1 week Ago By Bill O'Driscoll
This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon . Quantum Theatre took a bit of a risk by opening a new stage adaptation of the classic 1920 horror film “The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari” just days before last week’s election. The original silent film, after all, is considered both a critique of authoritarianism and a premonition of the coming rise of Nazism. And playwright Jay Ball’s adaptation, with its heady, play-within-a-play structure and references to Bertolt Brecht, doesn’t exactly play to the cheap seats.
Nor does it reassure its audience everything’s gonna be alright. With electoral anxieties high, how many people would go see this thing, either before Nov. 5 or after? But in fact, says Quantum founder and artistic director Karla Boos, opening weekend at Downtown’s Union Trust Building was well-attended.
And though the first few shows after Election Day were “very rough” both for the cast and in terms of attendance, audiences have picked back up, she said. That’s a good sign not just for Quantum, but also, one hopes, for our ability to process what the country is going through right now. While playwright Jay Ball wrote the script in response to the fraught politics of these past several years, his “Caligari” isn’t any kind of close allegory.
Yes, the heavy is a carnival sideshow performer with an agenda, who’s found a way to control people’s minds. But he’s also a learned foreigner — an Italian in small-town postwar Germany — and neither script nor production references any present-day people or events. Watching a performance on opening weekend, I recalled Ball’s interest in the original film’s historical context.
Director Robert Wiene shot “Caligari” just after World War I, in the early years of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first constitutional democracy. Today, “Weimar” is a byword for not only a cultural renaissance — whose products included the German expressionist art that defined the look of “Caligari” — but also the breakdown of liberal democracy and rise of fascism. As iconically evoked in the stage musical and film “Cabaret,” it is an example of a democracy that effectively dissolved itself in favor of authoritarian rule.
Hence “Caligari”’s reputation for prescience. “One detects in the film a certain suspicion that a liberal politics isn’t going to be successful,” said Ball in an interview. But Ball said he is less interested in exploring Nazism (at the mention of which “thought stops for the most part”) than in delving into the roots of right-wing politics.
He referenced present-day figures like psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, social media personality Andrew Tate, and Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, echoes of whose appeals to “traditional” gender roles can be found in Ball’s version of Caligari.
(Tate currently faces criminal charges of sexual assault and rape by British authorities.) “Gender is such a huge part of this,” said Ball. Art is another aspect.
Just as Nazis would later vilify and censor expressionist and other modernist works as “degenerate art,” so Ball’s Caligari rejects modern forms of creativity (specifically in dance, but for that you’ll have to see the play). With its play-within-a-play structure, a subplot revolving around “shell shock” and even a theology lecture, Ball’s “Caligari” is knotty and provocative as well as theatrically rich. (Indeed, last week Boos, responding to audience feedback, sent an email of historical preparatory notes to supporters on Quantum’s mailing list.
) And perhaps the playwright’s key trick — one of empathy, if you will — is to suggest why Caligari’s case for returning to “simpler” times might have appeal. It’s familiar, it’s straightforward, it seems to solve so many problems at once. In other words, many people want easy answers, they want them now and, like Caligari, they’re willing to do anything to get them.
And as recent events have suggested, that’s not changing any time soon. Quantum Theatre’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” continues through Nov.
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