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Like Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard and maybe one or two other contemporary dramatists, an impending Heiner Müller play invariably invokes the impulse to bulk up with a brain cram of the social, political and sexual history of the entire Western world. Often with Müller, the full 4000-odd year span seems necessary, time permitting; at the very minimum, a crash course refresher on the second half of the 20th Century is mandatory. Müller was a German not only scarred by the time he grew up in (he was 10 when Hitler invaded Poland), but burdened -- some may say enlightened -- by his society's time-honored legacy of doom, death and unrelieved despair. Müller himself remained largely an enigma, both during his life and since his death in 1995. Admired by some as a literary chameleon who enhanced existing texts by other writers with his own singular vision, he has been equally disdained as a dilettante and plagiarist who, in the words of one critic, inhabited the bodies of "host" works like an "historically subversive virus." Regardless of overall opinion of his talent, and despite its undeniable debt to the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, Müller's "Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture" is a mesmerizing piece of awesomely sustained writing strong enough to stand on its own under the closest scrutiny. Written as a single sentence spanning ten or more double-spaced, typewritten pages, "Explosion" is just that: a veritable eruption of images, metaphor and rumination relentlessly expressed in an astonishing display of literary brilliance. Ironically, it is Müller's unrelieved combination of a dense, palpable ripeness layered with vividly literal representations of sexual violence, death and just plain Old World doom that makes not just this text's palatability but its very staging a particular challenge. The Castillo Theater seems to sense this from afar. In an introductory essay in "Explosion"'s program notes, theater founding member and guest dramaturg Nancy Green takes special care to note that "we Americans" make Müller an especially hard sell, being that us damn Yankees "can be resistant to depth." In an attempt to compensate for this rampant national shallowness, director Fred Newman has tailored his "fragmented" presentation of "Explosion" specifically towards American tastes, or as Green puts it, towards "a culture rife with catchy tunes and happy endings." In other words, Fred'll dumb it down for you. This take could be entirely ingenuous -- if undeniably condescending -- on Newman's part, a kind of bring-Müller-to-the-attention-deficit-masses approach. It could also be one of several smokescreens sent up to disguise the fact that Newman simply does not possess the conceptual chops to effectively transpose such a demandingly dense and difficult text to the stage. From the end result it is truly difficult to tell just what Newman was thinking, but anyone who openly lists Milton Berle amongst his cultural influences is definitely suspect. The "fragments" assembled here by Newman under the umbrella title of Müller's brilliant work are an odd patchwork of self-deprecating self-congratulation, a 14-song musical revue cobbled together from several other Castillo/Newman Müller productions, and a large chunk of questionably-intentioned (read: smokescreen) audience participation. The opening salvo in this "Explosion" is a retrospective video of the Castillo's history that seems to go on for about a day and a half, but is probably closer to twenty minutes in length. Breezily good-natured, the video strikes a light, just-a-bunch-of-wacky-kids-makin'-theater tone as it retraces, seemingly day-by-day, the theater company's 20-year history in New York City. Beneath this self-effacing surface, however, lies the blithely arrogant assumption that those who have come to see a work by Heiner Müller would have anything more than a passing interest in this interminably intramural gladhanding. Perhaps in the pre-show background on one of the lobby monitors...? Following the video is a punchy, well-paced set of 14 "Müller-inspired" tunes written by...Fred Newman, but not for this show. Rather, they were cherry-picked from previous Castillo productions of other works by Müller. And, while they may very well be "designed...to put across some rather jarring and politically intense" Müller ideology, all lyrics were in fact written by...Fred Newman. After an intermission in the Starbucks-inspired Castillo lobby where books and other paraphernalia by...Fred Newman seemed to be on sale everywhere, the audience returns to be handed scripts of the full "Explosion" text and is strongly encouraged by the cast to read along -- aloud -- with a video recitation by the author himself. While this may seem to be in the grand old tradition of audience-participation "revolutionary" theater -- breaking down the fourth wall and takin' it to the people and all that -- the real result is that this allows for some very myopic vision and low-impact direction of the actual staging of the text. When an audience is exhorted to bury its collective nose in a single run-on sentence that takes about twenty minutes to read, that leaves very little of its collective attention available to focus upon what is happening on stage. Those not completely caught-up in this postmodern spoken-word Mitch Müller shtick saw, in fact, very little happening on stage. At its most intense moments, the eleven-member ensemble achieved an effectively strident collective cacophony reminiscent of The Doors' "Horse Latitudes", but it was mostly just a bunch of aimless whirling and writhing about; actors doing their best to wing it in the huge void left by some extraordinarily lazy direction by...Fred Newman. If the Castillo's promo video is to be believed, it was at one time a key player in the New York avant-garde theater scene. This flaccid presentation of a devastatingly visceral work only points to the perils of "cutting-edge" or "revolutionary" theater that has settled into complacency and comfort, not of age, but of attitude. An appropriate epitaph to this fizzled "Explosion" is its truly weird musical coda (the aforementioned Happy Ending?): a cloyingly sentimental ballad to the departed Müller written by...Fred Newman that surely would have had the Maestro of Angst choking in horror on his ever-present stogie. "Explosion
of a Memory/Description of a Picture" Copyright © 2003 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |
