What a Lulu at Yale Rep

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by Allan Appel | Apr 6, 2007 3:47 pm

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Posted to: Arts

Why, when in the middle of an hysterically funny orgy scene at Thursday’s opening performance of the Yale Rep’s bravura Lulu, which turns into a food fight, with whipped cream being smeared over at least five semi-clad men and one desperately mascara-ed lesbian countess, who are all Lulu’s current, future, or ex-lovers, and most entirely ridiculous in their narcissistic idealizing of her . . .why, when she wipes the Redi-Whip out of her big, brown eyes and turns to soliloquize to the audience, “This is the most beautiful moment of my life,” do we suddenly burst into the release of laughter or feel a deep belly ache of tragedy, and perhaps both simultaneously?

The mystery and power of theater is on full display in the Rep’s enthralling production of Lulu, the turn-of-the 19th century German play by Frank Wedekind.

It is part circus (there’s a ringmaster or animal trainer directly out of a George Grosz caricature who unites the seven linked episodes of bawdy and, well, gross, sexual misadventure), part vaudeville, high poetry and tragedy turning from one to the other on a dime, as if you mixed the tone and pace of the Marx Brothers with the naturalistic novels of Emile Zola, and substituted the gorgeous ingÃ©nue social-climbing flower girl turned prostitute Lulu for Margaret Dumont.

None of the men who crave and use her—including her pimping cad of a dad, a callow painter, blustering but ineffectual husband, the husband’s ineffectual son, a starry-eyed writer, the butler, an acrobat with a slipped disk, a delivery boy whose erection enters stage left well before he does, and the list goes on and on—cares a hoot about beautiful Lulu. On the other hand, she’s a user as well. She rises from rags to riches (and then back to worse than rags in the tragic end) through the power she knows she wields not only with the flick of her haunch but with her insights into power-gender relations that sound as if they anticipate Freud, who likely grew up seeing Wedekind, an actor and cabaret singer, stage this work himself in Zurich, Vienna, or Munich.

For example, from the third scene, here’s Dr. Schon, who sets Lulu up as his mistress and is refusing to marry her, beginning the verbal attack, at the end of which to say Schon’s eating out of her hand would be gross understatement:

“Do you want me to kill you?”
“Anything to make you touch me. Go on, go on and marry that fiance of yours.”
“Monster!”
“Yes. Beat me, whip me.”
“Why can’t I die?”
“You’ve conquered half the world, but inside you know the truth. You need me: Hah! Behold the fearsome lion weep.”

Indeed, Lulu is a monster of a play. Between 1894 and 1903 Wedekind wrote three plays, Monster Tragedy, Earth Spirit, and Pandora’s Box, which the dramaturgs, along with James Bundy, artistic director of the of Yale Repertory Theatre, and Mark Lamos the talented director, combined, along with all kinds of Wedekind revisions, into a single script. No one really knows quite how it came across in 1903, but it was enough to land Wedekind in jail for violating public taste, and more.

The sui generis piece is known more generally through its adaptations. This material is all covered succinctly by dramaturgs Catherine Sheehy and Drew Lichtenberg in the program notes—particularly an opera by Alban Berg from 1929 and the same year the great silent movie adaptation, called Pandora’s Box, by G.W. Pabst, which launched the career of Louise Brooks.

The Brooks’ role of Lulu of the film version—alabaster skinned femme fatale who retains a core innocence that renders her larger and more poetic and tragic than her pathetic gaggle of male lovers and thus also an early heroine of feminists—has been the defining one. But is, in my opinion, absent from this production. And that is a feather in the production’s cap. Namely, that it returns the play to the, fast talking, sexually quipping, one-line, dirty-joke delivering, keeping-the-audience-off-guard world of the fin de siecle cabaret out of which Wedekind’s material emerged. (And which was why Wedekind was such an influence on Berthold Brecht.)

This production therefore feels like a restoration of the genuine article, even though that article has all kinds of styles competing with the farcical, including poetic diction, non-or-vaguely non-sequitor juxtapositions. (Then again that’s also part of the genius of the Marx Brothers, and indeed confirmed in one of the dance numbers in the gay Paris episode, where a member of the chorus line bumps and grinds wearing not much more than her Groucho mask.) And there are even powerful moments of the then prevalent naturalism that Wedekind rebelled against.

What he wanted to do was get to the basics of human nature that lie beneath appearances and especially time-bound fashions, even the then nascent and politically correct liberation of women, about which Wedekind seems to have been of two minds, to say the least. In this exploration of basic instincts, which include the push-and-pull equally in both our directions, toward the outhouse as well as the throne of God, all classes, from whores to bankers, are, in Wedkind’s highly theatrical calculus, united. Thus all their ugliness and self-destructiveness and contrariness, and, yes, the beauty and poetry of their struggle and longing are on quicksilver, side-by-side display..

That’s why the play, in the hands of a director less talented than Mark Lamos—and actors of the skill of Breinin Bryant, who plays Lulu, or Felicity Jones (pictured at the after-party), who plays Countess Gescwitz—would seem a mess. Here, the controlled mess, the monstrosity, if you will, seems like, well, life itself. The greater the stakes, the faster and funnier the farce, and this production is a heart-breaking romp.

Even in the penultimate scene, after Lulu has been killed by a Jack the Ripper-esque john (and before he slices out and holds aloft the bloody trophy of her sexual apparatus that has been the target of an hour and forty minutes of raging male lust), the countess, who is the only one who has truly loved Lulu, as she expires makes a heart-rending speech worthy of Lear on the crag (“Oh misery, misery, let me see you one last time before I die”) undercuts it in the next breath, or gives yet another facet of reality to it, by appending, as her last mortal word, “Shit.” Then in the brief coda, our ringmaster reappears, Lulu rises from death, mounts the trapeze on which we saw her at the beginning, and slowly rises.

At the festive party at Zinc after opening night, as the actors, having washed the copious fake blood off their hands, and trickled (!) into the restaurant to appreciative applause, James Bundy explained to a reporter why he chose the play. “I wanted to do something dense, wildly theatrical, very adult, morally ambiguous and also something in the European aesthetic because we do so much in the English idiom here.”

He got almost everything he wanted. Still, why this particular play? “This play has a unique way to access deep human experience through poetry.”

If so, what makes it wildly funny? “Mark [Lamos, the director]‘s take,” answered Jones, ” is that the play is always walking the line between farce and tragedy, and there’s poetry in them both. You know,” she added, “I was in this play once before, in 1985, when it was staged in Minnesota at a small theater called Theatre de la Jeune Lune. At that time I played a little girl. That girl is not in our version of the play. In fact, Mark and the dramaturgs worked from so many versions, showing Wedekind’s revisions, even the “shit” that ends my dying scene might have been a separate ending meant to stand on its own. Here they’re combined. Go figure. It’s really a monster of play, as he says.”

As Dr. Schon says to his ne’er do well aspiring playwright son: “If you’re going to write a play, it had better be as complicated as life itself.” Which is Wedekind talking to his critics and winking to us, in posterity.

The play runs through April 21at the Yale Rep (yalerep.org). The April 7 matinee and April 10 evening performances feature “talk back” sessions with the bloodied cast and creative team afterwards. Those could be almost as much fun as the performance.

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