The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising

If one had lost even a great deal more faith than I in the gut and relevance of theatre -- no qualifying adjective like "Harvard" is the least bit necessary -- faith would still have been restored last night in beautiful abundance. Timothy S. Mayer's and Gunter Grass's The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising leads one to question not whether the stage relates to the world, but whether the world relates to the stage. Grass's play asks if artists can move about in the present, on the streets: Mayer's production answers in an unmistakeable affirmative.

The play, Grass's first, depicts a caricatured Bertolt Brecht -- The Boss -- rehearsing an adaptation of Coriolanus in East Berlin, June, 1953. Brecht, and here Plebeians tells no lies, has transfigured Shakespeare's tragedy into a didactic tract for revolution. Shakespeare's silly tribunes of the people become radical ideologues; Coriolanus -- the "colossal" as he is described in Plebeians -- is reduced to a despot with a certain knack for winning battles. And quite as much as Brecht tampered with Shakespeare, Grass has tampered with Brecht. He has made him a patronizing, cynical esthete resigned to the failure of revolution in the world at large, yet committed to its success on stage -- the success of his own peculiar brand of intellectualized revolution on his own stage.

Dean Gitter, who plays The Boss, has molded a character that is at once Brecht, Boss, and audience. His reactions to the events of the play -- to the East German workers' uprising -- are camouflaged with wit and contempt for three full acts. We can detect little going on in his mind, save reflex action, but we are nonetheless forced into the same chair in which he sits, to consider the same events with the same condescending ambivalence. In the fourth act, when the uprising is over and The Boss at last permits himself to respond -- to its "defeat," as he says -- a full circle has been run. The audience has moved from wisdom, in sharing Brecht's rejection of Coriolanus, to instinctive contempt for Brecht's cvnicism in the face of actual revolt, to wisdom again in Brecht's recognition of his folly. But the last reaction is brief, for just as Brecht has sympathized with something that is over -- as much a part of history as Shakespeare and Coriolanus -- the audience has achieved its wisdom too late, and will have trouble holding onto it outside the theatre.

Maver has reinforced the audience's identification with The Boss by placing him on a platform extended out from the stage. Much of the time he simply sits there, a patron himself, slowly absorbing the events of which he has chosen not to be part. Yet Gitter's detached performance is a masterpiece of contradiction. With small, restrained gestures, and occasional movements of the mouth with and without voice, he echoes and narrates the production. Physically he has come as close to Brecht as his appearance permits, but he is never even tempted toward mimicry, and the potentially cheap laughs of recognition which accompany his entrance are wisely not bid for again.

Plebeians is about playwrights and artists as a lot, so it doesn't really matter if neither Brecht nor the East Berlin uprising was in fact what Grass recreates. Like The Boss, he is snatching a bit of history and reworking it for his own ends. And his justification can be found in The Boss as well, to whom history is fantasy and the present is fact. Brecht -- politically disappointed with pre-war Germany and post-war America--meets the present for one last time in the German Democratic Republic. Finally perceiving the incongruity of his politics within and without the theatre, he retires to the countryside to contemplate trees and perhaps write poems about them. Grass, acutely aware of this same incongruity, presses quietly for the other alternative which, reduced to cliche, is to practice what one preaches.

Mayer's production brings together a far-flung assortment of talents, and makes of them a miraculous whole. Plebeians is not an instructive play in the ordinary sense. It is no lecture, but achieves its purpose by employing the audience as an equal partner, rising and falling with the central character, by making the stage what it is -- a stage -- and by having its cast stretch out, physically as well as metaphorically, into the audience. The blocking, which capitalizes on what are usually limitations in Agassiz Theatre, combines realism with esthetic pleasure, and modulates in perfect coordination with the play. Mayer's fight scene, for example, achieves its power by hurtling all the actors into a gaint, sprawling pretzel. The play-within-a-play is staged in ridiculous straight lines and circles which punctuate the comparative realism of the rest of Plebeians.

Besides Gitter's, there are three truly polished performances. Stephen Kaplan, as Erwin, acts out The Boss's dilemma in an underplayed, hysterically funny idiom. Kathryn Walker plays an actress in and out of character with precisely the right degree of mannerism, preserving her identity as both a woman and a woman of the theatre. And Arthur Friedman, despite gestures which become too broad a little too often, is a properly ugly, self-assured and obedient cultural bureaucrat.

The play, of which this is the American premier, has been translated by Ralph Manheim into compelling, if at times none too lucid, verse. The always-present theme -- of a playwright's relation to the world of politics -- is stated, dissected, and reworded a thousand times during Plebeians' oddly structured course. But a production as fascinating as any in memory, and a performance--Gitter's--that totally transcends the usual boundaries of academic theatre, draw The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising onto new ground as often as its author returns to old.