"Dreams Against the Cold": Characterization in Kroetz's Help Wanted

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As interest in Franz Xaver Kroetz spreads and more productions of his plays are mounted in North America, increasing numbers of American actors will confront a challenge for which their training does not fully prepare them. Kroetz's characters are deceptively realistic. Like so many others from Zola to Albee, they inhabit a world that mirrors, poetically or photographically, that of their audience. They behave in a manner that is, in Chekhov's words, "just as complex and yet just as simple as in life." Their much heralded ordinariness — with few exceptions they are unassuming middle–class working people — reinforces their naturalism, but they are somehow more than real. Rather than a deep psychology or an inescapable past, Kroetz endows his characters with a self-consciousness triggered by their immediate situation. They scrutinize themselves constantly, as if from the outside, and this imposes on them a duality of character which makes an actor's close identification with his role a reductive approach. Kroetz's recent play, Help Wanted, both in its structure and its ostensible subject matter, clarifies this method of characterization and suggests his ultimate concerns as a playwright.