Speaking as a Signal of the Present

How can the theater respond to September 11? Can this act of global terrorism and the ensuing battle be represented on the stage? How do we confront events that defy definition—the unknown and unresolved—without so drastically limiting our theatrical vocabulary that it shrinks to ridiculous dimensions when compared with reality?

A Berlin project, performed only once in a former parish house in January 2002, provided a convincing answer. Speeches after September 11 was a seemingly straightforward reproduction of international political speeches on and after September 11, performed by actors who were directed to represent the speeches only—not their speakers—without historical bombast and, above all, without media images. It'san idea that may seem irritating at first: political speeches as ready-mades for the stage.

The performance began with Jacques Chirac, who, visiting a trade school in Rennes, changed his schedule to return to Paris only minutes after the events in New York. Actor Stephan Korves stands composedly behind a black lectern on a red podium. The idea of Europe's "total support" for the United States is expressed here for the first time; then the actor exits through the audience, accompanied by a bodyguard. The lectern and podium are the full extent of the scenic design, except for some changing background projections that suggest who is speaking, when, and where.The next speaker, however, makes it clear that what's happening is not merely the reversal of a single media-related gestus but the creation of many slight dislocations and striking alienations. Angela Winkler recites George W. Bush's first statement at the Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, ending with a moment of silence: "May God bless the victims, their families, and America." A telegram from John Paul II follows, read by Karim Chérif with a hint of the pope's plodding style. In a reenacted press conference, Bush speaks of the best farmers and ranchers in the world, and shortly afterward Nino Sandow (as Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi) claims the superiority of Western civilization. ¹ Words that were intendedto demonstrate determination and confidence in the days after the attack are shown here almost without emotion and yet are not denounced.

Chirac, Bush, Berlusconi, John Paul II, Sharon, Arafat, Schröder, and Putin: their statements from the first two weeks after the attack are presented in all their nakedness. Director Patrick von Blume and dramaturg Gottfried Meyer-Thoss cast actors whose appearances question what is already known about these leaders; they don't obscure the words by replicating the personae. Their concept: "The speeches are removed from their heavily loaded contexts, which result from a politician's personality, his skin color, sex, age, nationality, and the time and place of his speech."

As embodied by the actor, the content undergoes a transformation. Exactly what changes differs from one speech to the next. Often a small temporal distance of little more than three months is enough to change a context, as the rhetoric of its moment often stands above its quality as a document. These texts are denied the very contingencies that frame and define political speeches. Bush's appearance at an Islamic center on September 17 was an important political signal; the transmitted document reveals above all how hastily this appearance must have been put together. After a well-meaning assertion that the English translation of the Koran is "not as eloquent as the original Arabic," the president quotes anostensibly appropriate message: "In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil." Winkler delivers this statement without overt dramatic interpretation—she simply voices it tothe parish room, where some smirk and others grumble. Each actor, incidentally, receives applause, independently of the content he or she "embodies."

Casting is the most effective aspect of this kind of counterstaging of documentary material. Indeed, some of the world's most powerful men have been cast as...