Die Soldaten, 7/3/08 @ The Armory in NYC

Die Soldaten, an opera by Bernd Zimmerman
Directed by David Pountney
Conducted by (family friend) Steven Sloane

Step 1: WATCH THIS VIDEO
Step 2: WATCH THIS SLIDE SHOW

Step 3: Recipe for success: Marie + Soldier ==> Whore & Rape Scene

So those of you who know me are well aware of the fact that I'm partial to German proto-expressionism-sturm-und-drang-ness. Any attempt I've ever made to explain why really goes back to the first time I saw Georg Büchner's Woyzeck performed. Here's a german news program on the production i saw at BAM's Next Wave festivl in 2002:

Anyway, the bottom line for me was that I knew I had seen something amazing when I was still talking about it a week later. It was dissonant, disturbing, jaw dropping, epic, stylistic, transformative, and i still vividly remember it 6+ years later. A lot of it, obviously, was due to the production. Caveat: There are plenty plenty PLENTY bad Woyzecks out there...but for the sake of this blog lets just assume i'm talking about the play in terms of it's potential.

OK So what the fuck does this have to do with Die Soldaten? It rocked my world. It rocked. My. World. Along with Top Girls (the Chicago experience) and Woyzeck (both the Danish Tom Waits Musical production at BAM and my own), Die Soldaten - this production of Die Soldaten, will stay with me.

Briefly, the opera is based on a play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz called...Die Soldaten (or, The Soldiers) and was composed by Bernd Alois Zimmerman in the vein of Schoenberg and Berg. Yes, for those of you with some exposure to classical music, you've probably already figured that it was composed in the 12-tone technique. That means that instead of pretty pretty arias, the music is quite harsh. Normally, I'm not a fan. But, it was extremely effective in matching the momentum and gravity of the action on stage.

The play is about an innocent middle-class girl, named Marie (typical, no?) who is seduced by a soldier away from her fiancé. She chooses to go with the soldier because he is higher in social status than her current man, Stoltzius. After trading up, earning a pretty gift box with a new pair of shoes, she is betrayed. What follows is her descent into the equivalent of prostitution, sleeping with soldiers effectively in exchange for their gifts. In the end, she flees the city in order to escape what she's become. annnnnnnd as you can imagine, that doesn't work so well. but more on that later.

The strength of this production manifested itself in two distinct places, though they were obviously interrelated. The first was the design. Lights, Sound, Costumes, Amazing. Scenic, though, OUT OF THIS WORLD. The opera took place in the Drill Hall in the 66th Street Armory on Park and 5th avenue. The drill hall is the size of a football field with a vaulted cieling remeniscent of a European train station, and the narrow stage stretches down the center of it, straddled by a proscenium-ish raked riser bank. The risers...are on tracks. Yes, the risers are built to move along the length of the hall, bringing the audience closer or farther to the action as necessary. One big fuck-you to pedestrian theater, this is.

More than anything, the production stood out to me as a fantastic piece of theater. The character and detail of...all...yes, all the directorial choices are the second extremely impressive component of Die Soldaten. I would like to recount the climax of the play, which occurs when Marie flees town. Live blog time:

• Marie seems to be trying to make a decision! Should she stay, or should she go? As she mulls her decision, a bunch of men in what look like tuxedos climb onto the far side of the stage (about a football field away) and start dance-walking towards her.
• Holy shit they're wearing pig masks (soldiers are pigs, duh)
• Uhm...they're getting real close now and the music is getting kinda intense
• "MARIE HAS RUN AWAY!!!" proclaims her sister
• Oh no! marie is struggling to get by the pigface evilmen!
• Holy shit there are 3 Marie's! how the fuck did they do that? I can't tell which one was the original Marie!
• Uhm, there are 3 guys dressed as santa walking towards Marie(s) carrying presents
  
• Uhm...the santas are raping Marie.
  
• They're being raped simultaneously.
• Mariex3 is still being raped
• Annnnnd she's done. Santas get up, take off their masks, and walk off stage.

And that wasn't even the ending. Oh boy. The crazy shit was it all made SO MUCH SENSE. SO MUCH SENSE. Wow. Ok. go to the NYTimes article to read more. I've had a theatergasm and I'm speechless.

Amazing.

Preview

Coming Soon!
Lincoln Center Festival Productions Galore!!

• Die Soldaten @ The Armory
• The Bacchae @ The Rose Auditorium
  

This week.

update: the NYTimes reviews linked up are pretty on point.

Is there anywhere theater shouldn't go?

Should theater be offensive? I don't see why not. I don't think that theater should be created with the intention to offend, but that does not neccessarily mean that theater shouldn't be allowed to offend.

My friend brought up a production of CP Taylor's Good, which is a play about a professor who starts off as an intellectual who writes a pro-euthanasia novel and turns into a full fledged Nazi of the 3rd Reich. The play, not surprisingly, sheds light on the psychology of national socialism and clarifies the idea that the Nazi takeover of the german psyche was a gradual process as opposed to an overnight sensation. When she told me about Taylor's play, I got really excited - from my perspective, it's an incredibly interesting question to confront the audience with.

BUT, she would have none of it. The idea that the play would attempt to justify the professor's degradation offended her. At one point in our discussion, she asked if the director really had the right to bring that question to the table - whether it was even ethical to justify a man's transformation into what many would term a monster.

In a conversation at the University of Chicago a couple years ago, Anne Bogart supported the idea that Theater, a giant waste of time, exists to fill the void in America's soul. Since that view of theater makes me feel as though what I'm saying is important, I'm going to run with it.

Bottom line, I really thing it's all fair game. Here's why: Theater, to me, is about story telling. Base. Story Telling. Dramatic Journey. The job of the director is to communicate a story, coherently and cohesively, to the audience. I could fault a director for preaching, but to be fair every textual interpretation will contain the biases of the interpreter, and it's the director's prerogative to let the audience see the story from his or her perspective

I understand how my friend could have gotten offended, and that she may not be too happy about what she saw, but how awesome is the idea that an innocent man can be corrupted by something so heinous? Without acknowledging it, understanding it, exploring it...can't it happen again? The bottom line is this production has stuck with her. Maybe it was the swastikas that they dropped from the catwalk at the end of the play...maybe not...but this production was the first thing she jumped to when I mentioned that i saw a place for provocative subject matter on stage.

Personally, I don't think that you should restrict theater from going anywhere...other than to the realm of bad taste. Nobody should be subjected to those horrors. Fucking Alan Cumming.

Top Girls, 6/25/08 @ Biltmore Theater in NYC

Manhattan Theater Club Production
Directed by James Macdonold
With: Marisa Tomei, Elizabeth Marvel, and a set of ineffective compatriots
Closed 6/29/08

I went to see Top Girls with my parents. It was unfortunately awful. Granted, I know every word of that play intimately given that I spent about 2 months with the script in rehearsal AND granted, our production was probably one of the best pieces of theater i have been involved in, I think any theatrically objective and educated individual would find the MTC production a let down. Beyond the easy gripes of affected performances and meaningless choices which mitigated the power of Churchill's wonderful writing, there were some structural choices that really really really cannot be forgiven.

No, actually, lets start with discussing the overarching problem: until act 3 they were playing the text for cheap moments. Sensible conversation and communication between the actresses rarely happened until Tomei and Marvel fought at the closing of the play. Often enough, one actress began to connect with some honesty! Unfortunately, her efforts were usually foiled by her scene partner. Moving on.

My primary concern lied with the choice to reorganize the casting. Churchill's act 1 characters represent allegories to the characters in act 2 and act 3, so arbitrarily reassigning act 1 characters to actresses based on ability meant actors were moving in and out of characters' dramatic arcs. There is no way Pope Joan and Angie have anything in common with respect to Marlene's journey. Likewise, Patient Griselda really has nothing to do with Shona/Kit's psychology.


Anyway, All things together, I'd say it's a good thing this production closed.

On second thought, to be fair, while the stage direction and acting could've been better, i was very impressed with the set and original sound (though i believe the latter was vastly underutilized). Each act would see a bare stage transformed as set pieces flew in/backdrops swept across the stage. Quite impressive...Not $90 impressive, but impressive.

They also used the same ikea chairs we did. WTF.