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"Dreams Against the Cold": Characterization in Kroetz's Help Wanted SCOTT T. CUMMINGS As interest in Franz XaverKroetz spreads and more productions ofhis plays are mounted in North America, increasing numbers of American actors will confront a challenge for which their training does not fully prepare them. Kroetz's characters are deceptively realistic. Like so many others from Zola to Albee, they inhabit a world that mirrors, poetically or photographically, that of their audience. They behave in a manner that is, in Chekhov's words, "just as complex and yet just as simple as in life." Their much heralded ordinarinesswith few exceptions they are unassuming middle-class working people reinforces their naturalism, but they are somehow more than real. Rather than a deep psychology or an inescapable past, Kroetz endows his characters with a self-consciousness triggered by their immediate situation. They scrutinize themselves constantly, as if from the outside, and this imposes on them a duality of character which makes an actor's close identification with his role a .• reductive approach. Kroetz's recent play, Help Wanted, both in its structure and its ostensible subject matter, clarifies this method of characterization and suggests his ultimate concerns as a playwright. Help Wanted, which received its world premiere in January 1984 at Bochum and Dusseldorf, marks something of a departure for Kroetz. Instead of restricting himself to his usual one-family situation which deteriorates over a course ofshort, emblematic scenes, Kroetz presents a gallery ofstatic domestic situations, fifteen in the original, ten in the current English translation by Gitta Honegger. Each one features a different pair of characters, most of them labelled simply "Man" and "Woman" or "Husband" and "Wife." A frustrated man in his pajamas watches his wife as she hurriedly prepares to go off to work. A fidgety man tries to strike up a conversation with a young matron on a park bench. An .insomniac tosses and turns in bed while his wife sleeps soundly beside him. The play offers no cumulative action nor snowballing narrative, only a series of thematically linked episodes. 588 SCOTT T. CUMMINGS This method, Kroetz's materialist perspective, and the play's actual title (literally, in English Fear and Hope ofthe Federal Republic ofGermany), all suggest the model for Help Wallted: Brecht's Fear and MiselY in the Third Reich. Brecht wrote this collection of twenty-eight scenes in exile in the mid-1930s as a documentary of life under the cloud of Hitler's New Order. Drawing on newspaper accounts and personal observation, Brecht's concern was to show the debilitating and humiliating effects ofNazi-inspired fear on the lives of everyday citizens, from shopkeepers and factory workers to judges and scientists. Fifty years later, Kroetz has emulated Brecht and written his own chronicle of fear in our time, focussing on another debilitating if less diabolical phenomenon: present-day capitalism. "What I want to show is spiritual numbness, the isolation imposed on some people by the present system," Kroetz said in 1972.' In 1984, that same system prevails. In Help Wanted as in his earlier plays, Kroetz draws his characters from the rank and file of his native Bavaria, home (for him at least) of Germany's Silent MajoriJy. They are people who get up early, eat the same breakfast cereal each morning, work hard all day, enjoy a hearty dinner, and then settle down for a relaxing evening of watching television or indulging in a favorite hobby. They listen to radio talk shows and look no farther into the future than next weekend. Spirited consumers, they shop atManzinger's, the Munich equivalent ofSears. As one character says, "That is my idea of freedom: I work and I buy something." But what happens when these working people are out of work? Help Wanted portrays the victims of what economists now call "structural unemployment," the result ofjobs rendered obsolete by computer-based technological advances such as robotics and word processing. Prolonged unemployment has worn these people down. The prospect of living on welfare infuriates them. Confronted with "the change from outside to inside," they feel and act like caged animals in a zoo - only they have "a-toilet and a tub." Plagued by a...

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