Trinity Rep's "Cabaret"

Cabaret, now showing at Trinity Rep, takes place at the sobering close of the dizzy, dithyrambic decade following World War I. The show, set in Berlin, begins as the 20s give way to the 30s and the extravagance of the Weimar Republic recedes before the moral stringency of the National Socialists—the Nazis. The party is still raging—its epicenter is the Kit Kat Club, its avatar the dissipated singer Sally Bowles—even as the clean-up crew starts to sweep in from the edges. Written in 1966 and based on the play I Am a Camera, itself based on Goodbye to Berlin, a collection of short stories by Christopher Isherwood published in 1939, Cabaret leans heavily on the audience's knowledge of what happened next: in 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, a position he quickly leveraged to realize the totalitarian vision he had articulated in Mein Kampf. For the characters in the show, then, time is short. If our familiarity with history tightens the show’s tension, it also cheapens its achievement: we leave the theater not so much grieving a paradise lost as pitying the characters who have so underestimated the hell to come. The prelapsarian context charges Cabaret with moral seriousness while absolving its authors of the rigors of narrative, character, and setting. A story that ends in genocide has built-in pathos; what, besides music, can Cabaret contribute to it?

The answer to this is short and simple: Sally Bowles. Bowles is an English ex-pat who has become a star attraction at the Kit Kat Club, a bastion of frivolity in a city increasingly consumed by angst. As portrayed by Trinity firecracker Rachael Warren, Bowles is a marvel of a character, a cataclysm of opposing, or complementary, impulses: to babble and to obfuscate; to perform and to conceal; to connect and to go it alone. On stage she’s plucky and inscrutable; off, she’s fidgety and vulnerable. The central question around Sally Bowles is whether she is indomitable or merely elusive: is her power to captivate or to ingratiate? In a scene that culminates with Nazi Youth breaking into a triumphant performance of the patriotic anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” our eyes turn to Sally, who is watching them with rapt fascination: their politics may be ugly, but their music is terrific. For the deracinated Sally Bowles, whose only home is in a song, this may be too much to resist. By the end of the show, when Germany’s grim future has been amply foreshadowed, Bowles has returned to the Kit Kat Club. She has lost a lover, aborted her pregnancy, and resolved to live in a doomed country; her final song, “Life is a Cabaret,” is a surrender phrased in the language of defiance. Warren, her voice loud, lusty, and lovely, achingly expresses this ambivalence. It is a thrilling moment of theater because it is a perfect crystallization of a complex character.

If only anything else in the show were as refractive as Sally Bowles; instead, we get dull-edged characterization and rubbed-smooth sentiment. The show is about Clifford Bradshaw (Mauro Hantman), an American writer who comes to Berlin for inspiration but who ends up, prosaically, giving English lessons instead. (Writers tend to make bad main characters: as stand-ins for the authors of shows, who wish to be neither self-aggrandizing nor self-incriminating, they are usually saddled with insipid goodness and passive natures. So it is with Bradshaw: he is a blank, but crisp, sheet of paper.) His lover is (inexplicably) Sally Bowles; his pupil is a Nazi named Ernst (Stephen Thorne); his landlady, the starchy Fraulein Schneider (Phyllis Kay), has a soft spot for his neighbor, a timid Jewish grocer named Herr Shultz (Stephen Berenson); another neighbor, Fraulein Kost (Janice DeClos), entertains young sailors in her apartment. It is not clear what world these characters are supposed to represent, except that of the Musical. Certainly there is nothing in this production to evoke the cultural schizophrenia of the era, the competing voices of trauma and arousal, the physical and spiritual disfigurement that made places like the Kit Kat Club necessary palliatives.

Berlin, I imagine, was a seething, pustular city—hence the makeup and make-believe at the cabaret. But Trinity’s Berlin has been treated with an antiseptic: sure, it’s a little wan, but you’d never know how sick it really was. Only Sally Bowles has the desperate vitality of the plague victim. Without a clearer picture of the city’s disease, the Kit Kat Club is just another saloon, its Emcee just another cross-dresser (although, to be fair, Joe Wilson, Jr. makes a hell of a cross-dresser). Director Curt Columbus has brought a cottony humanism to all of this work with Trinity, but that might not be the right texture for Cabaret, which cries out for a telling less merciful. The show is not without its delights; what it needs is more degradation.

Two Tens Gets You Tickets to Trinity

This from the Trinity Rep:

Trinity Repertory Company is pleased to announce that it plans to continue its tradition of making a night at the theater affordable for all by making 5,000 $20 tickets available for the rest of its 2008-2009 season. These $20 tickets will be available for select seats in every performance of every show – from classics like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to newer works like The Secret Rapture by David Hare and the world premiere of Shapeshifter by Laura Schellhard.

(More information here.)

I know that many of us have been wondering how Trinity would respond to the "economic crisis," especially given that, like lobster or a second yacht, theater seems distinctly like a luxury these days. But theater is only a luxury in proportion to its triviality, and this spring season is anything but trivial. Let me clarify that: for all of my animadversion, the fall season was itself no lightweight. Curt Columbus and the actors at Trinity Rep have tried to give Providence a theater that is both accessible and subversive; I appreciate that recent shows, though far from flawless, were presented as sincere challenges to complacency and compartmentalization. Does it make a difference that I thought these imperfect plays were nobly motivated? Are they better plays because they have the weight of principle behind them? In short, the plays may not be better but the experience of seeing them, now, is. That is what the theater is for: to be seen, now.

So I am excited about Trinity trying to be more affordable: the conversation that it hopes to provoke will be livelier because it will involve more, and perhaps more different, people. Kudos to Trinity and congratulations to all the theater-goers who might otherwise, but for the responsiveness of Trinity Rep, have missed a slate of really terrific shows. If you have wanted to go to Trinity but have been intimidated by the (presumptive) austerity of the experience or dissuaded by the price, now's your chance.

The Receptionist, Reconsidered

An early draft of my review of Trinity Rep's The Receptionist began conditionally--you may or may not like the show, I thought, depending on what you think theater is best at, or good for--but a friend of mine discouraged me from equivocating. "You didn't like it," she said. "Don't try to be nice." She was right that a reviewer shouldn't try to be nice, but I was wrong, I believe, to retreat from this position, as feeble and impractical as it may seem. I didn't like the show because it was not exciting to watch; it didn't use dramatic form or language to advance a perspective, a concern. But I have thought about it nearly constantly since last week, and if you think that theater--or any art--works better as nourishment than emetic, then it may be that this thinking, that goes on for days after a show, justifies it.

Also, what I wrote? It was wrong. Kind of.

Adam Bock was not suggesting that theater contorts language and theatrical language obscures real problems, but that people who fail to think theatrically--who do not converse in textured, supple language with themselves--will also fail to make moral decisions. The rigorous consideration that is a part of serious theater, that is, the tortured inquiry of the monologue, is also a part of being a moral human. The one character in Bock's play who is given a monologue, Mr. Raymond, is also the closest to distinguishing between the simulacrum and the real--this monologue, which I thought that the play undermined, is actually its own scene and honored by preeminence. Unlike any other character in the show, Mr. Raymond can communicate with himself; he demonstrates what Hannah Arendt called "a root-striking process of thinking." Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil," itself rendered a limp, if not evil, banality by time and overuse, has already been invoked by critics to describe, and inadvertently simplify, The Receptionist's theme; but none has talked about her notion of solitude, thinking, and speaking: To be with myself and to judge by myself is articulated and actualized in the processes of thought, and every thought process is an activity in which I speak to myself about whatever happens to concern me. Thinking is the conversation between the talker and the talked-to; thinking is a monologue. This thinking, which is, after all, only speaking, proscribes extreme evil. There are no other monologues in The Receptionist because there are no other thinking characters. They have no relationship, no conversation, with the people their actions have turned them into, or the people they once were.

One can fault Bock for failing to find the dramatic in his schematic--it addresses the brain rather than the heart, or, better still, the body. Theater can make us tremble; it ought to be tectonic. The Receptionist is a drama in retrospect--it's like finding out from the news that the vague unease you felt the night before was because of a mild earthquake. That phenomenon is explained, but the problem of having a home on a fault line remains unexamined.

One can also, incidentally, fault Bock for giving the male character this heroic insight and for writing the receptionist, Bev, as the quintessential work-drone. Mr. Raymond's crisis may find him unrepentant, but at least he suffers a crisis at all: it is better, Arendt quotes, to suffer wrong than to do wrong. The worst thing about Bev is that she has no sense of what "wrong" or "suffering" are; she is blissfully oblivious to her own responsibility for her fate.