The Contemporary German Theater Nights at Yale are a series of video recordings of outstanding recent German theater productions which have been invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen, a festival which nominates the ten most notable productions each year. Each of the productions is unique in its own way: they all challenge, expand and renew the possibilities of the theatrical medium by emancipating themselves from the written text and investigating new forms of theatricality.
The films, preceded by a short introduction, are shown in German (without subtitles) and are free and open to everyone who is interested in recent developments of contemporary German theater. If you would like to join the German Theater Nights-Mailing List or for more information, contact Julia Weber.
Monday, March 2, 2009 WHL 309, 7pm
Emilia Galotti by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Director: Michael Thalheimer
Premiere: September 17, 2001 Deutsches Theater Berlin
First staged in 2001 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, this version of Emilia Galotti, written by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1772, became one of the most successful productions in recent German theater. Sold out over 150 times, the production has been hailed for transforming Lessing’s classical drama about the Prince Hettore Gonzaga, who has an eye on the young bourgeois Emilia Galotti, into a modern story about the failure of communication. Mr. Thalheimer is usually either loved or loathed for his speciality of stripping complex classics down to their essential cores, and omitting secondary characters, superfluous exposition and most props and furniture. In Emilia Galotti he focuses on the shortage of time, which puts all the characters under enormous constraints, and explores the gulf between words and deeds: the contradiction between rapid-fire language, which comes fast and furious in an attempt to avert the play’s incomprehensible new situation, and the actions that are born of helplessness.
Monday, March 30, 2009 WHL 309, 7pm
Ulrike Maria Stuart by Elfriede Jelinek
Director: Nicolas Stemann
Premiere: October 28, 2006 Thalia Theater Hamburg
Ulrike Maria Stuart by Elfriede Jelinek projects an argument between the RAF members Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin onto the female dynamic in Schiller’s Maria Stuart between Mary Stuart and Queen Elisabeth. The play is a reflection on the possibility of female power (which according to Jelinek does not exist), as much as it is an investigation of the continually renewed German RAF debate and the ghosts we (Germans) cannot get rid of - be they in prison or pardoned, on stage or inside our heads. Director Nicolas Stemann confronts all these themes, which in Jelinek lead to furious outbursts of rage (her weapon is the language itself), with the reluctance that he and his generation often feel towards political involvement. The irretrievable loss of meaning - his generation's defining experience - makes it impossible for him to approach the RAF's misapplied idealism with any seriousness. And when it comes to Jelinek, he repeatedly stated that staging Jelinek's texts first requires airing out the old lady's head. It may be paradoxical, but his reserved approach seems to touch on emotional subcurrents underlying both Jelinek's rage and the endless discussion of the RAF.
Monday, April 6, 2009, WHL 309, 7pm
Der Sturm by William Shakespeare
Director: Stefan Pucher
Premiere: November 8, 2007 Münchner Kammerspiele
Prospero has lost his charm: against the backdrop of today’s mass entertainments industry the magical powers of the solitary island ruler can arouse only a meager pity. Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest begins with a shipwreck, and in Stefan Pucher’s production this turns out to be no more than the “making of” a documentary for a B movie. The director is unable to believe in the humanist pathos of sublime Prospero – as our view of the world today is always filtered through and coded by the media. Thus Prospero lives out an impoverished existence as an unfulfilled upmarket zombie in the spirit of Count Dracula and the Count of Monte Christo in a kind of post-colonial luxury lodge, where he is waited upon by his rebellious slaves Caliban and Ariel. The Neapolitan experts of disaster seem to come straight out of a movie about the mafia, and the two lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, directly from the tabloid press. The stage consists of enormous pages from a book that Pucher turns as if he were leafing through Shakespeare’s play, but one that has been transformed into a colourful pop-up volume on black pedagogy. With deep scepticism and an irony founded in melancholy, he plays the fairy-teller of pop culture, narrating the profoundly sad story of a failed civilisation and creating an autonomous world of images in the process.
Monday, April 20, 2009, WHL 309, 7pm
Wahlkampf Wallenstein freely adapted from Friedrich Schiller
A documentary production
Directors: Rimini Protokoll / Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel
Premiere: June 5, 2005 Nationaltheater Mannheim
In Wahlkampf Wallenstein directed by Rimini Protokoll, we see real people of Weimar and Mannheim, who act in their real lives and not just on stage. With their biographies they approach the protagonists of Schiller's Wallenstein and stand up to them. People of two cities from opposing ideological camps along the Iron Curtain: Experts of the rise and fall in political power games, of loyalty and obedience or even of the individual in times of fast political changes. The theater of Rimini Protokoll explores the borders between fiction and reality and makes it impossible for the audience to determine where drama begins and real life stops. By overlapping these spheres they attempt to break open the complex that constitutes reality, and to open the medium of theatre to new dimensions of documentation.
