A Performance Community Onstage and on the Street: Castillo Theatre and Heiner Muller's Germania 3

The Castillo Theatre is a theatre that isn't a theatre.

It is a theatre in that it produces plays, sells tickets, and has a membership base. Since its founding almost 20 years ago, the Castillo Theatre has mounted nearly 100 productions by some 20 playwrights, including Bertolt Brecht, Ed Bullins, Aimé Césaire, Laurence Holder, Heiner Müller, Yosef Mundy, Peter Weiss, and its own artistic director and playwright-in-residence, Fred Newman. It has built a diverse, nontraditional audience that fills its small auditorium for virtually every performance. Its 1995 production of Season in the Congo by Césaire was invited to the 1996 25th SERMAC (Service Municipal d'Action Culturelle) Festival in Martinique, and its production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade won "Best of the Fest" at New York City's first Midtown International Theatre Festival in 2000.

Having done 11 Heiner Müller productions—more than any other American theatre—Castillo has become the main stage for the work of Müller in the United States. Some of these productions have been directed by distinguished colleagues of Müller's. Joseph Szeiler, artistic director of Vienna's Angelus Novus, directed Explosion of a Memory (Description of a Picture) at Castillo in 1987. Stephan Suschke, a protégé ofMüller's at the Berliner Ensemble, directed medeamaterial at Castillo in 1997. However, it is for the productions directed by its artistic director Fred Newman that Castillo's Müller work is best known. These productions are notable for their integration of song, comedy, and American popular culture with the German playwright's dense and often grim texts. While many "traditional" avantgardists frowned on them, Müller himself found Castillo's productions of great interest.

Yet while it has produced plays, comedy nights, and improvisational performance happenings for nearly two decades, in a certain sense Castillo isn't a theatre: it is not an organization whose primary mission is the production of plays. The major concern of the tiny full-time staff and some 150 volunteers involved in Castillo is community building and, in a more general sense, human growth and development. Castillo's improvisational aesthetic grows out of those concerns.

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Anthony Craig in the Castillo Theatre production A Season in the Congo (1995). (Photo by Elena Borstein)

Castillo's eight founders were artists (a dancer, two musicians, three painters, and two theatre people) who found each other through their involvement in various grassroots community groups and left-of-center independent electoral activity. Much of this activity had been initiated and led by Newman, a Stanford-trained philosopher, who has been a community activist and political organizer since 1968.

This group of artists (myself included) raised the question of how to engage the cultural Left, which, like the rest of the Left, was dying. It was out of those dialogues that in 1984 the Castillo Theatre—called, in its early years, the Castillo Cultural Center and named after the Guatemalan poet and revolutionary Otto Rene Castillo—was founded. The shared assumption of the founders was that social change is, in the most fundamental sense, a cultural, not a political, phenomenon (Brenner 1992; Friedman 2000).

One of the earliest manifestations of this founding principal, Centers for Change, a loose grouping of Maoist-influenced collectives organized by Newman in the early 1970s, regularly held cultural evenings and began experimenting with the development of a nonpsychological therapy, later called social therapy. Throughout its history, the community has been characterized by an informal blending of politics, therapy, and performance within an improvisational environment. By the turn of the century, this blending of culture and politics had reached the point that the community—now involving tens of thousands and international in scope—was referring to itself as a "performance community."

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to deconstruct a particular Castillo production. By taking a close look at how a play was chosen, who was involved in the production, how it was worked on, and how Newman directed it...