LEE BREUER’S CLASSIC COMICS Gerald Rabkin Mabou Mines Dollhouse, adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and directed by Lee Breuer, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, NY, November 8–December 21, 2003. hirty-four years and counting Warrilow was mesmerizing as the narra- . Lee Breuer is still at it. His tor of The Lost Ones, a vision of purga- T two latest pieces—Ecco Porco tory as a “flattened cylinder fifty meters (2002) and Dollhouse (2003)—with the round and eighteen high” into which experimental theatre collective, Mabou are crammed two hundred “lost bodies,” Mines, of which he is a founding mem- each searching restlessly for its mate; ber—continue the categories of work moving about the cylinder’s center, wait- which established the group’s reputa- ing their turn to futilely climb ladders tion in the early 70s: imaginatively pre- to take them to one of the niches or cise, innovative stagings of the plays and tunnels that honeycomb the cylinder’s fiction of Samuel Beckett (an author to walls. The performance was matched by whom the group has remained commit- the piece’s innovative visual brilliance, ted through the years) and unconven- set by Breuer in a claustrophobic cu- tional choral theatre pieces based on bicle padded with gray foam rubber poetic texts by Breuer, labeled Anima- (literally a padded cell). The audience tions. Originally performed in art galler- peered down at Warrilow’s emaciated ies and museums, the group moved presence as he slowly unveiled a small beyond an art milieu into a theatre sculptural representation of the cylinder context when Mabou Mines Presents he described, complete with a group of Samuel Beckett, directed by Breuer, miniature toy bodies. With delicate pre- opened at the Theatre for the New City, cision, Warrilow used a pair of forceps New York City, in the spring of 1975. to position these homunculi in the grooves and niches of the cylindrical That program consisted of two short model. Each member of the audience plays, Play and Come and Go, and an was given a pair of binoculars with adapted prose fragment, The Lost Ones, which to observe the proceedings in distinguished by the modulated power voyeuristic closeup. Beckett’s molecular of its acting and visualization. David purgatory was further evoked by en- 40 ᭿ PAJ 77 (2004), pp. 40–46. © 2004 Gerald Rabkin Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028104323048232 by guest on 25 September 2021 semble-member Philip Glass’s tape- deconstructive critics “misread” literary recorded music, which (as one critic texts: if the ground text—classic or wrote) “seems to be played by electrons contemporary—can no longer reveal an rather than instruments.” unequivocal meaning, the director can recuperate its many voices only through The production audacity of the Beckett the intervention of performance. pieces was also evident in Breuer and Mabou Mines’ concurrent work, the As long as Breuer’s theatre focused on Animations. The Animations’ dependence his own texts or the works of Beckett on a non-narrative visual art vocabulary (perhaps the quintessential contempo- obscured their roots in Breuer’s poetic rary artist) it could be ignored by those imagination. At heart, each piece was unreceptive to new experimentation. But an intensely personal poem, a beast epic when he moved outside of Mabou Mines centered on an animal as protagonist. to accept commissions by the New York Horse, beaver, dog served as dominant Shakespeare Festival, the American Rep- images to illuminate the burdens of the ertory Theatre, and the Brooklyn Acad- contemporary consciousness assaulted emy of Music to direct new productions by an overload of images and social of established classics in established mi- roles. In order to fully realize his poetic lieus, Breuer’s aesthetic was not changed vision, Breuer the poet recognized that by its new classical focus. He remained language—however fragmented and el- committed to the values and strategies liptical—was not enough. He learned revealed in his Mabou Mines work: if from the world of ensemble theatre that all texts are distorted by conflicting the group’s collective consciousness signals, performance reinterpretation is can—must—enhance the literary text. absolutely necessary to recuperate them. He learned from the worlds of art and For Breuer this meant that a new dialec- film that visual imagery carries its own tic had to be forged between the classic signification. He learned from the world text, overlayed by the sedimentations of of music the power of pure, non-pro- history, and contemporary performance grammatic sound. And so Breuer the styles, a conjunction dangerous and in- radical director emerged as the double evitably controversial because it involved of Breuer the poet. For his total vision directorial risk-taking. was and remains dialectical, a synthesis of opposites and oppositions. But if the record of his classic reinter- pretations inevitably reveals uneven es- Without conscious intellectual indebt- thetic success, there are more triumphs edness, Breuer accepted the then ascen- than failures. In his initial extra-Mabou dant theories of literary deconstruction, classical excursions for Robert Brustein’s particularly Roland Barthes’s premise in ART in 1980 and Joe Papp’s Shake- S/Z that “the work of the commentary speare festival in 1981, although the [for which we can read ‘production’], range of his audacity was apparent, his once it is separated from any ideology directorial touch remained unsure. In of totality, consists precisely in manhan- turning to the Lulu plays and The Tem- dling the text, interrupting it.” So in his pest, Breuer chose popular forms as the Animations Breuer “manhandles” his own principal vehicles for textual recupera- texts, for the very same reasons that tion. In his and translator Michael RABKIN / Lee Breuer’s Classic Comics ᭿ 41 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028104323048232 by guest on 25 September 2021 Feingold’s conflation of Earth Spirit and the Delacorte the summer of 1981, Pandora’s Box, Wedekind was translated however, the outrage was much more into an American context—Lulu in widespread. This Tempest was textually Hollywood, New York, and Las Vegas; faithful but even more radical in pro- Wilhelmine repression, corruption, pre- duction: aggressively contemporary (it tension—a vision of a society without was set, “this evening,” the program scruple—was naturalized. The social told us, in “an island in Central Park”), parallels were underlined as language it dressed Shakespeare’s characters in switched in and out of historical time. pop or anachronistic clothing: Caliban Germanic names were Americanized and in ragged jeans, open denim vest and updated, occupations altered to con- shades; Ferdinand in white vinyl jump- form with the dominant milieu of the suit; a Mafia group of Antonio, Sebastian LA media industry. and Gonzalo, with Alonso as godfather, in Palm Beach suits and big-brimmed And most radical of all was Breuer’s fedoras, accompanied by pistol-packing overall production metaphor: Lulu was guards. There were also a female Trinculo presented as a film being dubbed by and a Stephano modelled on Mae West actors in a postsynch studio. Actors and W.C. Fields respectively, and, most delivered their lines on microphone; outrageously, eleven Ariels played by taped sound effects accompanied mimed everybody from a Sumo wrestler to actions. The various scenes were en- small children. The performers—though acted in tacky, portable B-movie sets of not relinquishing Shakespeare’s text— a photographer’s studio, a swimming spoke in a variety of accents ranging pool in Rio, a gothic mansion, etc. The from punk cockney to Mafia guttural to structure and apparatus of the synch Harlem street jive—to the accompani- studio catwalks, sound effect booths, ment of samba and gamelan music. and lighting instruments framed the minimal sets. The “film within a play” Even Breuer admits that he went too aimed at a conscious Brechtian distanc- far, that he “owes The Tempest another ing from the primary realm of action shot.” But the piece revealed the con- which was the Lulu Show itself, a kalei- stant in Breuer’s work: his denial of the doscope of performance “numbers” il- aesthetic antitheses high/low and seri- lustrating the Rise and Fall of the mythic ousness/entertainment, his recognition Sex Queen. that the forms and conventions of popu- lar and folk art are, at their best, as Although many ART subscribers were artistically valid as high art statements. outraged by Breuer’s innovations, and Indeed, they project a vitality that high although he himself now views the pro- art rarely duplicates. Breuer’s muse de- duction as “a little too Hasty Pudding,” scends when the top is down and the Lulu earned much critical acceptance as radio is on. It was no accident that the a radical interpretation that illuminated Animations evoked the denigrated art of its text. But, then, Wedekind’s plays the comic strip. though written at the end of the nine- teenth century are very contemporary By far, his most successful recuperation in sensibility. When Breuer turned his of a classic text, in almost universal innovative techniques on The Tempest at estimation, was his gospel resetting of 42 ᭿ PAJ 77 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028104323048232 by guest on 25 September 2021 Sophocles’ last tragedy, Oedipus at accents. Lear—played by the indomin- Colonus (1983 BAM, 1988 Broadway). able Ruth Maleczech—emerges as a Breuer and composer Bob Telson had strong-willed, mean-spirited blue-collar the ambition to reconnect with the matriarch. Gloucester (Isabel Monk) is high, if recalcitrant, art of tragedy by a rural black woman hosting a house- affirming its religious roots through the hold of dogs, not knights.