stage and street
by Douglas Messerli
Stefan Brecht The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (New York: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1978)
Stefan Brecht Queer Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1986)
Stefan Brecht Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1978)
Stefan Brecht 8th Avenue Poems (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2006)
Theater historian and poet Stefan
Brecht died, at the age of 84, on April 13th of this year. The son of German
playwright Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Wiegel, Stefan was born in Berlin,
and came to the United States at the age of 17, when his family escaped Nazi
Germany by moving to Santa Monica, California, where they joined the growing
German émigré community. When his family returned to Germany after Bertolt
Brecht was forced to testify before the House Un-
In 1966 he moved to New York City with his wife, Mary McDonough Brecht
and his two children, quickly becoming involved in the burgeoning experimental
theater groups in Lower Manhattan. Brecht performed with the theatrical
performance artist Robert Wilson and Charles Ludlam in his Ridiculous
Theatrical Company.
In 1972 Brecht published a book detailing several of Wilson's
performances titled The Theatre of
Visions: Robert Wilson, printed in English by the German publishing house
of Suhrkamp Verlag, thus beginning what was to have been a nine-volume series
of presentations of what he described as "original" theater: The Original Theatre of the City of New
York: From the mid-60s to the mid-70s. The mind boggles just thinking about
Brecht's grand project, outlined as follows:
Book 1. The theatre of visions:
Robert Wilson
Book 2. Queer theatre.
Book 3. Richard Foreman's diary theatre. Theatre as personal phenomenology
of mind.
Book 4. Morality plays. Peter
Schumann's Bread and Puppet theatre.
Book 5. Theatre as psycho-therapy
for performers.
A. Joe Chaikin's Open Theatre.
The Becks' Living Theatre.
B. Richard Schechner's
Performance Group. Andre Gregory's
Manhattan Repertory Company. With notes on Grotowski and
Andre Serban.
Book 6. The 1970s hermetic theatre of the performing director. Jared Bark.
Stuart Sherman, John Zorn, Melvin Andringa. With appendices
on Ann Wilson,Robert Whitman and Wilford Leach.
Book 7. Theatre as collective
improvisation. The Mabou Mines.
Book 8. Black theatre and music. With notes on the Duo Theatre and
M. van Peebles.
Book 9. Dance. Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk,
Douglas Dunn. With a note on Ping Chong.
One can only imagine, had he
accomplished this project, how much richer would be the history of our cultural
heritage. As it happened, Brecht was able only to complete three of these
volumes, The Theatre of Visions: Robert
Wilson, Queer Theater, and Peter
Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre. At the time of his death his was
working on the Richard Foreman study.
To call these books "studies," however, would be
inappropriate. Each of the volumes differ from the others, but all combine
painstaking detail with an often irritating style that frequently overwhelms the
works he is attempting to describe.
The Robert Wilson book, for example, consists of minute-by-minute
descriptions of the performances, along with charts and maps, and Wilson's own
notes that takes us through each production. These detailed descriptions,
moreover, share each page with long footnotes describing events in even greater
detail and explaining variations in the text.
Brecht's description of Wilson's renowned Einstein on the Beach, for example begins:
K 151
18.31
On the horizontal grey rectangle of
the drop, (ft 52: American premiere of Robert Wilson's and Phil Glass' Einstein on the Beach: November 21,
1976, at the New York Metropolitan Opera. I am here describing the second
performance, in the same place, the following Sunday, Nov. 28th, but include
data re the first), doubly framed in black, enormous, at the lower right a
smaller, fatter, almost square rectangle, pasted to it, projector light that
seems to spill over, a white rug, on the floor beneath the two women seated in
front of its, a Caucasian 9the dancer Lucinda Childs) and a Negro (Sheryl
Sutton, a Wilsonian performer),the latter immobile, hands in lap, the former,
within the maintained pose, shifting: contrast of self-contained quietude in
concentration to tension imperfectly imposed on nervous agitation. (ft 53:
Wilson has maintained them in this contrast, analogous, relative to light, to
that of back to white, through the play except for the concluding >knee<
(tho' act IV is such as to preclude its being in evidence). Self-contained
black is to Wilson not negative. It is his own color.) A sustained organ note, the space-filling sound of a present awareness,
accompanies it (in the pit, by pale-green lights, the console awareness of an
electric organ is visible).
All that in the very first moment of
the work! After 59 pages of that kind of writing, on some of which there is
only one line of text, the rest given over to footnotes, one feels utterly
exhausted, although perhaps one can conjure up the "vision" at the
heart of Wilson's piece. Yet Brecht's conclusion to all his attentive
description is a simple thumbs down dismissal of the work:
Wilson failed to find images
for what was on his mind. The themes he
hit on do not relate to the
content. He changed his style to divorce
the spectacle from its
content. Watching it, we see the meaningless
alteration of meaningless
themes, and perhaps the theme of failure.
Arguably, it may be beneficial to have such a thorough-going historian
treat his work with a kind of love-hate relationship. For all of his obvious
devotion to the experimental theater on which he writes, Brecht never makes
easy assumptions.
For example, in Queer Theater,
he maintains that as the gay theater got better, as it more artfully organized
its childish yet energized low comedy and burlesque into formal artifice, the
works became more popular but less interesting, that, in some senses, although
they were better structured, the plays "fell apart."
After a description of the work of Jack Smith, notes on the earliest
productions of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, an analysis of "the gesture
of hatred" works of John Vaccaro, and the "gesture of
compassion" works of Charles Ludlam, and a brief summary of Ronald Tavel's
career, Brecht ends this fascinating work with three pieces on The Hot Peaches,
a discussion of Larry Ree's Original Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company and Les
Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, and a piece on John Waters.
In this volume Brecht has replaced his detailed scenarios with broader,
but even more baroque, personal evaluations of the works he has seen:
Still in the flush of his first
imperfection broadcasting untellable riches,
Charles [Ludlam] immediately
without hesitation entered his Classic period,
putting on Whores of Babylon (by Bill Vehr) and then Turds in Hell (based
on an
idea of Bill's), grandiose Christian moralities, personal pictures of
homosexual misery in the grand format of
existential maps. The party-going
camouflage of naive fun shed, no longer in
a living-out on stage, their opulent
disorder, aristocratic crudity,
unostentatious shamelessness was the adequate
form
of a content in ideal beauty, which is why i use the word >classic< in
spite
of these plays being Romantic outcries of panic anxiety and disgust.
Their poetic despair of an awful misogyny
is passionate in their images and
their
just disorder.
He then goes on to more specifically
describe the play at hand.
If the overlaying metaphors of the paragraph above seem to present a
kind of thicket of words through which one must make his or her way to get to
the heart of Brecht's observations, there are other times in his writing that
one feels Brecht's academic training crowding out any heady gush of lively
expression:
Sentimentality is a
predisposition to uncircumspect, though conventionally
prescribed, feelings of
tenderness of a mind and approving, through
possibly compassionate sort,
more indulged in for their own sake, i.e. with
a hypocrisy, because they feel agreeable and reflect credit on oneself,
than stimulus to generous action.
More often, however, some of these
impacted sentences quite brilliantly reveal the theater to which he is
attending:
Remarkably, this sentimental
appeal of Ludlam's clean and pure sentimental
poses, —not camped up, neither
exaggerated nor twisted, nor played in
quotational style, —was not
destroyed either by their being recognisable
derivatives from films shown at
night on TV, and from old films at that,
that is, in a style of
expression gone out of style in art and in life, given up
together with the ideal of
woman as fulfilled by her sacrifice of herself to man
and procreation, nor by their
isolation in an ornate setting of stridently
ambiguous poses of enviously
competitive, ridiculing adoration of woman
as powerful sex-object.
Similarly, a comment on playwright Ronald Tavel tells the reader a great
deal about most of this the author's works, including some of his early Andy
Warhol movie scripts:
The dialogue [of Shower] was an exercise in the
pseudo-wit of smutty puns,
the author's attempt to
elevate the speech of the boroughs into art, an art
that would provide a kind of
entertainment. This art, though like Oscar
Wilde's an art of speech, is
literary rather that theatrical in that, a play on
language, it focusses the
audience on language rather than character, and does
not create tension or advance
action. The puns hinge on meaning, a not
too clever double entendre,
but Tavel is stuck on sound, addicted to
alliteration.
Accordingly, Brecht sums up Tavel as
a writer of "cleverness," focusing on, in place of a ridiculous
theatre (a term first coined by Tavel), on what he calls a "disgusting use
of language."
In short, although one is seldom given an easy go of it, Brecht takes us
through the various stages of experimental New York theater in a way no one
previously has been able to accomplish. And what a joyful, if some sometimes
carping, trip that is!
One might add that what this artist attempted to do for the theater
taking place mostly in lower Manhattan, in his two collections of poetry, Poems of 1975 and 1978 and 8th Avenue Poems, he attempted to
capture for that same area's streets. These are not carefully sculpted poems
but often raw expressions, not without their own sentimentality, of city life.
a hum in the air envelops the
wheeling flocks of pigeons above the gliding cars,
as a newspaper page in the lesser
format of the tabloids
with agility slips off the
sidewalk.
From another poem:
dream, befittingly disquieting,
the morning's sea throwing the
dream's transtemporal fluidity into city
street's straight line, eerily dissolves
the night's phantom solidity of
matter
into aspect of time....
In a sense, through his very
personal encounters, both every day and cultural, with the American scene, and
despite his European upbringing, Brecht was the most American of Americans. In
a poem title "Addendum" he writes:
I walk here and I don't have to
and I wasn't meant to, the houses
about me always
perfectly clear. No thread ties me
to them, eyes only
that see and they sink into me
and the traffic too and the people
and never become mine
and don't touch me.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
Yet I feel perfectly at home
here.
So you see I am not even afraid
nor merely discontent,
but simply unnourished, myself
not stirring ever
an old man virginal.
This is the truth.
At the performance at Mabou Mines I describe in My Year, I
introduced myself to Stefan Brecht and his current wife, Rena Gill, who were
attending the play. Suffering from the progressive brain disease, Lewy body
dementia, Brecht looked frail, his head and arms heavily shaking. Upon hearing
of his death last month, I again mused what a great loss to the theatre world
that Brecht had not been spared to complete his books.
New York, May 10, 2009
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2009).
