Mephisto (review)

Mephisto. Adapted from the novel by Klaus Mann by Ariane Mnouchkine, trans. Timberlake Wertenbaker. The Actor's Gang, Los Angeles. 3 November 2001.

"Why blame me? I haven't done anything. What can I do? I am only an actor." These are the concluding lines of the play, delivered by Hendrik Hofgen, the one-time communist actor in an agit-prop group, who stands on stage as the head of Hitler's Berlin State Theater. He has deserted the communist theater group, his black girlfriend, and his Jewish colleagues for the glamour and opulence of the Nazi regime. He plays Mephisto to the German Faust, onstage and off.

Klaus Mann (son of Thomas) wrote the novel in 1936 as a roman à clef about the decisions the theater artists of his time were making during the rise of fascism. Hofgen represents Gustaf Gründgens, the actor/director who was married to Mann's sister, Erika. The events onstage closely resemble those in the lives of the real players. In real life, Gründgens was reportedly homosexual, as were Klaus and Erika Mann. The black girlfriend signals this unacceptable sexual partner. In the play, as in real life, Gründgens's marriage to Erika dissolves as she goes on to found an anti-fascist cabaret and Gründgens becomes part of the Nazi state. The novel was banned in Germany until Ariane Mnouchkine's stage version appeared in Berlin in 1979. I was fortunate to see that production, where black market copies of the novel were sold in the foyer. Legal debates with Gründgens's heirs finally resulted in the release of the publication rights.

Mnouchkine both wrote the play adaptation and directed the production. The play is composed of short, fragmentary scenes that depict the plight of leftist and Jewish performers, Gründgens's rationalizations, and several actual scenes from the cabaret repertoire. She staged the play in a warehouse. Two stages were set at opposite ends of the building and the audience was forced to turn one direction, then the other to watch. The front stage represented the bourgeois stage, where the so-called classics prevailed: the Mann family played the final scene of The Cherry Orchard in the space which later became the stage for Gründgens's Nazi production of Faust. The other stage presented the physical theater tradition, with clowning, mime and other techniques to act out the stupidity and cupidity of such stock characters as Mr. Capitalist, the fascist housewife, and even a clown version of Hitler himself. Mnouchkine, whose troupe is dedicated to these physical techniques, pitted these two stage styles against one another, to reveal how they supported two contradictory political ideologies. Historically, and in the play, the fascist stage prevailed, while the communist one went dark. Mnouchkine brought the play to Berlin in 1979, in the era of leftist terrorism in Germany. The production sparked debates around what an actor can, in such urgent times, really accomplish, according to his tradition of theater.

Tim Robbins chose to stage Mephisto for his return production to The Actor's Gang, a theater group he co-founded in 1981 with ten of his fellow students at UCLA. Robbins no doubt identifies the work of this Gang with the communist troupe in the play, who studied anti-naturalist traditions of theater in the service of leftist/liberal political agendas. He had just filmed Cradle Will Rock (2000) as a testament to leftist artists in the US in the 1930s and perhaps was inspired to work toward the continuance of their legacy on the stage. The choice of play is daring and brilliant. The historical references require an audience that is either already familiar with the intellectual or political debates of the Weimar Republic, or is ready to read and apply the notes in the program. In an interview, Robbins associated Hofgen's attraction to the money and glamour of the Nazi theatre with his own attraction to the rewards of Hollywood filmdom. Timberlake Wertenbaker's simple, colloquial translation, which...