A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

Abstract

writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic: its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony.—Régis Durand, “The Disposition of the Voice”Although it's commonplace to distinguish between live theatre and recorded media, recorded performance is everywhere on the contemporary stage. Many productions use live-feed video during the performance, either to provide a simultaneously recorded and broadcast counterpoint to/within the live action, or sometimes—as in Gob Squad's Revolution Now, first staged at Berlin's Volksbühne in 2010—to collocate events, interviews, or performances outside the theatre with those happening inside. Staged film has been a prominent dimension of the visual field of theatre at least since the 1920s, and considerably more noted than another use of recording, sound. Recorded sound has been fully absorbed to the conventional apparatus of contemporary theatre: the sound designer develops the production's sonic texture with recorded sound, and most productions are accompanied to some degree by recorded music as well. For the 1935 Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, a gritty drama of urban life, the scenic design located the audience notionally in the East River, looking at a pier stretching the width of the stage, with a small street angling upstage toward a dense cityscape. Critics of the time praised the production's astonishing visual verisimilitude, captured when the boys in the play dove off the front of the stage into the “river”—netting below the audience's sightlines in the orchestra pit—and were sprayed with salad oil, climbing up glistening on to the pier. But perhaps more surprising was the production's sonic environment, created by several small phonographs hidden around the set, playing records of the noise of city life.1 Recorded sound onstage dramatizes the theatre's peculiar instrumentality: theatre represents the technologies it displays, and in so doing represents theatre at the intersection, often an intersection with obsolescence, of the contemporary media it appropriates and refigures.The ways theatre articulates, and articulates with, the technologies it uses has been a critical feature of the work of The Wooster Group, which has been experimenting at the interface of the live and the recorded since the 1970s. From the early series of Spalding Gray's autobiographical performances to its reperformance of his Nayatt School (1978) as Since I Can Remember (2019, and in progress), a decisive engagement with reperformance and remediation threads through the company's work, perhaps most visibly engaged in the dialogue with the John Gielgud/Richard Burton film that drives their Hamlet (2008), but also in the remaking of Jerzy Grotowski in Poor Theater (2004), and in the various modes of citationality driving To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre) (2002), Brace Up! (1991, 2003), and more recent productions like A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique) (2018).The Wooster Group's engagement with the visual field anticipates its striking attention to sound in the 2021 production of Bertolt Brecht's The Mother, where recording—particularly the use of the actors’ recorded voices—locates the axis of technological representation. Sound recording has long been predicated on (high) fidelity to the “live,” on its ability to replicate and so erase the distinction with the “live,” a moment in the ideological interface between the technological and the human focused in the voice, and epitomized by RCA Victor's iconic logo, a dog listening to a phonograph, over the slogan “His master's voice.” The Wooster Group explores alternate relations between the live and the recorded voice, as a decisive element in its exploration of Bertolt Brecht's extended, troubled Lehrstück. The Mother, according to director Elizabeth LeCompte's program note, adopts “the spirit of repurposing” as a dominant aesthetic in the show, as “Nearly everything in the production has been repurposed from previous Wooster Group works,” including “performers, ideas, set elements, and all but two props: the aqua typewriter and the yellow telephone” that sit on the prop table that stretches across the front of the stage.2This “repurposing” aesthetic is visible in the scenography—a relatively open stage, a few wheeled tables, selected hand props—and in the technical apparatus of the production, too, though unlike the stage festooned with monitors in Hamlet, in The Mother, there's only one large monitor, positioned above the audience and facing the stage, perhaps two-thirds of the way back. Clearly not designed to be visible to the audience as part of the show, the work it performs is nonetheless essential to the work of the performance: it shows videos—of the company's rehearsals, gangster films, Laurel and Hardy, the 1958 Berliner Ensemble production of The Mother—actively repurposed to the production.3 Talking back to the BE, so to speak, The Wooster Group production uses the voice to bring a critical question into focus: how might the repurposing of the technologies of Brecht's theatrical apparatus be absorbed to, be materialized within, and be represented as theatre now?In many respects, The Mother is a surprising vehicle for this kind of inquiry, an anomaly in the project of Brecht's theatre: neither quite a Lehrstück nor on the scale of epic theatre, though it does call for many of the devices Brecht explored for both of those genres. Brecht describes the play as “a piece of anti-metaphysical, materialistic, non-Aristotelian drama,” that makes “nothing like such a free use as does the Aristotelian of the passive empathy of the spectator,” and notes that its episodic incidents are “kept separate from one another” in epic fashion rather than accumulating toward a cathartic moment of release.4 Yet The Mother stands slightly apart from the most challenging element of Brecht's theatre: the use of the stage to articulate both how the theatre as an ideological apparatus operates in ways cognate with other social institutions and the affective alienation of the spectator within that process. In more compelling Lehrstücke, The Decision for example, the process of affective responsiveness has at once to be generated and re-presented through a gestic technology for the play's “lesson” to have its ultimately political effect. Since the masked actors all take turns playing the Young Comrade whose empathy for the suffering of the poor betrays their organizational efforts, each actor both occupies and learns about the power of empathy by playing and producing it. Similarly, the play's gestic technology—the blunt inefficiency of the coolies’ labor dramatized by attaching their barge rope to the stage floor—and its acting also require an empathetic response from the audience, so that it, too, may experience the demanding difficulty of overcoming anti-revolutionary sentimentality. That is, while Brecht's Lehrstücke are routinely dismissed as merely didactic, the purpose of the “alienation effect” is to produce the spectator as the site of “the truly rending contradiction between experience and portrayal, empathy and demonstration, justification and criticism, which is what is aimed at”: the spectators’ lived, recognized experience of the implication of their apparently native, human responses in an interested ideological apparatus.5In this regard, The Mother was, in a sense, always already obsolete, articulating a kind of didactic or political theatre at the moment of its transcendence by a more articulate and complex apparatus, an instrument that locates the script within the elements of production rather than as its cause. But the instruments of Brecht's alienating work, the gestic work that was supposed to reveal the theatre's considerable influence as an ideological apparatus framing the affective “I” of the spectator's apparently individual freedom of judgment, now often seem just “Brecht style,” to have been assimilated to the commodity machine of theatre, itself a passé technology of ideological reproduction compared to the reach of television, the internet, and social media. The technological armature of The Wooster Group production, then, repurposes Brecht's didactic melodrama—“the script itself was very didactic in a simple way,” as LeCompte put it in our interview—toward a more complex re-situation of the audience in the event. The index of this production's engagement with the complexity of alienation arises at the interface of the live and the mediated, the implication of the acting voice and the recorded acting voice as a signifier of the theatre's implication in and with “media.”Throughout the performance, all the actors are mic'd and wear earbuds channeling their speech as audio input. Speaking, their voices are routed through the house sound system: what we hear is sometimes the actor's (amplified) “live” voice, sometimes the actor's “live” voice distorted in real time, and sometimes the actor's recorded voice lip-synced by the performer. What the actors are hearing varies, but it's often recordings of their own voices, recordings that are sometimes sped up (changing both pace and pitch); what the audience hears is a challenging series of vocalizations, slipping between the “live,” the distorted, and the lip-sync-recorded, sometimes all within a short phrase of action. LeCompte suggests that by recording the actors’ voices and speeding them up for delivery and/or broadcast, the production both absorbs and reiterates—repurposes—the vocal and physical pacing of gangster films as a feature of theatrical production, so that the audience “wouldn't have to rest so long in the simple ideas.” The narrative of Pelagea Vlassova's rise to Communist consciousness is produced across this technological intermittency, recorded and live, then and now, there and here, that both dramatizes and produces a multiplex affective engagement in the production.The complex signification of the voice is also materialized visually—and, indirectly, sonically—by the monitor that faces the stage. Although the monitor is seen mainly by the actors, the video screen nonetheless plays a significant part in the production: sometimes, the scene on the stage is faced by material recorded in rehearsal, the stage a little less cluttered, some of the actors wearing different costumes or street clothes; sometimes, the stage is faced by video of Laurel and Hardy, or of a James Cagney film, locating one of the sources of the production in the kind of gangster films that had long appealed to Brecht, and which he saw in New York during the Theatre Union rehearsal of The Mother in the 1930s (as LeCompte remarked in our interview). But in several key scenes—notably the scene between the Mother and Pavel in the prison, the scene with the Teacher returning home to discover a meeting in his apartment, and the scene with the printing press—the monitor shows footage (identified in the program note) from the “1958 Berliner Ensemble production of The Mother featuring Helene Weigel,” a recording of a production made under Weigel's guidance after Brecht's death two years earlier. In performance, then, The Wooster Group is explicitly in dialogue with the Berliner Ensemble production, a dialogue that is symbolic, historical, and also material, literal. For the performance also repurposes the BE Mother, as the actors can switch the audio track from the videos on the monitor into their earbuds, providing audio input for their vocalization onstage. While, according to LeCompte, Kate Valk doesn't use the video in this way in her performance as Vlassova, Jim Fletcher tunes into the German audio of the Berliner Ensemble through his earbuds to guide the pacing and inflection of his English-language performance as the Teacher: he's listening to the German, translating into English, and emulating the gestic characterization—vocal inflection, movement—of his avatar on the monitor. The video helps to measure and qualify the work of the production we see: Ari Fliakos's delivery and accent as the revolutionary worker Semjon, and perhaps again as Karpov the worker's representative isn't quite in the register of Cagney's distinctive gangster intonations (“you dirty rat”), but does visibly and audibly quote that style of performance, the sharp cadences, the clear physical movement and sharply indicative gestures, using a relatively stereotypical, quick and staccato pacing to do the quotational work of the Brecht stage.The Berliner Ensemble video measures a distinctive difference, as the vision on the screen is considerably more realistic in tone and appearance than The Wooster Group performance. In the printing press scene, for instance, the actors on the monitor occupy a rundown, wallpapered room with a few sticks of furniture: it's a realistic set, a room in an apartment or boarding house, not the open horizon of Brecht's work as an epic director, and not like the repurposing space of the Performing Garage stage. While The Wooster Group has a clothes wringer in a large, orange Home Depot work bucket playing the noisy printing press, by craning around to look at the screen I could see what seemed to be a small, iron, heavy-looking machine churning through the BE scene. Perhaps for a number of reasons, when Brecht brought The Mother back to Berlin, he retooled the 1951 production at the Deutsches Theater in a surprising direction, not towards epic theatricality, but to evince “a new naturalism in costumes and décor and a greater concern with the Russian background,” perhaps as a way to remain in dialogue with the reigning Soviet aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism.6The Mother articulates a climactic narrative of the working woman's triumph, learning to read, becoming a subversive agent distributing leaflets, instructing the peasants even when they wrongly stone her as a strikebreaker, sending her son forward into revolution, developing as an authentic working-class leader. Facing back into Helene Weigel's realistic portrayal, both a past ideal and a lost opportunity, The Wooster Group's Mother repurposes Brecht's political melodrama, speaking in the technological apparatus of the contemporary stage, its intricate inter-involvement of the live and the recorded.Fascinated by radio, working with superb composers like Hans Eisler and Kurt Weill, Brecht was interested in the work of the voice in the theatre. But The Wooster Group locates the voice within the sound machine of the theatre, a fully digitized space that potentially relocates the functioning of the voice in the assertion of the theatrical “human” that Brecht was often—though perhaps not in The Mother—eager to disrupt. Writing in the late 1970s, in the first blush of the importation of deconstruction into North American philosophy, cultural studies, literary studies, and, somewhat belatedly, theatre studies, Régis Durand suggests that the “voice is inextricably bound up with bodies: the body of language, the body of the speaker,” and as such both “speaks of the body” and yet is a kind of “intermediary” between a presence assigned unproblematically to the body and the absence encoded by language. Recalling the ways various approaches to acting from Antonin Artaud through Jerzy Grotowski assigned an irreducible presence to a body outside the betraying determinants of culture, Durand concludes his essay with a shrewd reading of Marguerite Duras's splendid India Song (1973), in which the voice—heard now as a recording, emanating from outside the scene, outside the visible bodies, seems to summon “a profound reconsideration of the ‘affectiveness’ of the voice,” one in which the voice itself is no longer the instrument of a “central, omnipotent subject” of the represented body of the character, the representing body of the actor, or the witnessing body of the spectator.7The work on Brecht, with Brecht, through Brecht, the question of producing an audience at the interface with theatre as a technological and ideological apparatus is centered at this juncture, represented by the functioning and repurposing of the voice. The performance opens with Jim Fletcher—who later plays the Teacher—downstage center, delivering a narration about the play and Brecht's intentions (“This play, The Mother, by Bertolt Brecht, he took the story from a novel by Maxim Gorky called ‘The Mother.’ Gorky wrote this around 1905; in fact, Lenin read Gorky's original draft of it and gave him notes about how to fix it”), leading into a kind of speech-singing song, accompanied by a jazzy percussion and eventually by piano accompaniment, apparently from an electronic piano downstage left (played, we discover by Pavel, Vlassova's son). Fletcher's voice, both singing and speaking, sounds “natural,” that is, it sounds like his live, immediate, though amplified voice emanating from the speakers below the prop table and above the back of the stage: it's rich and full, a bit loud. Pavel's accompaniment, though, is more emblematic of the production's designs. Fletcher's jazzy speech-singing, reminiscent of the work of radio producer Joe Frank, is sustained by Gareth Hobbs's elegant keyboard work. And yet his playing is pure mime; the keyboard sits atop a table, visibly disconnected from the sound system. It's not even plugged in. The only sound emanating from the piano is the thunk of Hobbs's fingers striking the keys, mostly inaudible under the amplified score. The “live” piano is really only a prop, not so much a prop in the design of Vlassova's Russia (the teapot, the paint can labeled SOUP, the mirror labeled MIRROR that the Policeman breaks), as it is a prop in the theatrical design of the production, more like the labels than the objects they signify. In a classically “Brechtian” way, the silent piano signifies the place of the music in the theatrical scene, in the performance, witnessing both Hobbs's virtuosity (the first time I saw the show, sitting much farther back, I thought he was actually playing) and the absorption of acting to the recording machine: acting produces the gestural form of music in the performance, the gest of music, not in the dramatic scene but in the theatrical one.The keyboard is gestic: as a theatrical prop, it underlines the showing dimension of the performance's doing, and so implicates the action in the theatre as a form of “social gest,” “the gest relevant to society, the gest that allows conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances.”8 Almost, but not quite assimilated to the “live” production of music, the keyboard emblematizes the more pervasive challenge of the sonic texture, the work of the voice in the production, and the ways that the interface between the live and the recorded voice might be understood to stage the social gest of speech. The three modes of vocal delivery—live, live distorted, lip-synced recorded—are largely unmarked in performance, and while the actors are very good at anticipating their lines, they're often lip-syncing a nanosecond behind the voice we are hearing. In our interview, sound designer Eric Sluyter noted that while the transitions are set before the performance, they can be very rapid: an occasional speech will be entirely live or entirely recorded and lip-synced, but often the actor's speaking will switch from live, to lip-synced recording, and back to live again. This output is complicated by the input channel, visible enough in the actors’ earbuds: each actor can choose the signal (Fletcher, for instance, sometimes listens to the Berliner Ensemble on the monitor), though most of the time they're hearing their own prerecorded performance. Rather than signaling embodied presence, the actor's vocalizing body operates as a transducer between input and output, rendering the voice an often undecidable sign and instrument of liveness: in The Mother, the gest of acting speaking asserts a complex, often ambiguous assimilation to the socialized instruments of production.The privileged authenticity ascribed to the voice is withdrawn into the apparatus in a particularly challenging way when it comes time for the actors to sing. For Brecht, of course, when “an actor sings he undergoes a change of function. Nothing is more revolting than when the actor pretends not to notice that he has left the level of plain speech and started to sing.”9 In The Mother, that complexity is marked, at least sometimes, technologically: since the actors are hearing their recorded voices while working to harmonize live onstage, sometimes they just remove the earbuds (as Ari Fliakos does at one point), stepping into a kind of visible immediacy that's nonetheless marked within the technological by those dangling earbuds. Even “live,” direct address-speaking or singing is marked as a technology of production, and also marked in relation to technologies of recording and production. In the here-and-now the performers share with the audience, it's always possible for that mediated voice to be reworked—as, for example, when an echo effect seems to be added to the Teacher's voice as he first addresses Pelagea Vlassova.In its use of direct address to the audience, the disposition of the stage as an openly theatrical space for playing, the projection of a scene-setting video above the stage, the visible lighting instruments (and the visible and audible booth), the production implicitly witnesses the extent to which Brecht's apparatus has been absorbed to the theatre, as theatre, perhaps compromising its alienating capability. Denaturalizing the actor's voice as the assertion of an authentic, unmediated presence, provides a gestic instrument for the larger ideological work of the production's address to, and making of, its audience. Attending to this complex audio sphere is a richly engaging, affectively and intellectually dissonant experience, one that is difficult to reduce to the tension between empathy and demonstration; perhaps Brecht's language has always clumsily approximated the struggle to place oneself in relation to the ideologically complex encounter with the theatricalization of acting and character. In its arresting alternation of live, distorted, and lip-synced speech, the actors’ vocal work focuses the complex interaction between gesture and expression, between the making and what's being made in the register of recording and its other, a “liveness” already marked as mediatable, and mediated.10 Removing the voice as the sustaining impulse of the actor's presence, speaking is placed on the same plane as other channels of production; the voice is there, like the blue typewriter or the keyboard, and, as they are, is also absorbed to the machine of mediation.In their physical, gestural, and movement work, all of the actors perform a kind of gestic representation of their characters’ attitudes that locates “character” less as a moment of individual expressivity than in its intersection with public modes of assertion, action, meaning: Ari Fliakos's nasal accent as Semjon, and differently as Karpov and Vasil the Butcher; Jim Fletcher's reedy pedagogical voice as the Teacher; Kate Valk's increasingly idealistic sonority and facial expression (the lifted jaw, the upwardly tilted gaze more than a little recall St. Joan). Technologizing the voice, punctuating its presentation aligns it with the gestic mediation of the body, rendering it symmetrical with the ways the body is used to recode familiar gestures (the Policeman tearing up “the house” is largely cutting up a pillow and smashing a sugar bowl sitting on the prop table). Many Brecht productions assign a kind of stereotypicality to characterization as the means of “epic” or “alienating” acting, perhaps touched in this production by Fliakos's “gangster” gestures, intonations, and pacing, but the more pervasive work of alienation here arises in the way all dimensions of the performance, movement, gesture, singing, music, and vocalization register as always already mediated, a mediation that inflects—one might, pre-pandemic, have said “infects”—us. Encountering the actors at the slippery interface between the live and the mediated, a live that's already mediated, removes the possibility of maintaining our own situation as privileged, as not part of the production's repurposing of its materials.Is there a politics here? Many plays, many realist plays, engage with contemporary issues in a motivational way: A Doll House, Death of a Salesman, Look Back in Anger, A Raisin in the Sun, and of course, The Mother come to mind. Brecht's commanding insight was that such dramaturgy, while sometimes motivating an oppositional sentiment within the social world, doesn't engage the ongoing ideological constitution of that world, a world that can be changed only if we—the silent, offstage, apparently uninvolved, individualized spectators of theatrical realism—recognize the theatre's constitution of us as agents of social reproduction. To seize the theatre as a transformative agent begins, for Brecht, in the canny transformation of the experience of watching, of acting as a spectator. If there is a generic gest of the spectator's alienated attention in Brecht's theatre, it has to do with a moment of recognition, one that displaces the unthinking occupation of individualized awareness with the uncanny sense that “individual” responses and identities are constituted socially, ideologically: they are in a technical sense performative, a consequence of acting in a specific social milieu. “How easily the stage—Courage, Galileo, the Young Comrade—can make me want this, make me.”It's at this point, I think, that the deconstructive politics of The Wooster Group's The Mother operate. There's always something to learn in the theatre even from a relatively tendentious play like The Mother; for me, having seen the graduate student picket line outside Columbia University earlier in the day gave a particular bite to the stone-throwing scene. But what can be learned from those thematics may also merely reposition us on the landscape of contemporary politics—workers vs. management, communism vs. capital—without altering either the landscape or how we understand it, without changing how we might map it, map ourselves into it, map ourselves. Where the production does its work has to do with this savvy dislocation of experience, foregrounding a constant effort to locate what is happening in the mediation of the event, how the interplay of mediation, recording, monitors, and microphones displaces the kind of immediacy that laminates affective responsiveness to a fully ideological human and social nature. That is, even without its presence in performance—as, for instance, in Ivo van Hove's Roman Tragedies— social media captivates us.The Mother articulates a surprising, mediated carnal stereophony, evoking neither nostalgia for unmediated presence, nor the simple irony for a lost theatre, an identity that such a theatre could stage but can no longer occupy. The production locates us, its audience, in an odd corner, where the present performance, our present performance resonates between the mediated and the liveness it recursively summons and replaces, an echoing mise-en-abîme. The voice, hearing the voice, being processed by the processing of the voice sustains a pervasive, disassembling restlessness, inscribing us within and dislocating us from the affective narrative pull of Vlassova's melodrama and from the charismatic pull of the performers, too, Jim Fletcher's luxurious voice, Kate Valk's precise elegance, Ari Fliakos's swift, sharp, focused embodiment. Beneath the seen and unseen gaze of Helene Weigel, there is no outside to mediation, our mediation; and, as ever, no outside to ideology, either.