The Brooklyn Academy of Music‘s Next Wave Festival is on! Lulu, a production by Michael Thalheimer from Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, sold out all four nights that it played at the Harvey Theater. I was lucky enough to have bought one of the last tickets available to Friday night’s show. And all I can say is wow — incredibly intense, incredibly sparse, and very powerful.
The play itself was written in the 1890’s by German playwright Frank Wedekind (whose Frühlings Erwachen was adapted for the Broadway musical Spring Awakening) and it is quite amazing how well it translates into the present. Although the play has gone through many iterations (including censorship before it was allowed to go to stage in the 19th century), Thalheimer’s production shows that “this is a Lulu trapped by her own ambivalence. Propelled by her appetites and both empowered and horrified by her lethal effect on men, she is a heroine for the ages—unwilling to be a victim, yet helpless to stop the carnage in her wake” (BAM).
Thalheimer’s modus operandi is to strip a play down to its core elements, and this production is no different. The stage is empty, save for a large white screen that moves slightly closer to the audience with each act, and the lone prop of the play is a handgun. Lulu, played by German actor Fritzi Haberlandt, wears minidresses throughout the show which alter only in color and slightly in style. Despite her role as “an object of desire, as vulnerable as she is alluring,” she remains clothed the whole time. It is the string of men in her life that are constantly stripping down to display themselves for her. In this play, nudity seems to be less about sexuality than about communicating helplessness and an absurdity of desire and human nature.
The performance was in German, with English supertitles, and the dialogue was rapid-fire and volatile. My German was not good enough for me to keep pace, but the English supertitles skipped over quite a bit of the dialogue and did not always directly translate. I’m sure those fluent German speakers, or those English speakers with no knowledge of German, had an simpler time following the performance. But for someone in between, the disconnect between the performance and the supertitles was distracting. Actually, I kept wishing that those supertitles were in German! My brain would have been much happier with such a one-to-one connection, instead of trying to bounce back and forth between listening in German and reading in English.
If you’re interested in reading more, definitely check out this great review over at the NY Times.