The Newsletter of Classic Stage Company • Volume 17, Number 2 • WINTER 2014
CLASSIC
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An interview with A MAN'S A MAN set designer Paul Steinberg
IN THIS ISSUE:
FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR:
It was supposed to be a quick little play, dashed off in the summer but it
would be some six years before Brecht’s GALGEI would finally see the stage retitled as A MAN’S A MAN. A lot would happen in those six years and Brecht would undergo a dramaturgical chrysalis of sorts. It is during this time that Brecht would discover his unique point of view, key collaborators and his particular brand of theatre. The result is a play that seems almost giddy from all these new discoveries, intoxicated with itself and its fresh new voice. Reading A MAN’S A MAN is like listening to Prokofiev’s early piano concertos: Brecht, like Prokofiev seems besotted with the revelation of his newfound style and shameless in showing its sudden, infinite virtuosity. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s begin at the beginning, July 1920, when Brecht scribbles the following poem in his journal: Galgei was a solid citizen His head was rather thick. Some villains told him that he was The butter merchant Pick. They were such wicked people To play this dirty trick. Reluctantly he in the end Became the wicked Pick. Citizen Joseph Galgei Born April ‘83 Devout and neat and honest As God likes men to be. The early drafts of the play were still indebted to German Expressionism, but, even at this early age, Brecht was impatient with this form that he had inherited from the previous generations of writers. Brecht noted in his journal, “Expressionism represented a (little German) revolution, but as soon as a certain degree of freedom was permitted, it turned out that there were no free people around; as soon as one imagined one could say what one wanted, it turned out to be what the new tyrants wanted; and they had nothing to say.” But it was
not just a matter of “what” to say, but equally “how” to say it. Brecht seemed to find the “how” before the “what.” The “what” would famously become a Marxist point of view but the “how” was found in the bars, boxing rings, circuses and cabarets of Berlin where a new movement was happening all around him, a movement that G.F. Hartlaub dubbed “Neue Sachlichkeit,” which roughly translates as “The New Matter-of-Factness.” This impulse led to a light, casual, off-the-cuff approach to life and art. It was this impulse that suddenly animated the young Brecht and his new circle of friends and collaborators which included Caspar Neher (the designer) and Elizabeth Hauptman, who became his writing partner on A MAN’S A MAN, THREEPENNY OPERA and THE HAPPY END. Hauptman and Brecht shared a love for English writing and her proficiency in the language helped Brecht transform his GALGEI play, which was originally set in Munich, to the more exotic world of Rudyard Kipling’s India where Galgei became the porter Galy Gay. Brecht had grown impatient with setting his plays in Germany and had already experimented with setting his IN THE JUNGLE OF THE CITIES in the fantastical city of Chicago. This would become a common dramatic trait of his: he would always be talking about his love/hate relationship with contemporary Germany; it would just be in the guise of exotic locales or long-ago timeframes. The idea here was to further activate the audience’s imagination, let them discover the analogy. Brecht was always in search of collaborators and the greatest and most coveted collaborator of all was his audience. And so the original heavy-handed expressionist play became a comedy, Munich was transmogrified into India, and the “three villains” who convert Galgei were reincarnated into three soldiers who “induct” a reluctant Galy Gay into Her Majesty's Armed Forces. Brecht reports that this transformation of his play required “2 whole days, 1/2 bottle of brandy, 4 bottles of seltzer and eight to ten cigars.” The result is a play that is awake to the currents
of a new age, an age of rampant militarism and machines and what this means for a populace not quite ready for the next chapter of modernity. Although it was his fourth play, it is perhaps his first truly “Brechtian” work, introducing us to a gallery of colorful characters that we can now see as the prototypes who return to populate his later plays: the innocent Galy Gay will become Shen Tei in THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN, Widow Begbick will have a future life in THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY after which she will shape-shift into MOTHER COURAGE, and the wily Monk Wang will be the first of a myriad of scoundrels and connivers that will culminate in the infamous Azdak from THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE. At the center of Brecht’s play is his one great theme: man’s changeability. It is first discovered and elucidated here in A MAN’S A MAN and will become the basic DNA for all of Brecht's future plays. It will henceforth come in two modes: the comic and the tragic. When someone changes in a Brecht play, like Galy Gay, then it is a comedy; when they cannot change, like Mother Courage, then the play becomes a tragedy. Just about everything and everyone changes in A MAN’S A MAN, with the central focus being on Galy Gay himself. Brecht’s Galy Gay is a complete innocent unaware of the forces at work to remold him for the 20th Century. In this respect, he is something of a distant literary cousin to Robert Musil’s Ulrich, aka THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES. Gay and Ulrich are human tabulae rasae, patiently waiting for an impatient century to re-script them to its own darker needs. The question for Brecht was never “will Galy Gay change or not?” but rather, “what is the ultimate factor that could bring about such a change?” Change, for Brecht, was inevitable. The real question was always to find the root cause or causes for any social or psychological
transformation. The soldiers attempt a series of increasingly brutal tactics and sadistic mind games on poor Galy Gay, none of which really work. It seems, according to Brecht, that the human spirit is tougher than one might suspect. It is the tragic trajectory of the character Bloody Five who, inadvertently, changes Galy Gay. It is through Bloody Five's outrageous act that Galy Gay learns about the dark underside of relativity, that like acid, it can erode such seemingly fixed notions as name, identity or ideology. In this world, when a Brecht character is faced with the choice between holding onto a name or holding onto life, the only answer is life. Life trumps everything, even if that life is at the expense of one's fundamental beliefs. These things, Galy Gay concludes, are, as a more articulate dramatic character once said, “sound and fury signifying nothing.” Such intimations are difficult to reconcile. They take one to the very edge where relativism meets nihilism, a tremendously difficult existential zip code to live in. Shakespeare will abandon this tragic viewpoint for the more optimistic resolutions of his romances; Brecht will ultimately move away from such a stance and embrace his own idiosyncratic/ pragmatic form of Marxism. From this newfound viewpoint, A MAN'S A MAN became somewhat difficult to defend. Brecht would say to his Marxist critics (who were searching for uplifting stories to inspire change), “If you can change a man for the worse, it means that, conversely, he can be changed for the best.” When his critics continued to press him and ask why he never chose to write such positive types of plays, he responded, “Sometimes theatre has to present NO so loudly that it provokes the audiences to stand up and shout back, YES!” It is our humble hope that this production might provoke you to a similar place of “yes” toward life, change, and the world that so desperately needs our attention. - Brian Kulick, Artistic Director
YOU CAN LEAVE YOUR HAT ON An early interview with BERTOLT BRECHT The following is one of Brecht’s very first interviews conducted by Bernard Guillemin for Die Literarische Welt. It was printed on July 30, 1926 while Brecht was hard at work revising his fourth play, A MAN’S A MAN. Guillemin prefaced this interview with a brief note explaining that he had to “deliberately translate" what Brecht said into "normal language" since Brecht, even at this early age, seemed to have already developed his unique, slang inflected way with the German language. Am I wrong in regarding you as both a poet and a playwright? My poetry is more private. It’s designed for banjo or piano accompaniment and needs to be performed dramatically. In my plays I don’t just give my own private mood, but also the whole world’s. In other words, an objective view of the business, the opposite of mood in the usual poetic sense. So you reject the idea that the author participates poetically in the characters and events he portrays? I don’t let my feelings intrude in my dramatic work. It’d give a false view of the world. I aim for an extremely classical, cool style of performance. I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the
F. Murray Abraham and Steven Skybell in CSC's 2012 production of Brecht's GALILEO. Photo: Joan Marcus.
cockles of their hearts warmed. Who do you write for? For the sort of people who just come for fun and don’t hesitate to keep their hats on in the theatre. But most spectators want their hearts to flow over… The one tribute we can pay an audience is to treat it as throughly intelligent. It is utterly wrong to treat people as simpletons when they are grown up at seventeen. I appeal to their reason. But intellectual mastery of the material is just what I sometimes feel to be lacking with you. You don’t make incidents clear. I give the incidents baldly so that the audience can think for itself. That’s why I need a quick witted audience that knows how to observe, and gets its enjoyment from setting its mind to work. So you don’t want to make things easy for the audience? The audience has got to be a good enough psychologist to make its own sense of the material I put before it. All I can guarantee is the absolute correctness and authenticity of what happens in my plays; I’m prepared to bank on my knowledge of human beings. But I leave the maximum freedom of interpretation. The sense of my plays is immanent. You have to fish it out for yourself… I’m for an epic theatre! The production has got to bring the material incidents in a perfectly sober and matter-of-fact-way. Nowadays the play’s meaning
Christopher Lloyd and Tom Riis Farrell in CSC's 2013 production of Brecht's THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE. Photo: Joan Marcus.
is usually blurred by the fact that the actor plays to the audience’s hearts. The figures portrayed are foisted on the audience and are falsified in the process. Contrary to present custom they ought to be presented cooly, classically and objectively. For they are not a matter of empathy; they are there to be understood. Feelings are private and limited. Against that reason is fairly comprehensive and to be relied on. That’s uncompromising intellectualism!
Why that? Samson Korner is a splendid type and a significant one. I wanted to get him down on paper myself. The best way was to make him tell me his life story. I have a high regard for reality. Not that there are many realities like Samson Korner. The first thing that struck me about Samson was that the sporting principle underlying his boxing seemed un-German. He boxed in a matter-of-fact way. There is a plastic charm in that.
Maybe. I confine my plays to the raw material, but I show only what is typical. I select; that is where discipline comes in. Even when a character behaves by contradiction that’s only because nobody can be identically the same at two moments. Changes in his exterior continually lead to an inner reshuffling. The continuity of the ego is a myth. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew. We have to show things as they are.
And what else are you working at?
I can’t go, you know, till I’ve asked you what you’re working on at the moment.
Yes, and they are all of them much relieved.
I’ve got a couple things I’m working on. The first is a biography of the boxer Samson Korner.
A comedy called A MAN’S A MAN. It’s about a man being taken to pieces and rebuilt as someone else for a particular purpose. And who does the rebuilding? Three engineers of the feelings. Is the experiment a success?
Does it produce the perfect human being? Not especially.
TROUBLE WITH VERBS Three entries from Brecht's Journal
A MAN’S A MAN had a somewhat long gestation period, beginning in the early 1920s and finally reaching the stage in 1926. Here are several early journal entries from Brecht. During this period the play was called GALGEI, the name of the main character who will eventually become the Irish porter Galy Gay. JULY 6,1920 What needs to be brought out in GALGEI is the element of eternity, simplicity: In the year of our Lord … Citizen Joseph Galgei fell into the hands of bad men who maltreated him, took away his name and left him lying skinless. Everyone should look to his own skin. AUGUST 28, 1920 I realize I’m weak on verbs. Verbs are the foundation of drama. Need to build up a vocabulary, watching it like the rolling balls at roulette. I must do better. Meanwhile, GALGEI should stay simple: Just the story of a man whom they break (they have to) and the sole problem is: how long can he stand it. What reserves has he got, what marks him off, what has him by the throat? They lop off his feet, chuck away his arms, bore a hole in his head till the whole starry sky is shinning in it: IS HE STILL GALGEI? SEPTEMBER 29, 1921 Any dramatist attempting to raise the question of preordination had better look out. He is a crow feeding on crow’s eyes. Take Joseph Galgei and the few ideas that penetrate his thick skull. He has no relationship with communication. No deal could be done with him, he was merely dealt in.
THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE ABSTRACTION OF MUSIC & THE LITERAL QUALITY OF WORDS An interview with A MAN'S A MAN Set Designer PAUL STEINBERG You move very comfortably between working on FALSTAFF at The Metropolitan Opera and A MAN’S A MAN here at CSC. Do you think or work differently in the world of opera than in the world of theatre? Do these different worlds change the way in which you think about approaching a design? PS: Not really—but yes, there are differences. One that Brian [Kulick] and I were talking about was the temple door and it needing to make a lot of noise when actors threw themselves at it. I thought, ah, it’s so great to be able to do a set that’s allowed to be noisy! (laughs.) In a broader philosophical way in any musical theatre, the design is often a bridge between the abstraction of music and the literal quality of the words. It has a different place in the structure. But for a play it’s a more one-to-one dialogue with words. The dialogue with a director is a given in either, but I think, it’s interesting because when I do get asked to do plays they tend to be epic. So, it’s not my choice, but I don’t mind, I just go from project to project. Have you designed any other works by Brecht? MAHAGONNY, which is terrific. The Widow Begbick is the full-blown character in that, and it was great to kind of meet her in her first incarnation. It was at the Lyric Opera in Chicago in 1998 or 1999. And SEVEN DEADLY SINS several times. That’s one of my favorite pieces, even though I think Brecht disowned it. I think it’s a great work because it’s only a half an hour long and it condenses of a lot of really important issues
that I think still resonate. It was commissioned by Balanchine when he had a company in Paris. Brecht and Weill wrote the score. It’s interesting because it’s mostly a scenario which can be interpreted. The Weill Foundation only allows it to be done with a full orchestra. I don’t think I’ve done any of the straight plays. Given all of Brecht's theories about theatre and performance, do you feel they have impacted your thinking on any of these plays? To an extent, of course, and certainly to the extent that they are in the writing and conception of the piece. I think his theories are brilliant, but you know it’s like the Bible at certain points. One, I think, can’t be a fundamentalist. He was having a conversation with the theatre of his time and he makes great points, but I think the works are great because they transcend his theories. And one has to approach it with immediacy and sincerity, for now. You know, something like the Robert Wilson THREEPENNY was, for me, shockingly against Brecht’s intentions as I see them. But maybe that’s the point. And it’s been running at the Berliner Ensemble for ten years. It’s one of the most popular shows. Heiner Mueller once said that to be true to Brecht you have to betray him. I think he sets up that situation because he hits you with his plays and with his theories. Unlike Artaud, whose plays are skeletons to try out theories, Brecht is a brilliant writer. And frankly I don’t think his plays always achieve what he’s saying, and yet despite himself they’re rather good
And so that’s where those things come from. The color is meant to be slightly vulgar and intense, and also frankly it’s the world that these soldiers find themselves in which is alien to what they know and so it’s heightened and not realistically observed. The green wood is the forest, the jungle—but I think the kind of forest/jungle fantasy is a kind of melange. Because of course Brecht didn’t know these places, he was just sort of conjuring up these fantasy versions. Can you talk a bit about the Hindu/Tibetan iconography and imagery in the production?
The set of A MAN'S A MAN in progress.
traditional theatre. I think the piece that is the most Brechtian in my mind in the terms that we think of is MAHAGONNY. It’s a brilliant piece, but audiences hate it. The brilliance is so nihilistic and cynical and depressing. People always say they think it’s brilliant and no one wants to see it. Where as this play, or MOTHER COURAGE or CHALK CIRCLE, even with their irony, are kind of very moral, political pieces. One sees a solution maybe at the end. Let’s discuss your design for this project. There’s a color or vibrancy to the design. Could you talk about what led you to that palette? What strikes me is that this play starts out as a fairytale and it segues to the surreal, and then a very serious piece. I thought it was good to start with the fairytale aspect and then as the event unfolds there’s a bigger and bigger separation between the fake world and the kind of jolly, orientalist attitude. You’re kind of left hanging and by the end there is really a huge discrepancy between what is actually happening with the set. The oil barrels came from a reference in the piece where one character asks another where they’re going to fight the war and the other lists several places and says if we’re going to so and so it means we’re fighting for oil. To me there’s no more potent symbol in today’s world than oil as a force for wars.
Well, I think that it’s clear in the text that the characters have absolutely no respect for, nor are they even trying to understand, the culture they are in. So introducing the Ganesh figure in all its humor and vitality and welcoming qualities, I think it evens the playing field for the local culture, which is only represented really by Galy Gay and his wife, who aren’t exactly the epitome of high consciousness. But we also need to understand that the temple is also corrupt. By showing it like this, I’m hoping that we're showing two vulnerable cultures that are clashing. It’s not just one kind of browbeaten group conquered by the British, there isn’t much good said about colonialism in the piece. Certainly with the temple scenes, there are these strong positive feelings about culture. By the time we get to the end you kind of feel the wrath of war, and maybe the local spirit, descending on it. I think it has several meanings. It could be the triumph of Tibetan culture over the British for kind of causing this mayhem, or it’s just a manifestation of the war to the local eyes. That image is also something that was very important to Brian, to connect that to Galy Gay’s transformation. What’s next? Well, DER ROSENKAVALIER in Glyndebourne, and we’re just finishing a model that I have to take to Antwerp this week for a Mussorgsky opera, KHOVANSHCHINA. It’s really depressing—beautiful, but very grim. It’s as grim as MAHAGONNY. It ends with the chorus of old believers in Russia burning themselves to death…(laughs.) I am really happy to be doing A MAN’S A MAN because I don't get asked to do plays very much.
Anonymous (2) Actors' Equity Foundation Arete Foundation Axe-Houghton Foundation Barbara Bell Cumming Foundation Barbara S. and Benjamin M. Cardozo Foundation The Bay and Paul Foundations The Bouncer Foundation Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation The Chervenak-Nunnallé Foundation Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP The Diller - von Furstenberg Family Foundation The Don and Maggie Buchwald Foundation The Dorothy Loudon Foundation The Dorothy Strelsin Foundation Dramatists Guild Fund The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation The Friars Foundation Gardner Grout Foundation The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Ironbound Partners Fund LLC Janet Yaseen Foundation Lucille Lortel Foundation Michael Tuch Foundation MidOcean Partners National Endowment for the Arts New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts The Newburgh Institute for the Arts & Ideas The Open Society Foundations The PECO Foundation Pirret Foundation Random House, Inc. Richenthal Foundation Rosenthal Family Foundation The Scherman Foundation Shakespeare for a New Generation The Shubert Foundation Sullivan & Cromwell LLP The Ted and Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund Teeple Family Charitable Fund at the Greater Alliance Foundation TheaterMania.com The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc. Tony Randall Theatrical Fund
2O13/2O14 SEASON FUNDERS
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Special thanks to the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust for supporting Classic Stage Company.
Marc Abrams Paul Blackman Mary Corson Diane Cummings Denise Dickens Steven L. Holley Brian Kulick Debra Mayer Marla Schuster Nissan Maeve O’Connor Nicola Port Thomas A. Teeple
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Matthew J. Harrington Edwin S. Maynard Therese Steiner Rosemarie Tichler
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Lynn F. Angelson, CHAIR Kenneth G. Bartels, VICE CHAIR Donald Francis Donovan, CHAIR EMERITUS
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Greg Reiner
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Brian Kulick
January 10 - February 16, 2014 For tickets, visit classicstage.org or call 866-811-4111 • CSC Subscribers call 212-677-4210 x 11
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