On Stage
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
ON STAGE By Henry A. Zeiger Producing the Unproducible The plays of Bertolt Brecht have not been well received in New York. Although he is a writer of great talent, what we have seen of him has...
...Writers are at the mercy of actors, and the prevailing acting style is best adjusted to the involutions of bizarre psychology, not to comedy with a social emphasis...
...Ringed by his fellow gangsters, he predicts that he will go on to offer unity and protection to many other cities...
...And after Ui's hoods set fire to some warehouses, we are put through the rigged trial of a Charles Fish, even though it is not particularly amusing or germane to the drama, because the Nazis tried a mental defective for the Reichstag fire...
...Wickedness on a truly lavish scale always occurs in a strange country...
...He can be cruel one instant and kind the next, crass now and sentimental later...
...The problem is what to do with the lyrical portions of the drama, particularly that damned chorus...
...While Brecht's world derives from our landscape, the colors are heightened, the gestures are fuller, the motives are meaner—the whole tone is pitched to a higher scale...
...Zero Mostel's work some years ago in The Good Woman of Setzuan is the only totally successful acting I have ever seen in a Brecht play...
...When he goes on to say, through the use of projected newsclips of Hitler and Hindenburg, that the Weimar Republic fell because Hindenburg accepted a country villa from the Junkers, anyone familiar with these events has to stand up and shout...
...Gammell's voice also betrayed Ui's fears, frequently climbing to an uncomfortably high tenor, screeching and rasping instead of booming when he tried to be menacing, never sustaining his precarious dignity...
...This, however, may not have been exactly what Aeschylus had in mind...
...I am unable to offer any helpful hints on this subject, but after seeing Tyrone Guthrie attempt the Oresteia with the same Minnesota Theater Company...
...Another set piece has Ui wooing the widow of a man he has just murdered in an obvious parody of Richard III...
...Wearing clothes a size too big, he was altogether the perfect image of a little man trying to make an impression on a much bigger world, his natural endowments constantly betraying him...
...What with their masks, confining costumes, tinkling bells and pounding timpani, no one could have confused Guthrie's actors for human beings...
...Since it is not one of Brecht's stronger plays but a simple farce, the characters are all unmitigated scoundrels lacking the generous impulses with which Brecht endows his more intriguing villains...
...An actor cannot concentrate on his relationship to his father, his mother, or even the fascinating old man he ran into in Duluth and take the stage as Brecht demands...
...When he shows, for example, that Ui...
...Still...
...She was in accord with the rest of the actors, who, finding themselves in a work populated by gangsters, relied on the mannerisms of B-movie badmen...
...Arturo Ui contains many good moments...
...He is far more apt to shift with the tide...
...This, of course, is a recipe for comedy—similar to that found in the popular theater of Moliere and Goldoni...
...Some of Brecht's stories are nominally located in the United States, but they really take place in Amerika...
...Without restraint in his virtuoso portrayal of a man plagued by a perpetual state of the jitters, he collapsed into chairs, flung himself out of harm's way, and clawed onto rickety furniture when alarmed...
...He could not admit that his friends in the Communist party had something to do with the failure of the Weimar Republic, and there was no place in his philosophy for the role German anti-Semitism played in this sad history...
...Later, soliloquizing on how hard it is to trust anyone, he mentioned something about plotting behind his back...
...Hearing an actor like Douglas Campbell, with a deep, resonant voice, creep up into a quavering falsetto, only to plunge several octaves when he says something momentous, is really quite startling...
...Then we remember that Hitler was a funny little man nobody took seriously until he flourished in the economic and social morass of Weimar, and that the same man, with the ridiculous moustache, the silly lock of hair plastered down over his eye, shook the world for over a decade...
...Brecht had no more use for sloppy emoting than he had for undue guile...
...Brecht's characters offend the dominant esthetic most by not having an interesting past that determines their actions...
...Thus Brecht keeps insisting that Arturo Ui...
...While this lent distance, it was hardly very enchanting...
...The vocal patterns of many of the actors, when not actually set to music, were predetermined by Guthrie, so that meaning gave way to concentration on gliding up and down the scale...
...Gammell performed in bravura manner, but the widow insisted on real tears and genuine indignation...
...It is clear that portions of the Greek tragedies were sung, yet we actually don't know how...
...Although he is a writer of great talent, what we have seen of him has been discouraging...
...The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui avoids some of these problems...
...Dominick Argento's music also tended toward the obvious...
...This kind of comic contrast is the life of a low comedian and Mostel reveled in it, while his colleagues maundered along trying to reconcile conflicting character traits into something they recognized as psychologically convincing...
...I would not, as Guthrie did, have men take women's roles...
...He is not a good man momentarily gone wrong, or an evil one pretending to be good...
...With a voice of uncertain pitch and a tendency to lurch rather than walk, he was the perfect instrument to play the nervous, shaky Ui...
...Further, a Brecht character is not all of a piece...
...a country with only a superficial resemblance to our native land...
...Suddenly farce and history unite into a shattering image...
...Guthrie may have plucked his directorial scheme from Brecht: Arturo Ui, being taught how to perform in public by a broken-down Shakespearean actor, is advised to do nothing naturally because the simple folk appreciate an exaggerated, stiff-limbed dignity...
...I do have a plentiful supply of negative recommendations...
...The chorus always spoke in a definite cadence, probably necessary if they were to be understood, but the singsong that Guthrie provided was not right...
...If Brecht has proven difficult in the American theater, Aeschylus may be impossible...
...Aristotle in his discussion of tragedy mentions spectacle and music as necessary ingredients, but we have only the foggiest notion of what he is referring to...
...Slouched at the side of the stage as the play opened, he suddenly rushed center to threaten some business tycoons, but dropped his oversize revolver at a critical moment and retreated in shambles, muttering uncertainly...
...Its slightly old-fashioned harmony and steady dum-de-dum-de-dum often recalled Gilbert and Sullivan, surely not a very fortunate association to drag into this primal Greek myth...
...Here I thought that Gam-mell erred by not understanding Ui's sentimentality, seeing it only as a ploy...
...the other actors failed to follow his lead...
...Unfortunately, he presses his case too hard...
...Ui's scene with Hindborough (Hindenburg) is a successful demonstration of a small man trying to overcome a big man?alternately threatening to crush him, then pleading for a chance to show what a fine, respectable fellow he really is...
...He did not have to be told that the barber he portrayed could overflow with the gluiest sentiment one minute and kick some weaker brethren the next...
...a small-time Chicago hood out to take over the vegetable industry, is in every instance like one A. Hitler, a small-time Bavarian politician who took over the Weimar Republic...
...For Brecht's people live wholly in the present, alert to every nuance of their social and economic position, trying to attain their frequently devious ends by maneuvering rather than by displaying their emotions...
...Gammell had the right instinct in taking the conventional idea of a stumbling badman and letting it run riot...
...You've got it all wrong...
...So when we aren't objecting to what the play does to history, we are annoyed by history lousing up the farce...
...But the play and the production both came to rousing finish when Ui, having annexed the vegetable dealers of Cicero to his trust, climbed a high podium and declared that although he started as a hood everybody laughed at, nobody is laughing now...
...In the Minnesota Theater Company's production at the Billy Rose Theater, Robin Gammell displayed the requisite boldness to conquer Brecht...
...Alarmed by his own figure of speech, he glanced furtively over his shoulder, certain that disaster was following him...
...and our own tradition provides no handy analogies...
...The problem may be that productions of psychological melodrama are usually superior to attempts at epic theater...
...allied with the vegetable trust, is able to float a sizable loan by cutting the respectable mayor in for a piece of the action, all is well...
...Points of resemblance do exist, and if Brecht had been content with a loose analogy his effort would have been both more entertaining and convincing...
...For Brecht, Amerika was a land of high romance and extravagant behavior, just as Italy was to the literary gentlemen of Elizabethan England...
...The play itself is marred by Brecht's attempt to come to terms with the Germany of the '30s...
...the right big effect—definitely no...
...Their playing, not bad of its type, was mainly irrelevant...
...One was not aware of flights of lyric fantasy (which adapter John Lewin rarely provided), only of the deadly rhythm of it all...
...A big effect—yes...
Vol. 52 • January 1969 • No. 1
