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.