THEATERWISSENSCHAFT!

Wow, guess what gang, it turns out when you see friends who've been close to you for over fifteen years and they introduce you to their friends and their city and you're back in the Anglophone world you get real bad at blogging. (At least it's partially because you were working on your dissertation, good for you for doing that, nice job gang.)

Anyhow, day late/dollar short but here's a thing about Berlin theatre! After the jump, general thoughts and a few show-specific notes.

Pre-show at the standing room area for Berliner Ensemble and Robert Wilson's Threepenny Opera. It is hilarious that Brecht's ensemble ended up in such a classically designed theatre space, but kind of fits him in just about every way as well.

A quick video sample of the first show I saw in Berlin (slightly different than its current staging). Gives you a good sense of some of the work on offer; a few selections from the show are on Youtube and worth seeking out ...

General thoughts:
Holy moly German actors are fearless. Pretty much across the board there was a level of bravery, commitment, and training that outstrip most of what you see in the States (and at least what I've seen in the UK). I have cockamamie theories about East Cost v. Chicago Style acting, but Berlin actors really take the best of all worlds, and even when the productions aren't what you want 'em to be, it isn't really because the actors fall short.

The theatergoing culture is rabid in all the best possible ways. The audiences are more wide-ranging in age and (at least apparent) economic strata than I've seen elsewhere, and from a chat with a friend-of-a-friend, it seems that this holds up in general. Not only do, say, administrative assistants with no theatre background go to the Schaubühne, they all have opinions about specific directors and performers at the Schaubühne! Part of this magic is that the theatres are generally quite good at fostering the Space For Conversation we're always nattering on about in the States. (This is true in London at the Barbican and National Theatres, too! Probably other places too, and I have extremely high hopes for the newly redesigned Steppenwolf in this regard.) Full-service cafes and multiple common spaces for slightly-elongated intermisisons where patrons may nosh on bretzels and beer while debating what they're seeing. But of course subsidy matters too - when you regularly have tickets available to any comers at 6 euro, and discounts for the unemployed, students, disabled, elderly, for free or nearly-free tickets... you're going to get more people in the room.

I also love the repertory system. It means it's easy to catch 3-4 different shows by the same company in a given week (handy for tourists!) and that shows continue to live and breathe as they come in and out of rep. It seems an incredibly rich challenge as an actor, and as an audience member it means even if you live in Berlin you can always just check out what's on this week at, say, the Volksbühne and drop by if it's new to you.

The pre-show for Shakespeares Sonnette, another Wilson/Berliner Ensemble collaboration. Stunning.

Show specific thoughts
Shakespeare's Sonnets, Berliner Ensemble; Threepenny Opera, Berliner Ensemble

So Robert Wilson has been collaborating with the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht's old theatre company, and the results are fascinating and weird. Wilson brings a lot of his usual tools to the table: ultra-slow motion, a precisely spartan use of lighting and design, and broad clowning. Ha ha ha JUST KIDDING broad clowning is (at least to my knowledge) a pretty new tool in the Wilson toolkit, and gang, it is a weird fit. Extremely broad gestural and vocal goofing presented with the same kind of methodical presentational style that has been at the core of Wilson's stuff going back to Einstein on the Beach (probably earlier, but that's my personal first frame of reference) is... strange. I think not entirely successful?

What's fascinating is watching his performers still find sharpness and audience-engaging quickness in the margins of the piece; and when either of these pieces turned away from slow-motion mugging to more serious work, it was transporting. Much more successfully, I think, in the Sonnets than Threepenny, if only because the material was more pliable and Threepenny needs, I think, a bit more lean comedy than broad sound-effects-laced buffoonery.

But oh man those actors. The woman playing Macheath was stupendous, the ensemble in the Sonnets was full-hearted and athletic, and I'll say that I walked away with at least three or four indelible theatrical images and moments that I'll carry with me for a few years yet. When this stuff works, it really works. And with regards to Shakespeare's Sonnets - it actually made me realize what dozens of ill-fated "what if it's in a white or gray box?" designers are trying to achieve. Very cool stuff.

Mother Courage and Her Children, Berliner Ensemble
My one intermission walkout of the week, though generally a pretty respectable production. To my thinking, the main thing was - this was neither a reconstruction-productions from Brecht's modelbucher, nor was it a substantial re-imagining. Instead, it sort of split the difference - same circular playing space, but not a revolve. Other design concepts led to blackout, no-action scene changes of upwards of twenty seconds. There was actual rain on stage for the first twenty seconds of a scene before it phased out. All of it felt very half-thought-through, and while the actors were adroit, it had all the trappings of a museum piece, an old reliable for the tourist crowd. And truth be told, at least half of why I left at intermission was that crowd - neighbors talking through the show combined with my knowledge that I'd be seeing a three-hour, no-intermission show the next night, and I thought it best to be gentle on myself.

Wallenstein, Schaubühne
A three-part Schiller play! I was apprehensive about this one, though I have to say the production didn't disappoint in any of the ways I feared. But it still was a bit rough, a bit one note - literally, in this case, as a deep bass synth note sat underneath the entire show without pause. I suppose that was to underscore the central idea of the piece - war is bad and it's gonna keep being bad - but really, do we not get that? In some ways it was a bit of an experiment - seeing how sustaining a seething semi-shouted performance in murky lighting for two hours and forty-five minutes makes the closing violence feel - in brighter lighting, a stage full of gentle rain, and blood blood blood. (A horse carcass hung center stage for the entire show, if you're looking for another Potent Metaphor.) Again, some superb performances within the confines of direction that pushed them all to eleven in unhelpful ways.

Apokalypse, Volksbühne
This was kind of stellar. A (virtually) one-man show whose text consisted of the entire Book of Revelation, with brilliantly simple design. Wolfram Koch played John (so to speak), committing to the fervent, lit-with-fire intensity of a prophet (or a madman, depending on your perspective), with one actor/musician working a synth pad/metronome and another holding a prompt book, reading the text to Koch as he performed it (again, depending on your perspective there's lots to read into that). This was the performance where the craft of the actors really shone - not just Koch but Elizabeth Zumpe, playing the prompter (and this was a performance, simple and clean and intense in its own way). In some ways, it was all the ingredients you'd look for in creating a sketch of German Theatre - a bright yellow (latex?) business suit (later stripped down into a kaleidescopic body stocking), a few simple design elements deployed with precision, and full-on commitment to a conceptual premise. It's not the only time I thought of Darren Nichols from Slings and Arrows (though Wallenstein was much more a Darren production) but it had that aura around it in a good way. A great deal of why it worked - comedy, or perhaps more precisely humor. Not laughing at the text per se, but laughing at Koch's human, frail delivery of it. There was a lot to unpack for such a simple piece, and that may be why it, along with Shakespeare's Sonnets, might be my favorite of the theatre pieces I saw in Berlin. (Is it possible that having more familiarity with the text for both shows in English helped? WHO CAN SAY.)

Anyways, that's a way-longer-than-you-wanted report, but the long and short of it is: even if Berlin didn't already strike me as a city in which I'd love to live someday if I had free reign, its theatre scene would make that a tempting prospect. If you're ever passing through, it is very worth exploring.