Superfluities Redux

On culture and theatre, by George Hunka

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Tuesday, 11 December 2007

Man is Man by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Gerhard Nellhaus. Directed by Paul Binnerts. Set design by Amy Rubin. Costume design by Caleb Hammons. Lighting design by Bradley King, Kevin Guzewich and Travis Sawyer. Sound design by Richard Kamerman. Projection design by Marilys Ernst. With Lauren Blumenfeld (Jeriah Jip/Galy Gay's Wife/Soldiers), Tristin Daley (Polly Baker), Eric Eastman (Uriah Shelley), Brandon "B" Goodman (Jesse Mahoney), Natalie Kuhn (Galy Gay), Justin Lauro (Sgt. Charles "Bloody Five" Fairchild/Mr. Wang) and Sarah Wood (Leokadia Begbick). A presentation of the The Elephant Brigade, produced by Rebecca Keren Eisenstadt. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, one intermission. Reviewed at the 6 December 2007 performance. At HERE, 145 Sixth Avenue, New York, 5 December-22 December 2007. Ticket and schedule information.

An honest, insightful, bare-bones production of a rare Brecht play, with moments of sublime beauty and unexpected power

Brandon Goodman, Natalie Kuhn and Tristin Daley
in Man is Man. Photo: Jackie Munro.

This is a play about "a man who can't say no." Bertolt Brecht's 1926 A Man's a Man, to give it the title under which it's best known, is an unusual, transitional work in the Brecht canon, falling between the first glimmers of his epic theatre theory demonstrated in 1924's Edward II and the more trenchant social and economic analysis of 1928's The Threepenny Opera. And in many ways it remains among the more riotous Expressionist parodies and celebrations of individualism like Baal and Drums in the Night: but now, identity is mutable. A simple non-violent porter can be turned into a killing machine within only a day or two, so long as the porter permits it to happen; this mutability is ambivalent. Transformations are rife in the play: a mere soldier becomes an Oriental god, and a sadistic army sergeant is turned into a blubbering subject of sexually-aroused desire when in his civvies.

The theme of transformation drives the play's plot. Galy Gay is a simple porter in colonial India who one day goes out to buy a fish; along the way, he meets three men of a four-man machine gun brigade. The fourth man has been abandoned following a robbery gone wrong, and the brigade needs a new fourth man so that their sadistic sargeant's suspicion can be deflected. In exchange for a few boxes of cigars and a few bottles of beer, Galy Gay cheerfully goes along with the plan, but when the brigade is suddenly forced to pull up stakes and head for the front, the soldiers decide that Gay will have to take their comrade's place permanently -- and so the transformation of a simple porter into a bloodthirsty soldier is begun.

Man is Man is a play rarely revived. Because the play is set among British soldiers in turn-of-the-century India (Brecht was still deeply inspired by the poetry of Kipling and retained a bit of the same colonialist romanticism), most often it's taken as a satire of militarism, an anti-war play. A satire of militarism it is; more broadly, it's a satire of all of society's organisations that reward conformity, and the military certainly ranks among those. It's harder to defend its status, though, as an anti-war play. When Brecht wrote it in the 1920s, the First World War was over and 1933 was almost a decade away; the play premiered in one of the most economically and culturally stable years of the Weimar Republic, during the "Golden Era" of Gustav Stresemann's government. If it was an anti-war play, there was no specific war to be against, and Brecht occasionally takes great glee in the irresponsible behavior of his four soldiers. The bourgeois-socialist orientation of Weimar during those years did, however, reward a certain conformist perspective. One went along to get along, much as Brecht's Galy Gay does in Man is Man.

But the play does prophesy war, and in this The Elephant Brigade's new production of the play at HERE through 22 December, with an eye to its contemporary relevance, is an honest, insightful production. Paul Binnerts' "real-time" production is explicit in its debt to Brecht's own techniques of epic theatre. (The program itself specifies the time and place as "2007, New York City.") As the audience enters, it is greeted by the members of the cast, who approach friends and generally loll about in the minutes before the houselights come down and the play begins; Binnerts' procedure is to keep the performers from fully entering into their roles in the Stanislavskian sense. Instead, they "demonstrate" their characters, distancing themselves from their roles through the use of video and a presentational performance directed towards the audience rather than towards each other.

Justin Lauro, Lauren Blumenfeld and Sarah Wood
in Man is Man. Photo: Jackie Munro.

The question of identity, then, including the identity of the performers with their roles, is central. It's an open question in Man is Man, and because it's open, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The male Galy Gay is played by a woman (Natalie Kuhn), and it's testimony to the success of the staging that after a moment or so this becomes immaterial. Still, the passions about identity that the play evokes sometimes overcome the actors, who enter into emotional moments perhaps more fully than they should, particularly in the second act. When Galy Gay is led through his own fake trial, execution and funeral, the production drops its pretense to objectivity and out come good old Stanislavskian histrionics.

But when Binnerts' production works, it works brilliantly, and its strongest moments come in the same second act that contains its weakest. Justin Lauro's character Sgt. Charles Fairchild castrates himself to protect his military nature (and his nickname "Bloody Five") from the depredations of his own more sensual inclinations; in the Brecht play, the castration takes place off-stage, but here it's onstage, even televised, as Lauro manipulates a small doll that represents his character, tearing off its penis in an exquisitely affecting moment that unites video, performer and prop. Even better is a moment that isn't in Brecht's text at all. Towards the end of the play, Galy Gay has denied his identity to his wife, played by Lauren Blumenfeld; she then takes a microphone, comes downstage center, and coldly recites the lyrics to the 1933 Al Dubin/Harry Warren song "Remember My Forgotten Man" as the music for the song plays over the speaker system. During this simple presentational moment, you could hear a pin drop: a testimony to the effectiveness of Ms. Blumenfeld's fully-realised performance of the song, Binnerts' production and the pain that the realisation of the mutability of human identity can elicit. (She also plays Jeriah Jip, the soldier whom Gay is meant to replace in the platoon, adding another dimension to the complex portrayal of identity inherent in the play -- an inspired bit of doubling.)

Binnerts' utilisation of video provides a new window onto the cinematic quality of Brecht's dramaturgy -- at the beginning of the play, a video camera glides over a miniature landscape; projected onto one of the bedsheets that serve as video screens, the resulting image is reminscent in its crude way of Apocalypse Now's aerial photography. A televised image of a miniature coffin, pulled by a thread past a row of toy soldiers, rifles held silently before them, approaches the poetic. But the production is not entirely successful, and for unfortunate reasons (unfortunate for being merely opportunistic); a brief parody of the behavior of US soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison detracts from the experience, rather than rendering it contemporary.

That said, The Elephant Brigade's Man Is Man is an imaginative production of a rare play that remains relevant for more than its explicitly political messages, something of an undiscovered gem among Brecht's early work. The makeshift design of the production is often resourceful, the comic moments cheerful, the darker moments affecting and approaching the sublime; contemporary composer Louis Andriessen contributes a few minutes of haunting, original music. Among the rest of the performers (drawn from Binnerts' students at NYU/Tisch, where a version of this performance was presented earlier this year), Sarah Wood stands out as the sceptical canteen-keeper, Leokadia Begbick; a character who would reappear a few years later in the Brecht/Weill opera Mahagonny, she watches it all with bemusement, playing her role in the broadly comic mock-trial that leads to Galy Gay's faked death, and Wood also contributes a sadness just right for the production. Sad, but inescapable; Begbick also has the last word on the play's theme, reminding us that Brecht knew his Heraclitus:

Don't try to hold on to the wave
That's breaking against your foot: so long as
You stand in the stream fresh waves
Will always keep breaking against it.

As Brecht might point out, this is true not only for the army, but for all of a culture's other conformist institutions, including its theatre. Sometimes, you don't have to join the army to become a killing machine; just doing your job uncritically, day after day, without saying "no," turns you into a machine as well.