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    At Theatertreffen, the Hobbits Are Yodeling

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    A quirky and joyful play based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books joined weightier works at this year’s Theatertreffen drama festival.“Where is Frodo?” an actress dressed as Gollum asked as she crawled past me, sounding slightly panic stricken. It was the first thing I heard when I entered “Gigantic in Middle-earth” (“Riesenhaft in Mittelerde”), an ambitious immersive theatrical experience inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” The work is one of 10 productions selected for this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual springtime celebration of the best of German theater. To step inside the elaborate staging, which originated at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, in Switzerland, was to plunge headlong into a lovingly prepared yet scrappy version of Tolkien’s fantasy world. As much a playful examination of Tolkien superfandom as it was a retelling of the author’s saga, the show came to life humorously, energetically and sometimes epically with music, puppetry, video, dramatic light, swirling fog and blowing leaves. The audience is in the midst of the action, sitting and standing among the nearly 20 constantly moving performers.The forces required for this extravaganza, a collaboration between Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater HORA and the Helmi puppet theater, were monumental. The show boasted four directors, including one of the Schauspielhaus’s artistic leaders, Nicolas Stemann, who also played piano throughout the evening. “Gigantic in Middle-earth” is a collaboration between Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater HORA and the Helmi puppet theater.Fabian SchellhornThe most memorable performances came from members of Theater HORA. The Swiss company, which works with actors with cognitive and developmental disabilities, has recently been featured in weighty productions at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and in Liège, Belgium, that explored the challenges of living with Down syndrome and other conditions. Here, it was pure joy to watch HORA’s actors embrace their inner hobbits, dwarves, wizards, orcs and elves — including one that yodels!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Well-Made, and Massively Weird: A New Theater Season in Berlin

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      Recent premieres in the city ranged from a spare take on the recent Broadway hit “Prima Facie” to a dose of sheer artistic lunacy.It may be less polished and more rough-hewed than in New York, London or Paris, but Berlin’s theater scene is uniquely diverse, unpredictable and boundary-pushing. Buoyed by lavish public subsidies and boasting a fleet of remarkable actors and daring directors, it is also uncommonly accessible, thanks to low ticket prices and the growing popularity of English surtitles.This season, Berlin’s five main repertory theaters will present a total of 87 premieres, 29 of them at the Deutsches Theater, a storied playhouse that opened in 1883. Its new artistic director, Iris Laufenberg, opened her tenure by programing the German-language premiere of Suzie Miller’s “Prima Facie,” a recent hit on Broadway and the West End that won Tony and Olivier Awards, including for its star, Jodie Comer.The Hungarian director Andras Domotor stages the one-woman play as a chamber drama, with minimal props, stark fluorescent lighting and lots of empty space for his star, Mercy Dorcas Otieno. While the staging embraces a degree of abstraction rarely seen in commercial theater in London or New York, the show is also a vehicle for a prodigious and fearless actress.Otieno, who was born in Kenya, delivers a sweaty and emotionally naked performance as a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault, and then finds herself the plaintiff in such a case after she is raped by a colleague. She carries this intense 100-minute-long show on her capable shoulders and commands our attention long after the absorbing drama of the play’s first half gives way to clunky speechifying toward the end of the evening.A more compelling and disquieting exploration of sexual assault and trauma is “In Memory of Doris Bither,” written and directed by Yana Thönnes and running at the Schaubühne. The play is based on the true story behind the 1982 film “The Entity,” a hit horror flick that starred Barbara Hershey as a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by a malevolent spirit occupying her house in Los Angeles. In 1974, Bither, a single mother living with her four children, was at the center of a sensational investigation into paranormal activity that Hollywood later served up for entertainment.Performed in a mix of German and English (with surtitles in both languages), “In Memory of Doris Bither” does not so much recreate the alleged haunting as examine how the case — and the success of “The Entity” — reverberates. On Katharina Pia Schütz’s sparse set, the interior of a sterile suburban home, a wash of pink wallpaper, carpeting and curtains, the actors Ruth Rosenfeld, Kate Strong and Heinrich Horwitz obsessively sift through memories and try to make sense of Bither’s torment. The play’s horror, it becomes clear, is not supernatural but psychological.My only complaint about this absorbing and uncanny show is that it ended abruptly after 70 intense minutes. Then again, the play’s unfinished quality, its lack of resolution, may be intentional: Bither, who died in 1999, claimed the haunting was real until the very end.Heinrich Horwitz, Ruth Rosenfeld, and Kate Strong in “In Memory of Doris Bither” at Schaubühne.Philip FroweinAt the start of this busy theater season, new plays by two leading German-language writers were elevated by young, dynamic directors who crafted fluid and stylish productions for texts that were rather uneven.The novelist and playwright Rainald Goetz shot to prominence 40 years ago with the novel “Insane,” a nightmarish odyssey through a madhouse. Ever since, he has been a bad boy of the German literary scene, known for a sprawling literary blog and a novel about ’90s techno culture. His latest, “Baracke,” is a poetic, rambling and infuriatingly undramatic play about German history, family violence and the impossibility of finding love.For the work’s world premiere at the Deutsches Theater, the young Swiss director Claudia Bossard has served up a stylistically varied, epoch-spanning staging that provides a gloss on Goetz’s epic grouse while sometimes subverting it. Nine intrepid actors courageously follow their director into battle, even if the stakes of Goetz’s stream-of-consciousness text aren’t always clear.Over at the Berliner Ensemble, there was more focused critique in the prolific German-Swiss writer Sybille Berg’s “Things Can Only Get Better” (“Es kann doch nur noch besser werden”) a dystopian parable about A.I. and the Metaverse taking over our lives. It’s somewhere between a screed, a cautionary tale and a blackly comic satire.Perra Inmunda, Amelie Willberg and Meo Wulf in “Things Can Only Get Better.”JR Berliner EnsembleThe director Max Lindemann floods the stage with digital projections, while actors with illuminated smartphones glued to their hands cavort jerkily on a rotating platform. The characters receive an endless succession of Amazon packages, praise the “great men who have made our lives so easy: Bill, Jeff and, naturally, Elon” and brag about using ChatGPT to write plays. Everything Berg says does seem worrying, but her targets are a bit obvious and the dialogue is often glib.Like with “Baracke,” the production comes to the rescue, with movement, light, outlandish costumes and eclectic music by the Swiss D.J. Olan! It’s another step in the right direction for the Berliner Ensemble, the playhouse that has recently cast off its conservative reputation and emerged as one of the Germany’s most interesting theaters.It has become de rigeur to bemoan the loss of Berlin’s gleefully anarchic and experimental side, most clearly represented, perhaps, by the recent transformation of a famous former squat into the slick photography exhibition center Fotografiska. But Berlin can still be relied on to deliver some sheer artistic lunacy.“Baracke” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.Thomas Aurin“Toter Salon” is a monthly series of short performances written and directed by Lydia Haider and performed in an intimate venue at the Volksbühne theater. During the most recent installment, “Blut,” Haider stood in front of a coffin and officiated a gleefully blasphemous mass, which was frequently drowned out by the droning and often earsplitting score, by the Austrian electronic music artist Jung An Tagen.In her satanic priest garb, Haider also approached the spectators with an ice bucket full of white wine spritzer, which she drizzled into the mouths of willing audience members. For those unwilling to get down on their knees to receive her communion, there were Bloody Marys in plastic shot glasses. Sloppy, underdeveloped and massively weird, the hourlong performance was an endurance test.Yet suffering though the plumes of cigarette smoke, cheap booze and earsplitting music, I was oddly pleased that Berlin’s theater scene could accommodate both this level of experimental insanity and a well-made play like “Prima Facie.” Berlin may have lost much of its famed wildness, but at least when it comes to theater, there’s something for everyone. More

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      Review: A Star Director Takes a Back Seat in ‘The Seagull’

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      Thomas Ostermeier’s surprisingly traditional production of the Chekhov classic came to life via the cast’s performances, and without radical interventions by the director.Konstantin, the aspiring playwright in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” dreams of inventing “new forms” for the theater. Sensitive, moody and a bit ridiculous, Konstantin isn’t exactly a mouthpiece for the great Russian author, although Chekhov was himself out to innovate and reform. His chamber drama, filled with unheroic, frustrated figures propelled by life’s bitter ironies rather than melodramatic flourishes, proved too much for the play’s first audience to bear.Now a canonical work, “The Seagull” remains devilishly tricky to pull off, however, not because Chekhov’s theatrical form still confounds, but because of the difficulty of corralling an acting ensemble to play off each other with naturalness and ease while slipping between Chekhov’s shifting and overlapping emotional registers.In a surprisingly traditional staging of “The Seagull” that opened on Monday at the Berlin Schaubühne, Thomas Ostermeier ceded the floor to the actors, in a production that was free of the directorial interventions or distractions that classic works are often subjected to on German stages. Instead, this production largely came to life with the purest and most economical of theatrical means: the individual and collective performances of the 10-person cast. (The Schaubühne staging is also far tamer than “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” Thomas Bradshaw’s irreverent adaptation, which is transposed to the Catskill Mountains and is currently playing Off Broadway.)That approach may seem surprising for Ostermeier, a director best known to New York audiences for his furious and exuberantly messy reimaginings of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But Ostermeier’s more recent work has largely gone in a tamer, more conventional direction. And so it was with this “Seagull,” which had precious little to do with discovering new forms.There are some updates in this modern-dress production. In the opening scene, Masha, a secondary character who is hopelessly in love with Konstantin, vaped. At one point, the loud engine of a plane roared overhead — the only time the outside world intruded on the characters’ country idyll.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Ostermeier has allowed the Schaubühne’s ensemble of actors to tweak their lines and make them more natural, or contemporary, and this production also includes some rather blunt new meta-theatrical dialogue. (“Why perform the classics nowadays? They sell well.”) The first-act play-within-the-play that Konstantin writes to demonstrate new forms has been rewritten by the actor playing that role, Laurenz Laufenberg. Despite these emendations, this “Seagull” remains surprisingly faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of Chekhov’s original.Alina Vimbai Strähler, left, as Nina, and Joachim Meyerhoff, who plays Trigorian.Joachim MeyerhoffThe most gripping thing about the staging is the space in which it unfolds, an area dominated by a massive plane tree. The seating in the auditorium has been reconfigured and the audience is arrayed around the actors, who perform in front of the imposing tree. Occasionally an actor lies on, or hangs from, its thick branches. Several characters hide behind its mighty trunk; another urinates in it.The actors frequently got up close and personal with the audience members, circling the small stage, or tearing down the aisles to enter or exit, achieving a degree of intimacy that was exciting but not without risk. Experiencing the performances at such close range meant that both their merits and their shortcomings were magnified.Such a gambit only stood a chance of succeeding with a top-flight troupe of actors. However, the cast, drawn largely from the theater’s permanent ensemble, left a mixed impression. To their credit, the cast showed remarkable cohesion — and things never got monotonous — over the duration of a very chatty show, set in a single location. But there was only one standout performance, that of Joachim Meyerhoff as Trigorian, the older writer who ends up running away with the aspiring actress Nina. Meyerhoff, one of the Schaubühne’s finest actors, injected fresh life into his character, a popular second-rater who probably suspects that he’s a hack. His performance was shot through with twitching, neurotic energy, humor, and self-deprecating charm. Whenever he wasn’t onstage, the production glowed less brightly.Laufenberg overdid Konstantin’s temper tantrums in Act I, but found a convincingly pained and broken register for the closing scene. The women in the cast fared less well. As Arkadina, an aging starlet and Konstantin’s mother, Stephanie Eidt’s histrionic performance was pitched halfway between Blanche DuBois and Norma Desmond. As Nina, Alina Vimbai Strähler never fully inhabited her complex and demanding role; her journey from wide-eyed optimism to crushing disillusion seemed largely superficial.“There are no new forms here, but simply bad behavior,” Arkadina comments after seeing her son’s play. The only time you could accuse this production of bad behavior is when Meyerhoff takes a leak against the tree. For the majority of its intermissionless 165 minutes, this “Seagull” is handsome and skillfully rendered, but curiously bloodless, much like the stuffed specimen at the play’s end. More

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      The Best (and Worst) Theater in Europe in 2022

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      The Times’s three European theater critics pick their favorite productions of the year — plus a turkey apiece for the festive season.Matt WolfFour favorites from The Times’s London theater criticFrom left, Samira Wiley, Ronke Adekoluejo, Sule Rimi and Giles Terera in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.Marc Brenner“Blues for an Alabama Sky”National Theater, LondonWhen the American writer Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play crossed the Atlantic this fall, it was the high point of a variable year for the National Theater, England’s flagship playhouse. Set in adjacent apartments in 1930s Harlem, the play takes an unsparing look at a cross section of Prohibition-era Americans yearning for release from the racism and homophobia that mar their daily lives. An expert Anglo-American cast was led by Giles Terera (“Hamilton”) and the Juilliard-trained TV actress Samira Wiley as roommates who talk of packing up and moving to Paris; at the helm was Lynette Linton, making a terrific National Theater debut with a production that embraced freewheeling comedy as well as deep sorrow.Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein’s reimagining of “Oklahoma!” at the Young Vic.Marc Brenner“Oklahoma!”Young Vic Theater, LondonIt was an indifferent year for musicals in London, until the arrival from New York of a much-lauded revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 “Oklahoma!” The dilemma of the farm girl Laurey Williams (a dazzling Anoushka Lucas), forced to choose between the affections of two men, possessed an unusual urgency. And the directors Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein found a primal darkness in the material that made a buoyant-seeming American classic look very bleak. In February, the production is set to transfer to the West End for a limited run.From left, Emilia Clarke, Indira Varma, Daniel Monks and Tom Rhys Harries in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc Brenner“The Seagull”Harold Pinter Theater, LondonThe director Jamie Lloyd revived Chekhov’s 1896 play in a stripped-back, modern-dress production, with the cast seated on plastic chairs against a nondescript chipboard set. The absence of props and period detail helped focus attention on the anguish at the heart of this celebrated work. You felt, more acutely than ever, the thwarted passions that drive a play about artistic ambition and misplaced love. Indira Varma was in peak form as the charismatically self-regarding actress, Arkadina, and she was superbly matched by the Australian actor Daniel Monks as her suicidal son, Konstantin. The “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke made a memorable West End debut as the hopeful young Nina.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” directed by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic.Manuel Harlan“A Number”Old Vic Theater, LondonCaryl Churchill’s 2002 play has been revived many times, but rarely with the scorching intensity that the director Lyndsey Turner and the designer Es Devlin brought to bear at the Old Vic in January. Nominally about genetic cloning, Churchill’s hourlong drama moves beyond scientific inquiry to address more human issues, like sibling hatred and the slippery nature of happiness. In the superlative cast, Paapa Essiedu excelled playing three cloned sons who confront a toxic parental inheritance, as did Lennie James as a father who wants to make a fresh start.And the turkey …From left, David Harbour, Bill Pullman and Akiya Henry in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel at the Ambassadors Theater.Marc Brenner“Mad House”Ambassadors Theater, LondonDysfunctional family dramas are a staple of American drama. But they rarely come drearier and more overwritten than Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” which had its world premiere in the West End this summer. Rebeck, a New York theater regular, gave the play’s choice role to a fellow American, David Harbour; he played one of three children gathered at the home of a cantankerous father (Bill Pullman) roaring his way to the grave like a dime-store King Lear. The writing felt borrowed and inauthentic, and the director Moritz von Stuelpnagel couldn’t lift an evening rife with tired confessions (“none of us had a childhood”) and clichéd plot devices (the belated emergence of an all-important letter). More than once, I groaned.Laura CappelleFour favorites from The Times’s Paris theater criticRomeu Costa, left, and Rui M. Silva in “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.Filipe Ferreira“Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists”Bouffes du Nord, ParisTiago Rodrigues, the incoming director of the Avignon Festival, was on a roll in 2022. He brought several revelatory productions to Paris this fall, none more so than “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Bouffes du Nord. The unlikely subject of the play, which Rodrigues also wrote, is a fictional Portuguese family that hunts down and kills fascists, following a tradition passed down through generations. Is that an honorable contribution to society, as most of the family members believe, or is doing harm always unacceptable, even when fascists threaten democracy? Rodrigues and his cast walk a fine line to avoid caricature, yet the conversations that result onstage — starting with the youngest daughter, who experiences doubts about her right to kill — are consistently thoughtful and engage the audience critically, without feeling forced.The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival “One Song”Avignon FestivalSome of the best shows to debut in France in the past year brought unclassifiable feats of virtuosity onstage, like “One Song,” which played at the Avignon Festival. Created by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop, it was another idiosyncratic entry in the “History/ies of Theater” series that the Belgian playhouse NTGent has developed in collaboration with the festival. In “One Song,” a group of musicians/competitors perform a single song on a loop while doing an extreme workout. (A violinist plays while doing squats and leg lifts on a high beam.) Throughout, as the performers thoroughly exhaust themselves, a male cheerleader and a group of fans take turns encouraging and booing them, while a referee mumbles incomprehensibly in the background. The instant standing ovation in Avignon wasn’t merely a way to reward the performers for their efforts: “One Song” lingered in the mind as a wild, exhilarating study in absurdity.Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan in “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Caberet.”Gestuelle“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret”Paris l’Été FestivalAnother oddball success, “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret” won a number of awards in France this year, and they were thoroughly deserved. The show’s two actors and directors, Olivier Martin-Salvan and Pierre Guillois, tell their story almost entirely through dozens of cardboard objects. Words written on the signs and boxes, of various shapes and forms, explain what each represents — including a “fjord” and a “fly swatter” — and with the help of assistants, Guillois, a lithe, clownlike figure, in boxer shorts throughout, manipulates them at lightning speed. In the tale he spins, Martin-Salvan’s character goes on an adventure around Europe to reconnect with a siren, all the while mumbling in a mix of gibberish and English. How does this all add up, you ask? The duo’s fantasy world coheres thanks to extraordinary stagecraft in this “cardboard cabaret,” and the result is serious theater magic.Juliette Speck as Caster Semenya, the South African runner and Olympic gold medalist, in “Free Will,” directed by Julie Bertin at the Théâtre Dunois. Simon Gosselin“Free Will”Théâtre Dunois, ParisTheaters that cater to young people often fly under the critical radar. With Léa Girardet and Julie Bertin’s “Free Will,” however, the Théâtre Dunois in Paris landed a hit for all ages. This new play explored the life of the South African runner Caster Semenya, an Olympic gold medalist caught in a long-running fight with her sport’s governing body — and repeatedly banned from competition — because of elevated testosterone levels. Girardet and Bertin, two gifted young writers and directors, depict the frequently inhuman treatment of Semenya (the excellent Juliette Speck) with instructive clarity, weaving together verbatim excerpts from court proceedings and witty spoofs of femininity standards that even top athletes are forced to abide by.And the turkey …From left, Julien Frison, Denis Podalydès and Christophe Montenez at the Comédie-Française in “Tartuffe,” directed by Ivo van Hove.Jan Versweyveld“Tartuffe”Comédie-Française, ParisThis “Tartuffe” was supposed to launch France’s yearlong celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial in style. Staged by Ivo van Hove for the Comédie-Française, a descendant of Molière’s own theater ensemble, it offered an intriguing experiment: a reconstruction of the play’s 1664 original version, censored by the French religious establishment and subsequently lost. Yet van Hove undermined it with a stultifying black-and-white production that had less to do with Molière than with his own directorial tics. The suited cast was left to wrestle with bewildering character arcs: When Tartuffe, who fakes piety to secure a position within a bourgeois family’s home, attempts to seduce the wife, Elmire, van Hove manufactured a love story between the two — leaving Marina Hands, as Elmire, to take Tartuffe’s abuse with puppy-eyed adoration. Thankfully, stronger Molière productions followed at the Comédie-Française later in the year.A.J. GoldmannFour favorites from The Times’s Berlin theater criticA scene in Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” an exploration of texts by the experimental Austrian writer Ernst Jandl.Nikolaus Ostermann/Volkstheater “humanistää!”Volkstheater, ViennaThe director Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” which premiered at the Volkstheater in Vienna in January and traveled to Berlin for Theatertreffen, the prestigious German theater festival, in May, is rightly one of the most acclaimed German-language productions of the year. This theatrical homage to the Viennese experimental poet and writer Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) is a musically supercharged and visually arresting work from one of Germany’s very best theater directors. Exuberant performances from the Volkstheater’s excellent actors are perfectly calibrated to this gleefully surreal production, in which 10 of Jandl’s key works come to eye-popping life in a Gesamtkunstwerk that combines spoken word, music, dance and pantomime. While delighting in Jandl’s linguistic games, the production, which remains in the Volkstheater’s repertoire, crackles with fresh and euphoric inventiveness. This is the one show I can’t wait to see again.The ensemble in “Oasis de la Impunidad” (“Oasis of Impunity”), directed by Marco Layera, at the Schaubühne’s Festival International for New Drama, or FIND.Gianmarco Bresadola“Oasis de la Impunidad”Schaubühne, BerlinThis show, from the Chilean director Marco Layera and his company, La Re-sentida, is brilliant but harrowing: I don’t ever want to revisit it. A coproduction between Berlin’s Schaubühne, where it premiered in April, and the Münchner Kammerspiele, the rigorously choreographed exploration of state violence is one of those extreme works of art that is all the more disturbing for the delicate artistry of its execution. Darkly comic in some places, poetic or balletic in others, this “investigation into the origins and mechanisms of violence,” to quote the program, feels like being trapped in a carnival of torture and brutality that is profoundly unsettling for the performers and spectators alike.“Crazy for Consolation,” directed by Thorsten Lensing.Armin Smailovic/Salzburg Festival“Verrückt nach Trost”Salzburg FestivalThorsten Lensing’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” is possibly even more astonishing. In “Verrückt nach Trost” (“Crazy for Consolation”), which premiered at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria, in August, Lensing and his group of four brilliant actors achieve something close to a theatrical miracle. The lengthy and often surreal play, which revolves around an orphaned brother and sister who go through life craving love and human connection, is one of the most profoundly moving new plays I have seen in a long time. The work’s emotional impact has much to do with the finely chiseled performances of Ursina Lardi, Devid Striesow, André Jung and Sebastian Blomberg, who guide us through a long evening of unpredictable and incandescent episodes, including what is quite possibly the most moving monologue ever written for an octopus.The “Hamilton” cast in Hamburg.Johan Persson“Hamilton”Stage Operettenhaus, HamburgIn October, the German premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical, “Hamilton,” landed with volcanic force in Hamburg. The first production of the show in a language other than English, it was a herculean undertaking. The ingenious translation of Miranda’s abundant and inventive lyrics took four years, and the cast hails from 13 countries. Hard to believe, but the original Broadway production, directed by Thomas Kail, is already seven years old; if anything, this one seems galvanized by its new language and cultural context. There has never been a show like this before in Germany. From the dazzling linguistic feats of the translators to the convincing and handsome staging and gripping, Broadway-caliber performances, everything about “Hamilton” in Hamburg feels revolutionary.And the turkey …Christian Weise’s “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater.Ute Langkafel“Queen Lear”Maxim Gorki Theater, BerlinGermans love their Shakespeare, and Berlin has seen many fine stagings of the Bard’s work, both traditional and deconstructed. Christian Weise’s goofy sci-fi production of “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater is possibly the most bewildering Shakespeare reimagining ever conceived. The modern-language adaptation is by Soeren Voima, an authors’ collective, and it recasts Shakespeare’s darkest play as an outer-space soap opera with echoes of “Star Wars” and “Doctor Who.” The chintzy, low-budget aesthetic, the hammy acting and the lightsabers are all good, if mildly tedious, fun for the first hour. But hark! There are two more hours to go! The only thing this intergalactic spacewreck of a production proves is Lear’s maxim that“nothing will come of nothing.” More

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      Review: In ‘Who Killed My Father,’ an Inquest and an Indictment

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      Édouard Louis grew up scorned by his family for being gay. Now he sees homophobia as part of the portfolio of “humiliation by the ruling class.”It’s natural to wish harm on those who do harm. When “something heavy” falls on Eddy Bellegueule’s father at the factory where he works, leaving his back “broyé, écrasé” — “mangled, crushed” — it may seem a kind of justice. The father has, after all, left his son in approximately the same condition: mangled by homophobia and crushed by unrequited love.Or at least that’s how I felt after reading the takedowns of toxic masculinity, and of the French provincial culture that produced it, in two memoirs by the boy who grew up to be Édouard Louis. “The End of Eddy” details his harrowing childhood in Hallencourt, a village about 100 miles north of Paris, where his father fumed at his son’s femininity, his schoolmates beat and used him sexually, and even his mother used a gay slur to mock him. In “History of Violence” we learn that the capital city, for all its sophistication, offered little shelter from the same forces; after picking up a man on Christmas Eve, Louis writes, he was robbed and raped.But a third memoir, “Who Killed My Father,” implicitly asks readers, and now playgoers, to rethink who’s responsible and reassign the blame. Published in 2018, this one argues that homophobia — like racism, misogyny, transphobia and “all kinds of social and political oppression” — is not a personal failing but a cultural norm enforced by the state. Less a narrative than an indictment, it also brings the receipts.I don’t know that the one-man stage adaptation of “Who Killed My Father” that opened on Sunday at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn — a production of Berlin’s Schaubühne and Théâtre de la Ville in Paris — will ultimately persuade you, though. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, and featuring Louis himself, it is too eager to show off its avant-garde chic to maintain the prosecutorial force of the narrowly argumentative book.That makes for a strange brew, both riveting and soporific. First comes the soporific: When we enter the theater, Louis is already at a desk, uplit by a laptop, muttering as he types what is evidently this script. On a screen behind him, English translations of the French he speaks share space with grainy, moody imagery, often depicting a ride on an endless, misty highway.At first you may fear that the entire 90-minute play will resemble that ride, and if you saw Ostermeier’s excellent production of “History of Violence,” which St. Ann’s presented in 2019, you will recognize his bag of alienation tricks. Microphones, music, videography and random movement — Louis darts from the desk to two other areas of the stage as he recites — are used not merely to break the audience of lazy theatergoing expectations but also to delay gratification so that it’s richer when it arrives.Yet there’s something to be said for those lazy expectations, including a desire for pleasure even in unpleasant things. Ostermeier gives us tiny appetizers in the form of interstitial dance breaks, when Louis, between heady sections of text, dons a wig or pulls a skirt over his pants to lip-sync the songs he loved as a boy. If “My Heart Will Go On,” “ … Baby One More Time” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” once enraged his parents, they now signify a kind of liberation. And Louis makes a delightful Celine Dion.His father is granted no such liberation. After the accident, his life collapsed; unable to work, and yet forced to work anyway to maintain access to welfare, his health deteriorated drastically. By 2017, when the story is set, his heart “doesn’t want to beat anymore.” He is just past 50 and even speaking exhausts him.Louis occasionally curls up in a recliner, meant to represent his absent father.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot that we hear him speak, of course; this being a solo act, whatever the father says is refracted through the son — and again through the surtitles, if you’re not a Francophone. Indeed, one of the play’s cagey stratagems reduces the father further, to a piece of furniture: an empty recliner with a blue-check blanket, which Louis, now 29, occasionally talks to or curls up in. This representation of the longed-for parent is sweet but also somewhat creepy: He is deliberately kept out of the play.That was true of the book as well, but narration works differently onstage than in prose. In subsuming his father’s voice, Louis eliminates him. Is he, in effect, the killer of the title?In any case, it’s a complex Oedipal complex, and the play’s navel-gazing doesn’t help. Roughing it up with real instead of stagy difficulty eventually brings it to fuller life, as when Louis switches to English to tell us a story he says is too important not to share in the audience’s primary language. Whether because I simply understood him more directly, or because he, an otherwise indifferent actor, had to work harder to deliver the text, this passage was more thrilling than any that preceded it.Notably, the passage concerns vengeance. As we hear how young Eddy revealed a secret to his father that he’d sworn to his mother to keep forever — thus causing family havoc that delighted the boy — we begin to sense the shape of a larger argument. As Louis frames it, family is the template for, and the creature of, the state, with its brutal leadership, its sycophantic enablers, its goons and its subversives. If he got back at the Bellegueules in his previous works, he proceeds in this one to get back at France.I won’t say too much about how, except that in the final section of “Who Killed My Father” Louis offers specific answers, with detailed evidence, to the title question that is not even a question. Provided with magical powers for the occasion, along with a cape and a bowl of bang snaps, he creates a shrine to the country’s evildoers — the politicians of all stripes who made policies harming the poor and unwell — and, in a kind of childish exorcism, symbolically destroys them.However weird and stunning this is as a theatrical gesture, it left me confused about the play’s underpinnings. Having convincingly explained his father’s medical predicament as a result of anti-proletarian politics — “humiliation by the ruling class,” he calls it — Louis tries to connect his father’s homophobia to the same source.Here the logic becomes murky, and by the time Louis offers a formula connecting the two — “hatred of homosexuals equals poverty” — I felt he was doing anything he could to absolve his father of personal responsibility for his prejudices. And though it’s surely a son’s right to exonerate the man who helped ruin his childhood, those of us who took Louis’s earlier books to heart may not feel as forgiving.That’s the real drama here: Louis’s struggle to rationalize, within his politics, the irrational desire to forgive. Still, “Who Killed My Father” is a strange way to do it, especially if you know (as neither the book nor the play tells you) that his father, despite the title, is alive. Just not onstage.Who Killed My FatherThrough June 5 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      A Standing Army of Actors Keeps Germany’s Theaters Going

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      In a country where the director is king, it’s the hundreds of full-time players in the many house ensembles who have assured that the lights stayed on during the pandemic.BERLIN — One of Germany’s best-known theatrical exports is Regietheater, a staging approach that grants directors godlike powers to rewrite and reinterpret plays as they see fit. The aesthetic sensibilities, philosophical preoccupations and egos of directors here help set the tone and define the identities of the country’s highest-profile playhouses. But make no mistake: German’s rich theater landscape is sustained by the hundreds of actors employed full time by the country’s 142 publicly owned theaters, as well as by several private ones.This truth has never struck me as forcefully as in the past 20 months during the coronavirus pandemic, in and out of lockdown, with all the resulting hygiene and distancing measures.One of the main reasons theater here has been able to rebound after repeated closures is that Germany effectively has a standing army of actors, most of whom continued to receive most of their salaries even during the monthslong stretches when stages were dark, thanks to a government program for furloughed workers. This also meant players on hand for digital theater experiments during lockdowns and for live performances in cleverly modified formats once theaters reopened. Now, as theaters once again begin limiting attendance to promote social distancing, the actors they employ are at the ready to play for limited audiences.Long before the pandemic turned much of our everyday reality on its head, house actors have been prized for their flexibility. Most of them are expected to be dramatic chameleons, moving from main to supporting roles in plays by Shakespeare or Sarah Kane as circumstances demand. The number of actors in a theater’s ensemble can vary wildly. In Berlin, the Deutsches Theater has 37 full-time actors, while the nearby Volksbühne employs a mere 12. Most ensemble actors are accustomed to grueling schedules and a grab bag of roles.Angela Winkler and Joachim Meyerhoff in Christian Kracht’s “Eurotrash,” directed by Jan Bosse at the Schaubühne in Berlin.Fabian SchellhornOne of Berlin’s most recently anointed acting gods is Joachim Meyerhoff, a member of the Schaubühne in the capital since 2019. After winning acclaim in productions of works by Molière and Virginie Despentes, Meyerhoff, one of 30 actors in the Schaubühne’s ensemble, starred in the late November premiere of “Eurotrash,” an adaptation of a novel by Christian Kracht that was a best seller this year in Germany.Meyerhoff brings a nervous, uptight energy to Kracht’s autobiographical narrator, a middle-aged son who tries to connect with his estranged mother during a dysfunctional road trip from Zurich to the Alps. The show’s director, Jan Bosse, stages this offbeat buddy comedy aboard a small yacht on an unadorned stage. It’s a delightfully absurd touch that visually enlivens what is an overlong and dramatically thin evening, despite the commanding central performance.During two intermissionless hours, much gets tossed overboard, including colostomy bags, vodka bottles and thousands of Swiss francs, but Meyerhoff’s pained and deadpan performance as a man-child struggling to connect with a mentally ill mother remains the emotional focus of the evening. As the stony, alcoholic and self-destructive matriarch, Angela Winkler is unable to invest her character with enough emotional nuance to make us truly care about the parent-child relationship. In the end, finding the actress onstage in 2021 is itself more moving than her actual performance: Winkler belonged to the ensemble of the Schaubühne in the 1970s, during the long tenure of the artistic director Peter Stein.To see this 77-year-old next to Meyerhoff is to be reminded of the Schaubühne’s long tradition of acting excellence.Less than a week later, I found the great female performance that had eluded me at the Schaubühne in southern Germany, in an unusual production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” that stars the Belarusian Israeli actress Evgenia Dodina, a recently minted ensemble member at the Schauspiel Stuttgart.Evgenia Dodina  in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” at the Schauspiel Stuttgart.Julian Baumann“The Visit,” one of the few postwar German-language plays to achieve international success, has had many lives since its 1956 premiere in Zurich. It’s been adapted for the big screen and turned into an opera and a Kander and Ebb musical. Shortly before the pandemic hit, a misbegotten version by Tony Kushner played the National Theater in London. Yet the Stuttgart production, by the theater’s artistic director, Burkhard C. Kosminski, is perhaps the most unusual of all these incarnations.Dürrenmatt’s perverse plot, about a wealthy woman who returns to her impoverished hometown and offers to make the villagers rich in exchange for lynching the man who wronged her long ago, has often been interpreted as an allegory for postwar European life in the shadow of National Socialist crimes. That reading is made explicit by this fascinating and frustrating production, in which the play’s titular character is a Jewish woman whose being driven out of town in 1940 saved her from perishing in a concentration camp.When she meets her old flame (Matthias Leja, another of the theater’s 31 ensemble actors), they flirt nervously in both German and Hebrew. While Kosminski reimagines the main character’s background, Dodina periodically steps out of the play to narrate, in Hebrew, her own biography as well as her mother’s and grandmother’s wartime experiences fleeing the Nazis across Central Asia. Dodina is mesmerizing as the play’s avenging fury, as well as in her personal monologues, but it’s hard to see how the various elements add up. In the end, the modified and abridged Dürrenmatt text and the actress’s family reminiscences are an odd match, despite Dodina’s committed and captivating portrayal.The performance of “The Visit” I attended was the last that played to a full house. The next day, much of southern Germany slashed the numbers allowed in theaters there. Stuttgart got off lightly with 50 percent of capacity; in nearby Munich, most cultural events can go ahead with only a quarter. But for the most part, theaters, and their actors, have soldiered on as best they can while performing, once again, to comically small audiences.Delschad Numan Khorschid, left, and Steffen Höld in “Absent Dreams” in Munich. Sandra ThenTwo hundred and twenty masked spectators were allowed into the 880-seat Residenztheater in Munich for a recent performance of “Absent Dreams,” a trilogy of plays by the Dutch author Judith Herzberg that is a sprawling saga of an extended Jewish family in Amsterdam. Memories of the Holocaust and of perished relatives loom in the background, but Herzberg is more interested in showing the vibrancy of these characters and their complex relationships than in suggesting that they are hopelessly crippled by trauma. The director Stephan Kimmig’s five-hour production resounds with a kind of epic intimacy that the theater has been honing under its new artistic director, Andreas Beck. The large dramatis personae of “Absent Dreams” are played exclusively by members of the theater’s 50-actor ensemble, the biggest in Germany. For the duration of this long evening, 15 of them populate the vast stage, some in multiple roles.Yet beyond the accomplished performances, which are too many to enumerate, the production achieves a remarkable cohesion from the almost conspiratorial sense of rapport engendered by a group of actors who have been performing alongside one another, in both main and supporting roles, night after night and in play after play.As I watched Herzberg’s protagonists come to life, I could see the engine of Germany’s mighty theatrical tradition at close range. Throughout the pandemic, that dynamo has proved unstoppable.The Visit. Directed by Burkhard C. Kosminski. Schauspiel Stuttgart, through Jan. 30.Absent Dreams. Directed by Stephan Kimmig. München Residenztheater, through Feb. 23.Eurotrash. Directed by Jan Bosse. Schaubühne Berlin, through Jan. 2. More

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      From a Contemporary Drama Festival, Tales of Art and Survival

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      At Berlin’s FIND festival of new international drama, some plays tackle big themes while others reject being useful.BERLIN — Theater, according to the Spanish director and performer Angélica Liddell, is a sacrificial act. In the opening minutes of her new show, “Liebestod: The Smell of Blood Does Not Leave My Eyes, Juan Belmonte — Histoire(s) du Théâtre III,” she takes a razor blade and slashes at her kneecaps and the back of her hands. It’s a “sacrifice in the name of the absurd,” she explains in an online teaser for the production. “It’s not a sacrifice in pursuit of the greater good.”“Liebestod” is the centerpiece of this year’s FIND festival of new international drama at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin, where many of the 2021 entries flirt with the redemptive power of art as a tool for both survival and transcendence.The theatrical persona Liddell assumes in “Liebestod,” a monologue-fueled play about art, religion, Wagner and bullfighting, is loud, angry, self-destructive and startlingly musical.When she’s not singing, cooing or screeching along to Bach, Handel and Spanish flamenco rumba, she lashes out at the audience for their mediocrity, hypocrisy and middlebrow tastes from a sparsely decorated stage whose yellow floor and red curtains suggest a bullring.In extended soliloquies, Liddell rails against the spiritual and aesthetic decadence of contemporary “culture.” Nor does she spare herself from scathing criticism. As a result, the production contains a running commentary on its own status as art.“Liebestod” refers, of course, to Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” The term is often used as a shorthand for the opera’s radiant coda, where Isolde sings herself to death in a moment of transfiguring ecstasy. We never hear the aria in the production, although Liddell, dressed as a matador, recites the lyrics to the stuffed effigy of a bull.While bullfighting is a main trope of the production, “Liebestod” is also awash in Catholic symbolism. Liddell renders the liturgical in ways both disturbing and absurd, including in a scene in which she mops her own blood with bread, which she then eats. There’s also a double amputee dressed as Jesus and a coffin-shaped glass reliquary filled with live cats. Some of these images seem worthy of Buñuel (an artist Liddell reveres), although the atheistic filmmaker would rise from the dead to protest when Liddell endorses theocracy as a corrective to a society built on secular values.Although she lacerates herself and her audience (some of whom left; others giggled nervously; most applauded heartily), it is clear that Liddell considers art a wellspring of holy beauty. And at the moments when her production approaches the high-water mark of the art she so venerates, Liddell makes us feel how dazzled she is.While Liddell performs as if her every minute onstage were a fight for survival, she’s not the only person with work at the festival for whom making art seems a matter of life and death. The Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov spent 18 months under house arrest in Moscow on charges of embezzlement that are widely considered to be trumped up. During his long confinement (and the coronavirus lockdowns that came after it), Serebrennikov has directed plays, operas, films and even a ballet remotely. Much of his confinement-era work has dealt with persecution, paranoia and even incarceration, suggesting a therapeutic working through of themes that loom large in the director’s new reality.In 2017, Serebrennikov contacted the Chinese photographer Ren Hang about developing a play inspired by his arrestingly provocative images. Shortly afterward, Hang leapt to his death and Serebrennikov’s freedom of movement was curtailed. From his living room, he devised “Outside,” a phantasmagorical double exposure of himself and Hang that premiered at the 2019 Avignon Festival.In “Outside,” by Kirill Serebrennikov, erotic choreographies bring Ren Hang’s photos to life.Ira PolarAt the start of the performance, the American actor Odin Lund Biron plays a character who is similar to his director. He converses with his shadow about life in confinement and under surveillance. These early scenes, which depict a version of the director’s Kafkaesque ordeal from the inside, are the most dramatically absorbing in the play. Soon, however, Biron is all but supplanted by the suave Russian actor Evgeny Sangadzhiev, who plays the Chinese photographer. The stage fills with beautiful bodies, many naked or in various stages of undress.Much of the following 90 minutes is a series of erotic choreographies that bring Hang’s photos to life. While frequently arresting, the lengthy succession of tableaux vivants often feels arbitrary in its order and selection.“Outside,” though less hermetic than “Liebestod,” is similarly committed to art that is upfront about mining personal pain for the sort of rare beauty that can produce epiphany. For all of their differences, these two shows reflect the sensibilities of artists who are not afraid to practice their art as an end in itself.“I think that making theater into a tool is death to theater and death to art,” Liddell says in the “Liebestod” teaser. In the context of this year’s festival, that credo almost sounds like a warning to some of the other artists featured in the program.In “Not the End of the World,” the writer Chris Bush and the director Katie Mitchell run the risk of using theater to lecture the audience about the dangers of climate change. Bush is a young, acclaimed British playwright; Mitchell is arguably the most influential English theater maker working regularly on the continent. Sadly, their encounter is ill-fated.From left, Alina Vimbai Strähler, Veronika Bachfischer and Jule Böwe in Chris Bush’s “Not the End of the World.” Gianmarco BresadolaThe play toggles between time periods and plot lines at breakneck speed: a young climate scientist interviewing for a postdoctoral position; a researcher who dies during a research expedition; a woman delivering a eulogy for her mother.To their credit, Bush and Mitchell have consciously avoided making a militant play, but what they’ve given us is so slippery that it’s very difficult to get a handle on.The wealth of obscure or cosmically weird anecdotes that are stuffed into this collagelike text often make the play sound like “Findings,” the back-page feature of Harper’s Magazine that compiles wild facts from science journals.In keeping with the play’s theme, the entire production has been crafted with an eye to sustainability. The British team didn’t travel to Berlin for rehearsals; the sets and costumes have been recycled or repurposed; and the show’s sound and lighting is powered by two cyclists who pedal from the sides of the stage. Yet these facts don’t add much to the production.Another British production at FIND, Alexander Zeldin’s “Love,” also runs the risk of “making theater into a tool.” First seen at the National Theater in London in 2016, it centers on a family who have been suddenly evicted from their apartment and find themselves in a crowded shelter, struggling to maintain their dignity.Janet Etuk in “Love,” by Alexander Zeldin.Nurith Wagner-StraussThere are so many ways that a play like this could go wrong, but “Love” is neither earnest nor preachy. The themes are so elegantly dramatized, and the characters so beautiful rendered, that it winds up being politically urgent almost by stealth; the production’s emotional impact is surprising considered how economically it is put together.The immense set depicting the dreary residence plays a focusing role — for the actors, I imagine, as much as for the audience. This is naturalistic theater at its best, evoking the work of the filmmakers Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.“Love” had me thinking that perhaps Liddell is too absolutist in her thinking. I’m not saying it’s easy, but in the right artist’s hands, theater that is alive to social and political issues can be an occasion for beauty and transcendence.FIND 2021 continues at the Schaubühne through Oct. 10 More

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      Dark. Messy. Assaultive. Inscrutable. Even From Your Couch.

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      Without international tours, streaming high-concept, director-driven European theater is the next best thing to being there.In October 1973, Arena Stage in Washington took its productions of “Inherit the Wind” and “Our Town” to Moscow and Leningrad for “the first American theatrical performances on the Soviet stage in memory,” according to The New York Times.A teenager named Dmitry Krymov was so bowled over by “Our Town” that he returned the next day. He grew up to become one of the world’s finest theatermakers, and “Our Town” plays a pivotal role in his wonderfully evocative recent memory play, “We Are All Here,” which tracks Krymov’s relationship with Grover’s Corners over the course of his life, and peaks in an emotional gut punch doubling as a visual masterstroke, with the cast lined up on a slowly rising bridge.The good news is that I was able to take in Krymov’s show earlier this month. The less-good news is that I saw it online.And that, in a nutshell, is what the past year has been for fans of border- and boundary-crossing theater: increased access, curtailed experience.Audiences in New York (and other cities that regularly host international companies) have long been able to discover theatrical ideas, techniques and aesthetics that can be radically different from the ones we encounter in the United States.Indeed, American theatergoers can be taken aback by another culture’s conception of the art form. Very roughly, if the playwright, dead or alive, rules in the United States, in Europe it’s the director who is the focus.But as Krymov learned in 1973, opening one’s mind to different possibilities is also incredibly exciting.The main problem is that travel was even harder this past year than it was between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. And sharing a physical space has always been a key to the more adventurous experiences, the ones that make us question our artistic assumptions: The impact of a show by Italy’s Romeo Castellucci, France’s Ariane Mnouchkine or Poland’s Krystian Lupa can only be fully felt in real life.When you are in the room, you can see how Mnouchkine reconfigures the very idea of the theatrical space by placing movable sets on casters or having the actors get ready for a performance in full view of the audience.In the room, Scott Gibbons’s tectonic soundscapes, which are an integral part of Castellucci productions, feel as if they are pressing on your chest. Audiences entering “The Four Seasons Restaurant” at Philadelphia’s FringeArts festival, in 2014, were handed earplugs, and no, raising the volume on headphones at home just isn’t the same (you can try with another Castellucci show, “Inferno,” available in full on Vimeo).In the room, you can be awed by the supersize scope and the way live and videotaped perspectives intermingle in Ivo van Hove’s “The Damned.”The impact of oversized video imagery, as in this 2018 production of “The Damned,” can’t easily be replicated in a production watched at home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd in the room, you can thrill to an audience’s response to the moment. It’s possibly even more exciting when you’re in the enthusiastic minority in a sea of haters, “Rite of Spring”-style: I can still hear the slaps of seats springing back up as enraged patrons left in the middle of Jan Lauwers’s berserk “King Lear” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that was 20 years ago.But just like that, the pandemic closed borders: we will have to do without outré tableaus from visiting companies for the foreseeable future. The sudden disappearance of international theatrical touring did not make headlines in America last year: Our shellshocked stages went into survival mode, and a much needed discussion of racism in theater took precedence.Obviously I am not begrudging any of that — the reckoning was overdue — but I couldn’t deny the dull ache I felt for what was missing.It was somewhat alleviated, at least, when we switched from glaring at supertitles to glaring at subtitles, as the digital floodgates opened and theaters all over the world began streaming both shows in their repertoires and new projects.Krymov’s “We Are All Here,” for example, was just one of 15 subtitled captures I binged over five days of watching this year’s Golden Mask Festival. These were part of the Moscow-based festival’s showcase section, called Russian Case, which offers works available for tour bookings.Some of them were entrancing even on a screen, like Mihhail Plutahhin’s hypnotic “The Observers,” which consisted of handlers wordlessly moving objects rescued from forced-labor camps this way and that on a table.Yury Butusov’s staging of the Florian Zeller drama “The Son” was so bizarre that it was compelling on its own terms — the actors’ histrionic line readings were refreshingly free of any attempt at psychologizing. The popular writer Vladimir Sorokin’s “Spin” was staged by Yury Kvyatkovsky in a glass house, where we spied a rich family reveling in a decadent boozy brunch via surveillance cameras.Not everything worked, especially the shows that illustrated Regietheater (or director’s theater) run amok, like the incomprehensible commedia dell’arte-influenced production “Pinocchio. Theater.”“Investigation of Horror,” which recreated a soiree of 1930s avant-garde philosophers, complete with real-time potato-peeling and intense debates, looked at times like a “Saturday Night Live” parody. After I admitted, in a postfestival debrief on Zoom, to having been bewildered by a modern-dress adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” another viewer reassured me by saying, “I’m Russian, I read the book, and I had no idea what was going on.”None of the Russian Case shows I watched were of the naturalistic bent most common in the United States. I never caught a glimpse of characters desultorily chit-chatting on a couch plopped center stage.Come to think of it, there was not much desultory chitchat at all.Yevgeny Mironov, left, as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, in “Gorbachev.” Ira Polyarnaya, via Theatre of Nations, MoscowIn her introductory note to “Investigation of Horror,” the Russian Case curator Marina Davydova wrote: “Watching relationships between characters is getting boring — it is much more interesting to observe ideas fleshing out.”This applied even to the most traditional productions, which always had a twist, like “The Son” and its outré Expressionism, or the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis’s brilliant bioplay “Gorbachev” having the virtuosic Yevgeny Mironov in the title role as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, change costumes and wigs in full view as their characters age over the course of the show.And Russian Case was just the apex of a year in which I gorged on non-English-speaking theater.It all started last spring, when major companies scrambled to put catalog productions online as soon as their venues shut down — many of them stuck to traditional curtain times and eschewed on-demand, which meant appointment matinees for American viewers.Suddenly, it became easier to see work by directors we have come to know over the years. Berlin’s Schaubühne dug into its archive for full-length shows, including a healthy selection from the artistic director Thomas Ostermeier — a treat for those of us who have loyally trekked to St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for his live productions. As of this writing, the prestigious Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris was still streaming a subtitled capture of a contemporary take on Molière’s “The School for Wives.”The most ambitious institution may well have been the Comédie-Française, also in Paris, which started by offering a slew of weekly archival captures (without subtitles) in the spring of 2020. I was finally able to see the 1974 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine” that starred a teenage Isabelle Adjani and has attracted a cult following; I laughed alone in front of my computer watching a zippy staging of the Feydeau farce “Le Système Ribadier.”The Comédie-Française’s virtual programming has evolved over the past year as regulations changed, and this 341-year-old grande dame has exhibited enviable verve. When in-person rehearsals were authorized again, the company put its troupe to great use with new initiatives like the table read series “Théâtre à la Table,” which has become increasingly sophisticated (and will remain on YouTube, unlike the full captures).The Comédie-Française’s reading of “The Seagull,” part of a series that is available on YouTube.via Théâtre à la tableThose familiar with “The Seagull” could be tempted by the Comédie-Française’s dynamic reading, led by Guillaume Gallienne as Trigorin and Elsa Lepoivre as Arkadina (they also played the terrible lovers Friedrich and Sophie in “The Damned” at the Park Avenue Armory).Choices of source material show inventiveness, too, as with a fantastic re-enactment of Delphine Seyrig’s “Sois Belle et Tais Toi” (“Be Pretty and Shut Up”), a prescient feminist documentary from 1981 in which actresses including Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider and Jane Fonda talked about sexism in the film industry.Other companies have taken to appointment, blink-and-you-miss-it livestreaming, most notably Internationaal Theater Amsterdam — the company led by van Hove, whose staging of “The Things That Pass” you can catch on April 25.Not long before my Russian immersion, I was on the edge of my, er, couch during the British director Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” for the Amsterdam theater. Even though there was no doubt as to the outcome, the modern-dress production had the intensity of a thriller and I caught myself yelping “no no no no no” out loud as the characters headed toward their fate like asteroids pulled into a black hole by an irresistible gravitational force.Hans Kesting as the title character in Robert Icke’s production of “Oedipus.”Jan VersweyveldThere have even been actual online festivals such as “Stories From Europe,” which presented subtitled captures from members of the theater network mitos21. For a few days in January, we could pretend we were at the Berliner Ensemble, Moscow’s Theater of Nations or the Teatro Stabile Torino. In dark wintertime, that escape felt precious, a window onto a world of possibilities rather than restrictions.In an article for The Times recounting that trip to the Soviet Union in 1973, the Arena Stage associate director Alan Schneider quoted an account in the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper. “Truly,” it said, “the exchange of theater experience, of theater groups, is one of the finest proofs of the willingness of peoples to live in peace, to seek mutual understanding.”If that understanding must happen online for now, so be it. The glass, at least, is half full. More