On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
Jakov Lind's Double moments of theatricality. One of the two protagonists, Wurz, is determined to smile for the first time in his life. He succeeds in pulling his lips into a horizontal line with a...
...The country of men without character...
...If a new generation of Asians...
...Lind spends an unnecessary amount of his text on implying this...
...if so, they are scattered wildly about, bobbing out of the lines of any character at any moment...
...Or when Leo tries to make Wurz cease to exist by inducing a mob to deny Wurz' existence, Asian cannot join in the clamor...
...He was born in Austria, lived in Germany and still writes mostly in German...
...One can also regard the two figures as the Biirger and the bum and thus, by extension, as our own middle class and poor, our voluntary poor, the hippies, being descendants of the middle class...
...The other protagonist, Wacholder, digs himself an upright grave and shovels the earth in place over his head...
...Or as the Siamese twins of Austria and Germany which share the language of cultural discourse—Goethe's, Kant's, Nietzsche's, Freud's—and share the confusions of political history created by the overlapping of the Hapsburgs and the Junkers...
...And Vienna is said to be "a city which calls itself the teat of the Western world and has suckled nothing but madness...
...He seems to be saying, "I must heap up everything I observe and know and feel, and let you sort out the mess however you wish...
...Wacholder tells Asian, "People who deserve a Hitler get a Hitler, and people who don't deserve a Hitler don't get a Hitler...
...So is the following speech by Wurz: "God has not forsaken me...
...If Lind's attitude to them is a curious mixture of fascination and revulsion (a genuine pair of oppo-sites at last), they are, after all, persona of his background as well as his imagination...
...She has allowed herself to be governed horizontally...
...Wurz' wife, Rita, a plump little catiike lady with white skin and black hair all over it, a creature of impulse, has a counterpart in Trude, Wacholder's mistress, a plump intellectual "minister for trade and reconstruction...
...and when he cries, "We pull on God's cock, therefore we are: Penem Dei trac-tamus ergo suinus," Asian replies, "God is sexless, an erection is therefore out of the question...
...They live on him...
...As teamwork between playwright, director, and actor (Tom Aldredge), it makes conventional attempts at audience participation look like kids' play...
...More than that...
...Lind, like Gunter Grass, sees men as performers and pretenders...
...That's not Hitler's fault...
...He succeeds in pulling his lips into a horizontal line with a tiny circle of tooth showing at either end...
...As with many Central Europeans who barely escaped from the holocaust he must look back and wonder how much of himself still belongs there...
...Ergo, he sees everything in ill-matched pairs, discrete examples snatched at random out of the irrational bundle of the universe, and we are, presumably, to examine these twos and make our own averages out of them...
...Lind may be uncertain about what he wants to see happen in German-speaking Europe, other than saying vaguely through Asian's mouth that the world "can exist only if we let people live...
...Thank God, nature is a wild horse and man is its tamer...
...They are intended to wreck Wurz' nerve, and they do have an effect on him, though what that effect is it's impossible to say...
...Jakov Lind is in part a product of this land and a fugitive from it...
...In doing so he renounces the steady, single, interpretative gaze of the old artist of the Enlightenment, the man who (critics always said) took it upon himself to resolve chaos into his own brand of order...
...he must affirm the evidence of his senses: Wurz exists because he is there...
...One might almost conclude that Good and Evil are the principal pair of characters in this indecisive modern morality play...
...Nor is it gratuitous...
...Wurz believes that "man rules over nature...
...their eyes function independently and will not cooperate...
...But I doubt whether Lind likes to reduce or elevate life to clear symbols...
...A journalist, coming upon Wacholder and Trude amid the mounds of paper in the customhouse, exclaims, "The government is being screwed before my very eyes...
...He goes so far as to lay out all his pots and pans and spray them with germicide, and to repaint his house tirelessly...
...They look about them with a split vision...
...Wurz still murders germs and, perhaps, himself...
...Wacholder's cylindricality can be summed up in his troublesome "giant sex organ," the burden of his late middle-age, and in the shape of the hole he digs for his self-burial...
...Or are some of the older people wiser...
...A country that shipped off its own citizens as if they were rabbits for Christmas and has the gall to complain about it now is no country at all...
...Leos, and Arnulf-Arnolds has sprung up, which of them, if any, will outlast the embers of the old generation...
...He adds...
...The act of camouflage represents Wurz' effort to purify himself and to bow out of society...
...By covering his body in whiteness Wurz makes a gesture that corresponds to Wacholder's covering his body with dirt...
...I defy anybody to sit through this episode without quivering...
...Or Wurz stands in a T shirt and undershorts, holding a paint pot and a broad distemper brush...
...Leo talks like a Nazi philosopher (a fine, intent performance here by Robert Stattel), while Asian (played by Sam Waterston, a mannered, badly cast actor) seems to be a melting-down of a number of great humanistic German writers...
...He sends him the letters, which he calls "nerve foam...
...Leave out the 'not' and it means, God has forsaken me...
...Wacholder, in addition, once murdered a whore by merely entering her...
...That's my country...
...Wacholder says that Wurz "clogs up life...
...Wacholder wants to hunt, punish, destroy Wurz, and yet, strangely, to be united with him, "the other half of my mutilated soul...
...There's too much hope in this...
...Wurz' home, by absolute contrast, is blindingly white, clean, and orderly...
...Wacholder has adopted two unrelated young men, Leo and Asian, to whom he is constantly shelling out money...
...He sees this, remains helpless before it, and is unable to unify his vision...
...If he revisits Austria he must wonder even more...
...he seems almost to be the author's voice or raisonneur...
...When Leo talks of holding "the Lord's hole open to bring new blessings and a new fragrance upon our world...
...Then he dashes the paint casually onto his neck, ears, face and, finally, his hair...
...Later, he says uncertainly, "The wicked are good, as good as the good, if not better...
...He sees logic that is perfect illogic, and striving that is the cause of its own defeat...
...Sterile, that is...
...For Wacholder makes his home in an old, filthy customhouse shed, a dump for disused government documents that lie in impenetrable thickness on the floors and against the walls...
...Have things changed...
...Of Austria, Wacholder says, "A few mountains, a little water, and a little night music...
...The new artists—the seed of Buchner, Strindberg, Kafka, Picasso and, in Lind's case, of Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy, the early 19th-century playwrights of Zauberpossen or magic farces—feel too much a part of what they describe to pretend to an objectivity or prescription...
...Horizontal" and "vertical"—the words and idea echo, an unformed cross, through Lind's script...
...Asian is the nearest thing in the play to a sympathetic character...
...But actually Wurz and Wacholder are ex-Nazis who have been trying for 22 years to obliterate their past...
...But Wurz' liturgical devotion to freedom means a freedom from germs and contamination, from life...
...God has no hole because the eternal is conceivable only as one and intact...
...His ironic title is another reference to the futility of "therefore...
...He is stout, disgusting, a human wurst, a dollop of walking excrement but alive throughout (unlike Jack Hollander's playing of the part, which is the least satisfactory element in the production...
...He wets the brush generously and flops white paint over his bare legs, arms and armpits until they are covered...
...Ergo, what...
...One is tempted to regard Wurz and Wacholder as complements?the two heads of the Austrian eagle suspended above them and looking, in Ming Cho Lee's design, as rapaMarch 25, 1968 29 cious as a vulture...
...Cleanliness is freedom, so help me God...
...Logic can prove or disprove anything...
...By "indecisive" I do not mean "neutral...
...Wurz has a pair of stepsons, Arn-ulf and Arnold, homosexuals both, and he is said to "live on their immoral earnings...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
