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-- t2k's Jessica Slote caught a performance of Dario Fo & Franca Rame's "Offene Zweierbeziehung" ("The Open Relationship") in Cologne, Germany this past August, and files this appreciation. Gender politics (or, nostalgically, the battle between the sexes) is an age-old, and beloved, theme in theater. Think of the ancient Greek gender battles of Medea and Lysistrata. Think of Punch and Judy, the puppet plays of the Middle Ages in which (lower-class) husband and wife beat each other over the head, to the delight of all. Think of Shakespeare's great comedies, setting youthful love in motion against the mercantile aspirations of the elders, and drawing on conventions from commedia del arte. In commedia, the battle of the sexes was a comic mechanism that revealed the vertical -- as well as horizontal -- relationships in a class society: aristocratic man and wife were always at pains to cuckold each other, while their menservants and maids were at pains to dupe their masters and mistresses, help young lovers, and unite with their own amours. The husband-wife team of Dario Fo and Franca Rame are masters of the commedia tradition. And for that reason, their play, The Open Relationship (Coppia Aperta), presents an interesting modern conundrum. Fo, author of the masterpiece Death of an Anarchist, among others, was honored for his life's work with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. His reputation stands as a "scourge of authority" and "upholder of the dignity of the downtrodden," as the Nobel Prize organization called him. Since The Open Relationship was written in 1984, the play has been a staple of the German stage, embraced by the theater-going German public as the last word on politically correct gender politics. In the original version, the man is the villain -- the egotistical, self-justifying philanderer -- while the wife is the long-suffering slave of the home. In August, 2005 however, a new German production reversed the roles, making the man, who has lost his job, the suffering maintainer-of-home-and-hearth, while the wife is the liberated and self-serving pleasure-seeker. ******* Offene Zweierbeziehung, as it is titled in German, was presented this past summer in Cologne, in German, in the open air. The stage was an open space in the middle of a small beer garden in front of a charming lake. The lake and the surrounding park, with a long vista symmetrically surrounded by trees and in the distance a leafy pedestrian bridge, suggest a small Versailles. This formed the backdrop. The public sat on steps leading down to the playing area. In the playing space, against the vista of the lake, there stood a flat on which hung some clothes: a man's suit, a woman's skirt and jacket, and a boudoir wrap. A toilet takes center stage. Chalked in on the ground was the floorplan of an apartment: bath, livingroom, and a hopscotch board with "Heaven" chalked in one end and "Hell" chalked in the other. The floorplan included the door to the World Outside. The play begins. A wife and husband enter, passing through the public and beginning to speak, echoing each other, repeating their complaints, over and over. And what is the nature of their conflict? They both claim they can no longer bear being subjected to the indignity of putting up with each other's infidelities: "Come in, what class are you in? Sit down, dinner is ready. But of course you can use the bedroom, our bedroom, actually. Don't worry about me, I'll sleep on the couch. Oh no, the squeaking and moaning doesn't bother me. I'll put wax in my ears!" There are endless accusations, explanations, and recriminations, "slammed doors," retreats to the toilet, and self-justifying soliloquies. No Punch and Judy, these modern "civilized" characters do not beat each other over the head. They do, however, retain some of the characteristics and habits of their commedia forebears. There are the obligatory, melodramatic threats of suicide, followed by the obligatory pleas to desist. There are the obligatory role reversals -- the accusations and recriminations of one become the accusations and recriminations of the other. Suzanne Kehrein plays the woman. Kehrein is the kind of actress you could watch for close to two hours (the length of the play) alone on a stage doing nothing. She is most active --and most interesting -- when she is thinking, listening, daydreaming, scheming. She inhabits the body of the woman -- lustful, desirable, and relentless in pursuit of her own pleasures and her own comfort, keeping her beleaguered husband on hand for her own comfort and convenience and out of some curious loyalty to a principle known as "marriage." Marcus Jakovljevic as the man gives a strong physical performance as well. He's got the unenviable job of playing a modern man: the schmuck living at the mercy of a woman whose desire he no longer arouses. In the commedia tradition of the cuckolded husband, he puffs and wheezes, sucks in his gut, and tightens his belt, but there is only a tattered humor to his dilemma as he vainly tries to stand up for the dignity of his gender. In commedia, this couple would have been at home in the roles of the merchant and his wife. Or, with finer costumes, they could equally well have assumed the roles of aristocrats. In such circumstances, the banality of their conflict would have made for fertile comic fodder, presented in relief against the larger picture of men and women of all the different social classes, from high to low. However, this modern man and wife (their gender roles now revealed to be interchangeable) are stuck in the peculiar modern hell of middle-class marriage, as well as modern playwriting: there is no one else in the world. They are stuck in a flat (sometimes known as a "life"), bored to death with each other. They refer to lives (jobs, family members, drinking buddies, politics), but these are just phantoms, worn-out tatters of a life which also bores them to death. There is no world. Just other flats, other toilets, other couples, equally bored. The stage -- and life -- are devoid of meaning, and there is no hope of change. The public senses this. The laughs are scattered, and begrudging. ******* What is this modern banality -- in modern society, and on the modern stage? One could compare it to the man and wife disaster portrayed in Happy Days (1961), Samuel Beckett's last full-length play, a study in a surreal banality so complete that, provided with the appropriate utensils, many a couple might cheerfully commit suicide at the end of the show. At the beginning of this decade, war is long forgotten, buried (up to its neck?) in the new-found banality of prosperity ... different from the situation in Beckett's towering masterpiece, Waiting for Godot (1948)? In this play, two buffoons (inspired by Laurel and Hardy) inhabit the terrifying banality of a landscape where there is literally nothing, except one tree. Here, the entire theatrical vehicle -- language and stagecraft -- is put to service, shedding a searing, transforming light on the basic question of human freedom: are we not perhaps truly happy only in the role of master or slave? The situation of the Fo/Rame characters in 2005 is, however, more (or is it less?) banal, hamstrung as they still are in post-WWII theater "realism," and the dilemma of citizens of a prosperous society enduring 50 years of peace --with no hope of liberation or change through poetry, spirit, inspiration, or imagination. The German Open Relationship began as huge white high-summer clouds sailed across the Versailles sky and the sun went down. The final scenes took place as raindrops began to fall. The obliging beer garden proprietor supplied a large café umbrella for the public to retreat under. The characters -- and the actors playing them -- had to submit to the elements. After an obligatory climax, man and wife (surprise!) declare their love for each other after all and the woman is left alone onstage to reprise the duo complaints that began the play, now as a solo. This plaintive solo was delivered in a drenching downpour. Rame and Fo couldn't have staged a better ending. "Offene
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