The Brooklyn Rail

The Germans do love their theater, and the annual roundup of the ten best German-language theater productions of the past year, called Theatertreffen, always promises to be a thrilling opportunity to sample the current climate in the theater and the world at large. The ten winners were selected by a panel of critics who considered 690 shows. This year’s offerings, restaged almost exclusively at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, were all over the map in themes and quality.

A joy from first to last, Riesenhaft in Mittelerde (“Gigantic in Middle Earth”) draws on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, though the story, sometimes hard to follow here, was arguably the least important aspect of the show. The production is a collective effort by the Zürich-based Theater Hora (a company composed of persons with disabilities) in conjunction with the puppet group Das Helmi Puppentheater and the theater Schauspielhaus Zürich. This environmental theater piece enveloped its audience immediately upon entering, as the smiling crowd wandered among cockamamie oversized plants made of carved foam rubber and members of the cast partially costumed in masks and wigs, Levi jeans often visible below for the men.

After introducing each of the players, the troop bravely took on Tolkien’s massive fantasy of imaginary creatures and medieval-style quests. A four-piece band on an elevated platform accompanied the actors who spoke, sang, and yodeled. Four video screens carried the live filming by a mobile camera crew—quite helpful, as it wasn’t possible to see everything from any one spot in the theater. The urgency of current events could not help but color the reception of lines like, “Everything’s gone awry” and “How did evil come into the world?” The band shifted into a heavy metal style for a song with the lyric, “I love human blood.” Fish puppets, supported by poles carried by actors, swam above the audience. Toward the end, in keeping with contemporary criticism, the cast explained that parts of Tolkien’s work were objectionable as they appeared to denigrate the nonhuman Orcs, and so the collective had rewritten Tolkien. In another piece by Theater Hora that I’ve seen, individual members of the company stepped forward to explain their disabilities as well as to perform otherwise. Here the thorough integration of the three companies allowed Theater Hora to shine along with differently abled actors from the other groups. The multiple curtain calls at the end were well deserved.

Anton Chekhov’s Die Vaterlosen (“The Fatherless”), also known as Platanov, is a rarely produced teenage work that, unless edited, runs to seven hours. The plot and sentiments are familiar from his later plays: Russians in the countryside concerned with giving their existence meaning while hopelessly chasing love, as they drunkenly celebrate before the family property is auctioned off to settle debts. The four-hour production by the Münchner Kammerspiele highlighted self-conscious theater references (“There isn’t any love anymore, just theater” and “Anything but theater”), drawing hearty laughs. Interstitial, apparently extemporaneous colloquies about some themes in the play were staged as if on a nighttime talk show. The fearless cast ably portrayed the complex personal relationships, and they got convincingly sloppy drunk and sexually careless during their final night on the property. They had a hard time keeping their clothes on.

The production opened in front of a black flat, with cast members drifting in from the audience, but the flat rose to reveal a forest of plastic rods stuck in the stage floor, which shimmered and swayed in the exquisite lighting effects. It was Chekhov updated (marvelous modern-era costumes; this is no period piece), edited, savaged, accompanied by an onstage musician, and yet still faithfully Chekhov, with his characteristic admixture of comedy and tragedy.

Simple, direct, and effective, Rede in Es-Dur, by and with climate activist Luisa Neubauer, accompanied by the string quartet Ensemble Resonanz, took a broad view of history. Not one of the selected ten winners, though part of the Theatertreffen program, this piece featured a spoken text that reached back to the optimism of the Enlightenment to ask how the promise of freedom and political equality of the eighteenth century devolved into the sorry state of affairs prevailing today, as human rights suffer globally, nuclear destruction is ever only ninety seconds away, and neo-fascism inexplicably becomes popular. While Neubauer narrated, the quartet played from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, opus 130. Though the end might be near, Neubauer said that history is still open-ended. A recording of Opus 130 was included in the evidence of human culture launched into outer space with NASA’s Voyager.

Yael Ronen and Shlomi Shaban’s Bucket List, a production of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, is described as depicting a startup named “Zeitgeist,” a philosophical term that denoted the stage in evolution of the collective human spirit at a particular point in history. Here, the Zeitgeist startup promises to erase traumatic memories for an individual. The mostly English-language musical resulting from this idea was a hodgepodge of scantily indicated, disparate personal traumas, e.g. a marriage breaking up because of extramarital affairs, and the lyrics often seemed to allude to the war between Israel and Palestine, too.

The three-piece band and the four players were all excellent performers; if only the material were as strong. The musical format and the choice of English raised the suspicion that the impetus for this mess, a co-production with Théâtre de Liège, might have been to create a show that was accessible to international audiences and might even successfully tour internationally. One problem was that the English was never quite English. Sure enough, the song lyrics can be decoded with some effort, and to nonnative speakers of English it might not make a difference that the sentences don’t quite make sense or are not correct grammatically (“None of that old Freudian bore / A troubled mind. A heart that sores.” “Here in Zeitgeist/We don’t tend to shock treatments.”)

A “bucket list” is a wish list of things to do and places to go that one dreams of accomplishing before one dies. But this show was ostensibly about traumas that remain unresolved, and, though the traumas were briefly presented in song, there was no indication of any resolution or working through the past that might release the psyche from injuries. Likewise, the set design was more multipurpose than meaningful: a pair of platforms with d-shaped backs that the cast moved around sometimes with no apparent connection to anything. The show opened beautifully with clothing dropping to the stage, perhaps the dirty laundry of the past, but perplexingly it was already bleached clean and white.

Consistent with her other work that I’ve seen, Gisèle Vienne’s boring Extra Life dwelt in a morbid world of sexual violence. She has previously staged the literary work of Dennis Cooper which portrays fantasies of murder and torture. Extra Life focused on a brother and sister who, after a party, sit in their onstage car, smoking, declaring a love for each other that suggests incest, continually alluding to being raped by their father, and seemingly encountering an alien from outer space, who dances with them. The barebones background facts were conveyed in the opening minutes, the rest of the show being mostly wordless. The dancing could hardly be more banal (picture typical repetitive side-to-side rock dancing slowed way down), and the equally banal electro-pop music hummed along like a two-hour elevator ride from hell. Dramaturgically, the piece froze after the short opening dialogue. A third figure appeared, presumably an alien being, but nothing happened as a consequence. The only (mildly) interesting part of the show was the laser light effects through the abundant stage smoke.

There were earlier shows in the Theatertreffen program, and some still to come at the time of writing, including a Macbeth from the Schauspielhaus Bochum and the enticingly titled Die Hundekot-Attacke (dogshit attack). Whatever its faults this year, Theatertreffen remains a singular chance to see ambitious theater such as only the German-speaking world can produce.