Time and Again

I was about five years old when I organized some of the neighborhood children to put on a show in our garage on Harrison Street in Paducah, Kentucky. Many years later, I started writing for PAJ. A lot of history happened in between, personal history and world history. I have spent much of that time trying to tell myself the right story about the world and me, including thinking about how stories are told, how languages operate, and what we can call truth.I don’t remember much about that first show, except that I took some care directing the neighborhood kids, explaining when and how to enter and exit the garage. I was keen to use the elevated storage area at the back of the garage as an alternate playing area, from which the actors daringly leapt at the end. With my frequent performances in the religious rituals of my church (the singing, the processionals, the recitations, the public prayers, the readings, the spontaneous professions of faith, and the religious plays we staged there) and school, my childhood was regularly spent on one stage or another. For reasons I cannot imagine, I was allowed in grade school to write and stage plays, taking children out of class for rehearsal whenever I wanted. When the productions were presented, the administration cooperated by canceling classes and sending all the students to the auditorium to watch my plays.Decades later, I was a student in the playwriting program at The New School for Drama. I had arrived circuitously, through a BA in history, a stint in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar, a law degree, and a career as a litigator. Theatre had accompanied me all along. I did undergraduate productions at Yale. While in Germany, as a student I was able to attend marvelous theatre and opera for almost nothing, and my German boyfriend was an actor. Litigation is a combinatory form of extemporaneous theatre. Studying and living in New York, the theatre was always close at hand. I could hop on the subway and drop into downtown, that other world that felt more like me. The clubs—Pyramid, Area, Danceteria, Club 57—were their own kind of performative escape, but the theatre was my true balm. I remember one particularly brilliant night at La MaMa where a mysterious piece by Ping Chong rocked my world.While stuck spending eleven hours in the Chicago airport on a work trip, I started to write a play that was later included in a reading series at La MaMa and presented in Icelandic in Reykjavik. So, I ended up at The New School, whose MFA playwriting program favored the traditional. While exposure to rule-based theatre might be necessary, I was disappointed by the narrowness of the theatre for which we were being trained. It was not the kind of theatre that I liked seeing and not the kind I wanted to create. The description of Bonnie’s course on contemporary American performance at The New School offered me hope that part of the education I could expect in this program was not so restrictive. It was a relief to find the modern tradition valued and contemporary and international theatre explored in all manifestations and to learn from someone who had spent a lifetime in the kind of downtown theatre that truly interested me. The Broadway-bound in my program weren’t quite as thrilled as I was, but I did not care. At last, I felt that I had connected with the kind of theatre that had brought me back to school.A few years later, through Bonnie’s introduction I was able to attend summer classes at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft in Berlin. There I was privileged to study with, among others, Gabriele Brandstetter, who currently leads the institution, and Erika Fischer-Lichte, its founder, who was then directing the program and whose writings opened for me new perspectives on the history of theatre and the way theatre functions as a social experience.While resident in Berlin that summer, I returned to exploring the German theatre scene. I was consistently struck by the fierceness of the performances. The actors seemed to all but project out from the stage as over-life-size figures, filling the room and creating an energy that was so unlike most American theatre. The performances often embraced a kind of wild excess that was intoxicating and somehow also appropriate and able to signify in several codes at once. I recalled that same extraordinary strength from the theatre I had seen in Hamburg when I had studied in Germany years earlier, such as a particularly violent Titus Andronicus, directed by Christof Nel at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. I still recall the horror of the “banquet” scene at the end in that Titus.I began writing for PAJ while in graduate school, covering Elevator Repair Service’s rendition of The Sound and the Fury, Katie Mitchell’s dramatization of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Edward Bond’s The Chair, directed by Robert Woodruff. I had an idea that art performance was turning away from the prohibition on “theatre” and rehearsal, and Bonnie suggested that I expand the idea into book form by conducting a series of discussions with people working in the visual art field who were explicitly doing a form of theatre, with scripts and even professional actors. John Kelly, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, Alix Pearlstein, Pablo Helguera, Ohad Meromi, Xaviera Simmons, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Michael Smith, William Leavitt, John Jesurun, Elisabeth Subrin, and Joe Scanlan spoke with me, either individually or on panels at art venues such as the New Museum and apexart. PAJ Publications then published the dialogues along with an essay I wrote for the book under the title newARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic.It was intimidating when Bonnie asked me for help with translations of two of Heiner Müller’s Shakespeare adaptations. Carl Weber, who had been an assistant director to Brecht and translated Müller extensively, as well as Peter Handke and Franz Xaver Kroetz, had begun work and was planning a production of one of the plays, Müller’s Macbeth adaptation. I focused my attention on the other adaptation, Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome. Müller’s Titus is especially difficult to translate because the unpunctuated iambic pentameter must first be scrutinized to determine where sentences might have been separated in conventional writing, and then which parts of Shakespeare he is alluding to or distorting for his own ends. The lines run most always in rambling lower case but sometimes shift to all upper case for various reasons.The translation, though enormously complex and challenging, was a perfect congruence of so many things that interest me. I discovered something about the voice of a writer through this act of ventriloquism. Translating a script that is so demanding required being immersed in the text in a way that outstripped even my earlier applications of French poststructuralist theory. I could not fool myself with thinking I had found the voice of this writer, but I did begin to feel some sort of kinship. Perhaps it was my familiarity with the text after several runs through it, but I had the feeling that I could anticipate where the writing was heading even before it lurched in that new direction. I had lived inside novels and other writings before. Indeed, literature had always been my refuge, my guide, my survival tactic, my opening to the world, and my way to imagine other ways of being. But I had never so fully entered a piece of writing until this.Moreover, some inordinate portion of my life had been dedicated to learning German. It had been an entirely arbitrary choice to take up the language, but it spurred me on to the study of German literature, history, theatre, and philosophy. Later, while living in Germany, I found that the language could fully occupy my mind: I thought and dreamt in German. Everything I read was in German. I listened to German radio; quite memorably a very serious, well-researched series that ran for several months on the history of jazz. The music was great, and the commentary both academically rigorous and publicly accessible—a slice of mostly American history in German.And naturally, my lifelong interest in experimental theatre was well met in attempting to render Müller’s often raw and disjointed text in English. I wanted to preserve the feeling of the writing in German, in addition to the quoted fragments of Shakespeare and Müller’s narrative additions, changes, and historical allusions. I didn’t give much thought to how the play could be staged, which in retrospect might have been a good thing. It could well have been a hindrance to consider this daunting aspect of the work, since the text is already open in so many ways. It is plagued by long speeches and frightening directness as well as obscurity. Though humorous in spots and with the occasional pun, the play may feel like a long cry of pain with attendant physical violence, possibly unendurable in performance.PAJ Publications published the Titus translation along with Macbeth under the title Heiner Müller After Shakespeare. It was a dream come true when a reading of the translation was presented at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY. The distinguished avant-garde director Robert Woodruff led a fantastic cast that included the amazing actors Bill Camp and Reg E. Cathey. The translation has yet to receive a stage production, but I remain hopeful that this part of my dream may yet come to life. After translating the impossible in Müller, I have since felt confident to translate for other publishers, such as Seven Stories Press and Norton.Under the journal’s auspices and eventual publication of my articles, I have several times traveled to Berlin for the annual roundup of the ten best German-language productions of the past year, as selected by a panel of critics and then restaged as a festival under the title “Theatertreffen.” Besides the intensity of the performances, the Theatertreffen productions are usually marked by an acute political consciousness. Perhaps being in Berlin also always reinforces the sense of historical context for me. Though after the Wall came down the city has gradually healed the scars that marked the separation between east and west, the divisions within the society remain.Lately in Germany, that separation has expressed itself in the renaissance of neo-fascism, the surge of the so-called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which recently finished with remarkable strength in the European parliament elections, even after it was revealed that high-level functionaries had taken bribes from the Chinese and Russian governments and others had violated German law by using Nazi slogans to advocate for racial purification at the party’s meetings. Separately, members of the so-called Reichsbürger group planned to take over the government in a coup and install a member of the aristocracy as regent; they are now going on trial for the attempt to subvert the government and other crimes. Plus, politicians have been physically assaulted across the country.While in Berlin this year for Theatertreffen, it was sometimes possible to think of the AfD as a phenomenon that had nothing to do with me. It was part of another history, not mine: Germany, not America; authoritarianism, not democracy. But one of the festival selections, by playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, looked back to ancient Greece in the second installment of his Anthropolis series, with the astonishing actress Lina Beckmann. Laios is the prequel to Oedipus. Jocasta is married to King Laios but won’t give him a child because of dark forebodings. Beckmann alone incorporated the terror of the story as manifested in all the characters, working on a mostly empty stage. These quasi-mythical histories might seem irrelevant to a purportedly democratic society such as America, but the right wing in the U.S. is flirting openly with authoritarianism in both its rhetoric and its plans to govern. Already, the Christian right talks of suspending the U.S. Constitution. Since the orange-haired former president of the U.S. once mused on the record about being sexually attracted to his daughter, even the most far-fetched oedipal plots don’t seem so implausible, nor even dynastic succession.The politics of violence came under scrutiny in another Theatertreffen offering this year, Die Hundekot-Attacke: Eine Vorstellung über Finsternis, Schönheit und Vergebung basierend auf einer wahren Begebenheit (The Dogshit Attack: A Performance about Darkness, Beauty, and Forgiveness, Based on a Real Event), concept by Wunderbaum and written collectively, which drew on recent history in Germany involving what became known as the “dogshit attack” when Marco Goecke, the head of the Hannover State Ballet, took revenge on a critic, Wiebke Hüster, by smearing dog feces in her face during intermission.The current election season in the United States may well see many such attacks, and possibly worse. Politicians of all stripes are reporting threats and acts of violence. The former president has refused to accede to the peaceful transfer of power, should he lose again. A mob invaded the Capitol after the last election, and a coup was defeated more by luck than design.American theatre hardly plays the same role in public life as it does in Germany. It cannot be expected to save us from a bad future. Suffs and Hamilton aren’t going to change the 2024 election. Even in Germany, it is hard to imagine that the stage is going to do much to defeat the AfD. Hope must lie elsewhere. I am eager to see the stage version of this history from a comfortable seat and a satisfyingly joyful distance from the dreadful present.