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    On European Stages, Myths and Memories Merge

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    New productions by the theater titans Krzysztof Warlikowski and Frank Castorf play games with ancient Greek folklore and modern history.STUTTGART, Germany — Perhaps no theater director working today is more haunted by memory than Krzysztof Warlikowski.To portray its tortuous mechanisms, the Polish Warlikowski favors enigmas and fragmented narratives over straightforward answers. During the past 20 years, this has helped make him one of Europe’s most acclaimed and distinctive directors. In addition to his productions for the Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, which he founded in 2008, Warlikowski also stages works for many of Europe’s leading drama and opera festivals.In his latest production, “Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood,” he takes the viewer on a kaleidoscopic journey from Homer to the Holocaust to Tinseltown, telling the story of a Jewish woman who risks her life during World War II to search for her deported husband. She is portrayed both as a latter-day Odysseus and as Penelope: the wily and weary adventurer in search of his elusive homeland, and the faithful, patient wife tending the hearth.Loosely inspired by “Chasing the King of Hearts,” a 2006 novel by the Polish author Hanna Krall, the production is an epic web of associations brought to life on Malgorzata Szczesniak’s handsome and versatile set, whose darkly industrial components stand in for interrogation chambers and waiting rooms.History, mythology and philosophy, and pop and high culture, rub shoulders in a four-hour production that is consistently absorbing even if you’re not always sure what it means. (An international coproduction with Nowy Teatr, “Odyssey” was recently performed at the Schauspiel Stuttgart theater here and will tour to Paris later this month.)Izolda Regensberg, the protagonist of Krall’s short novel, is convinced that her life as a survival artist would make a great Hollywood film. The play’s opening scenes, set in war-torn Europe and shortly afterward, show Regensberg navigating a film-noir landscape of violence and menace. A giant cage wheeled repeatedly across the stage heightens the sense of claustrophobia.From there, we’re whisked to Los Angeles, where a much older Regensberg is meeting with the director Roman Polanski, the film producer Robert Evans and Elizabeth Taylor, who is set to play Regensberg in a film. The Polish actors perform the scene in English with exaggerated American accents that heighten the vulgarity and ignorance of their backroom talk.That sendup of Hollywood cluelessness is rebutted by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, “Shoah,” a nine-hour oral history of the Holocaust that is a milestone in the history of cinema, to which Warlikowski turns later in the evening. A screen lowers and we watch a famous excerpt from the movie in which Lanzmann interviews Abraham Bomba, a barber living in Israel who once cut the hair of Jewish women destined for the gas chambers at Treblinka. Bomba’s wrenching testimony contrasts sharply with a showy test reel we see during Regensberg’s meeting with Polanski — a spot-on parody of Hollywood Holocaust schlock in which a handsome Gestapo officer tortures and arouses his interrogation victim by playing Wagner on the piano.Malgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik as Hannah Arendt and Roman Gancarczyk as Martin Heidegger in “Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood.”Magda HueckelIn “Odyssey,” Warlikowski sifts through many of the same tropes as Lanzmann’s film, rummaging around in trauma and memory while sifting through the ethical and aesthetic implications of representing the Holocaust. At times, Warlikowski’s associative and open-ended approach leads the production in unusual directions and to unexpected places.At one point, the scene abruptly shifts to the Black Forest in 1950, where Hannah Arendt is picnicking with Martin Heidegger. As the German philosophers (and former lovers) struggle to reconcile — Heidegger remains defiant about his support of the Nazi regime — a pushy, camera-toting tourist (possibly a visitor from the future) pesters them with questions. The grim trajectory of the play is often speckled with such surreal and humorous details.For the production’s finale, Warlikowski turns to the Coen brothers by faithfully re-creating the prologue to their 2009 film, “A Serious Man.” In that atmospheric short, a Yiddish horror-comedy sketch seemingly disconnected from the rest of the film, a pious couple in a 19th-century shtetl are visited by a dybbuk (an evil spirit in Jewish folklore) who possesses the body of dead rabbi.This final scene is a jarring contrast to the “Shoah” material that directly precedes it and concludes this sprawling production on a curiously muted note. Yet the subject of existential homelessness is the connective tissue that unites “Odyssey’s” various strands.The intersection of personal and communal trauma told through one woman’s eyes is also the theme of Irina Kastrinidis’s dramatic monologue, “Schwarzes Meer” (“Black Sea”), whose world premiere at the Landestheater Niederösterreich, in St. Pölten, Austria, was directed by the German theater legend Frank Castorf. It’s a surprising production, not least because Castorf, whose fame rests on his deconstructive approach to literary classics, is not exactly known for his sensitive portrayals of female protagonists.Julia Kreusch, left, and Mikis Kastrinidis in Irina Kastrinidis’s “Schwarzes Meer,” directed by Frank Castorf.Alexi PelekanosIn “Schwarzes Meer,” Kastrinidis, a former actress in Castorf’s troupe when he led the Berlin Volksbühne (she is also the director’s ex-girlfriend), has fused Greek myths with the history of her more recent ancestors: Pontic Greeks, living in what is now Turkey, who were forcibly expelled in the 1920s. Her monologue — a stilted and nonlinear oration in heightened and, at times, archaic language — is delivered by the German actress Julia Kreusch, whose physically impassioned immersion in the text seems to elevate it. Kastrinidis’s text mixes quotidian, even banal, observations with paeans to the Argonauts and passages in which Penelope seems to fuse with pop icons like Jane Birkin. The expulsion and murder of Kastrinidis’s forebears hovers in the background. And as the first-person narration shuttles among Paris, Athens, Berlin and Zurich, Kastrinidis suggests a continuity of exile and inherited trauma and memory that explains her own hallucinogenic sense of homesickness.Perhaps to safeguard against monotony, Castorf adds two characters who don’t appear in Kastrinidis’s text, including one played by his 12-year-old son, Mikis Kastrinidis, whose spirited performance alternates between adorable and irritating. Sharing the stage with Kreusch (and occasionally a real goat), he repeatedly reminds the audience that he’s acting in his parents’ play by talking to his mom on the telephone and cracking jokes about how old his dad is.This chamber staging of a brand-new work is a change of pace for Castorf, who is now 70. His classic productions, tour de force theatrical marathons, took extreme liberties with their source materials and were frequently exhausting for actors and audiences. Kreusch certainly gets a workout in “Schwarzes Meer,” but, aside from that, there are surprisingly few hallmarks of Castorf’s style.Most surprising, it is, by and large, faithful to Kastrinidis’s text, as if the onetime enfant terrible decided it would be inappropriate to impose his ego onto his former lover’s personal and poetic cri de coeur.Like “Odyssey,” “Schwarzes Meer” is ultimately an artistic excavation of the theater of memory. In the associative games they play with Greek mythology and modern European history, both of these striking new productions suggest that dislocation and exile are fundamental to the modern human condition.Odyssey. A Story for Hollywood. Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski. On tour at the Théâtre National La Colline, in Paris, May 12-21; Nowy Tear, in Warsaw, June 2-5.Schwarzes Meer. Directed by Frank Castorf. Landestheater Niederösterreich. May 5 and Sept. 24. 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