At Agassiz: Drums in the Night

BRECHT wrote Drums in the Night as a satire of revolution. The hero, Andreas Kragler, returns battered from the war to Berlin of January 1919, on the eve of the Sparticist rebellion, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Kragler wants his fiancee Anna back, but her parents are just about to marry her off to a corpulent war profiteer named Freirich Murk. Kragler is pissed, so much so that he begins spouting off about oppression, and rushes to join the revolution at the barricades. Anna has a change of heart, and catches Kragler on the way. Without a second thought, Kragler deserts his comrades for his girl and the ripe fruits of the bourgeoisie.

The satire is uncomplicated, and somewhat shallow. The revolutionaries we see are bourgeoir who have been slighted by their class: pompous intellectuals and cafe bums. The fringes of society, suffering malaise of the soul, ransoming their dreams to the mythical revolution. Brecht in his later years regretted the immaturity of the play, the worldly cynicism, the debunking of all ideals without suggestion of where society's problems come from and how they are resolved.

Brecht's use of the revolution as a background on which to play an unsentimental low comedy, one almost hammed by the distrust of human sensibility of a Ben Jonson, is hard to figure out. He was 22 when he wrote the play, perhaps he was not yet confident to deal head-on with the real issues of the revolution. His later, more radical plays, evolved a whole new kind of theater. In "Drums" there are hints of his presentational mode; the characters often seem to step outside of themselves, the bourgeois are prototype bourgeois, the proletarians a somewhat unsympathetic prototype. Yet the distancing serves artistic ends rather than those of propaganda and social justice, as in Brecht's later works. And the completely apolitical, uninformed resolution of Kragler's dilemma at the close of the play belies seeing Drums in the Night as much more than an anticipation of more mature work.

Harpo's choices of plays for production are never haphazard. The choice of this play of Brecht's seems particularly sensitive. Harpo is committed to do plays as much the way they were written as possible. Director Laurence Senelick must then intend Drums in the Night primarily as a statement about Weimar Germany. I have no real way of knowing how well he succeeds. The play seems like what Weimar seems like, anomie everywhere, drunken revelry, heavy humor, recrimination and insecurity. Anna's super bourgeois parents, played by Martin Andrucki and Raye Bush, are convincing, and though they are without any subtlety, the roles seem, written that way. John Camera reaches a peak as the profiteer Murk in his drunken scene. All three are the kind of Germans you love to hate.

Sally Bonn is not so good as Anna. According to Brecht, she is supposed to have a "certain run of the mill sensuality." It is missing. Her performance opening night was nervous and somewhat ferced. She seemed almost embarrassed at being on stage, rushing at moments to get through with it. Gary Halcott is convincing as an everyman Andreas Kragler. He is the confused warrior come home to an ungrateful Fatherland, wanting only to sleep with his old honey, sinking to revolutionary despair when be can't have her. Through the play he manages to look progressively more tired and more bored.

THE WEIMAR ANALOGY is pretty clear. It says that 1970 America, rather than being like Nazi Germany, is like its predecessor, the Weimar Republic of the 20's. Liberal institutions are revealed as totally bankrupt, minority revolution is fiercely suppressed, majority coasts along with mounting prosperity, finding its soul in moments of absolute debauchery. Hitler is the inevitable next step.

Harpo's Drums in the Night is saying something about America. The satire of bourgeois revolutionaries, their quixotic attachments, seems particularly appropriate for a modern American audience. So do the caricatures of bloated warmongering pigs. In fact, it all seems close enough to reality that one wonders just where the satire lies. And when we, like Brecht before us, will come to a better understanding of our predicament.