he really is and what he has spoken. For any true thinker it is the most devastating request that might ever be made.

      Even if my review here is not necessarily a profound statement, to deny me my own commentary would be to deny the thinking I am currently trying to accomplish. It would be to deny me the possibility to think. It would mean that as a human being I no longer was given the opportunity to explore my own mind.

       But Nettles, unlike the author of this work who was imprisoned, cannot quite show his mettle—or for that matter the nettles, the thorny improbabilities thinking entails. He simply postpones his decision to wipe his name from the slate of his life-time actions.

       By the time he finally determines that he cannot agree to the offer of the “Two Chaps,” the thugs the government has sent to correct his behavior, they can assure him that his decision no longer matters (“for the time being”) such his own fears and neuroses have now rendered him meaningless. His inabilities to immediately respond prove their presumptions that he is no longer a true threat, since is can no longer write anything.

       My theater-going companion for this performance, Thérèse Bachand, wrote me, after, that this play reminded her somewhat of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others, and she is right. The Stassi investigations of the central character and his lover in that film certainly tingles the spine in the same way that Havel’s earlier play does.

       Yet, the characters in the film are basically innocent, and a single moral figure, listening into their lives, perceives it and saves, if not the drug-needy girlfriend, the playwright who has done nothing but report about the number of lives lost because of the same kind of unnecessary entry into their daily living.

       In this play, Nettles, no matter how innocent is his writing, is no moral model of his own beliefs, and in the process of his moral decay makes it unnecessary for the state to act against him. Von Donnersmarck’s figure, even at film’s end, remains a potent force that, even if unintentionally, helped to bring down the East German government.

       Havel’s frightened character, much like Kafka’s perplexed and desperate men and women, only contributes to the paranoiac world in which he is entrapped. As both Suzana and Lucy suggest, Nettles is a man of no true commitment. He seeks women and others merely as a relief from his own delusions.

       While von Donnersmarck’s film seems to call for a continuation of order, Václev Havel’s play is a call for action, a demand that one stand behind one’s own thinking and behavior, particularly if it stands opposed to governmental interference. In other words, that the thinkers transcend that orange door and enter the world in which they live.

        I truly think that today we need to make those important distinctions. Fear and trembling is no answer for a world in such terrible disorder; as Søren Kierkegaard long ago argued, the moral among us must make a “leap into faith.”

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2020).