"Edward II," Brecht's only tragedy, is revived by Jean Cocteau Rep
Masterful tale of England's ill-fated gay king, seldom-produced,
contains the seeds of Brecht's epic theater and of modern gay drama.
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| "EDWARD II" BY BERTOLT BRECHT -- Harris Berlinsky as the King, Jason Crowell as Gaveston. Photo by Jonathan Slaff. | |
Presented by Jean Cocteau Repertory, Bouwerie Lane Theatre, 330 Bowery.
Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8:00 pm (except where noted), Sundays at 3:00 pm
Admission $30, $24 seniors, $15 students, TDF accepted.
Preview performances $24.
Discount ticket packages available (traditional series or flexible pass).
Box office (212) 677-0060.
PERFORMANCE DATES: Previews January 21, 22, Opens January 23, runs January 27, 28, February 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 25, 26, 27, March 1 (7pm), 2 (this show has pre-show symposium with director at 7:30 pm), 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 24, 25 (3pm & 8pm), 26, 29, 30 (7pm), 31, April 1, 2, 15, 16, 19, 20, 28, 30, May 3, 4. Added dates: April 28 (8:00), 30 (3:00), May 3 (8:00), 4 (8:00).
Despite its dramatic vigor and its historic place as precursor of modern dramas with a central gay theme, Bertolt Brecht's "Edward II" ("Lebens Edwards des Zweiten von England," 1924) is seldom produced and mostly unappreciated. In New York, it has been presented only once: off-off Broadway by The Medicine Show during the 1970s. Jean Cocteau Repertory leaped at the opportunity to share this neglected modern classic with New York audiences and to once again team up with translator Eric Bentley. English adaptations by Bentley have been a favorite of Cocteau audiences in recent years, in productions including "Woyzeck," "Leonce and Lena," "The First Lulu," "A Man's A Man" and "Mother Courage."
"Edward II" will be presented January 21 to April 20, using Bentley's much-commended 1965 verse translation together with songs written for this production by Arnold Black and arranged by Ellen Mandel. It is directed by Karen Lordi, who is making her Cocteau Rep debut.
The downfall of the Plantagenet king of England (1307-1327), whose incompetence and distaste for government ultimately led to his deposition and murder, was first dramatized in an Elizabethan verse play by Christopher Marlowe which dealt frankly (for its time) with the king's homosexuality. Brecht intended to direct Marlowe's play (as an alternative to "Macbeth") in 1924 at the Munich Kammerspiele, but since he did not like the translation, decided to make an adaptation of his own. The finished work, written with Lion Fuechtwanger, became more of a "counter-play" than a translation. It distilled the number of characters from 40 to 20 and strengthened the play by enlarging the roles of the Queen (Edward's devoted wife) and Mortimer (the ally to whom she drifts to recapture the kingdom). The modern tragedy that emerged was, in many aspects, the debut work of Brecht's "epic theater." Even the play's visual look was emblematically so: on the advice of Karl Valentin, a famous clown of the Munich beer halls, Brecht made the soldier's faces chalk-white to suggest the terror and fatigue of war.
The events of the play reflect the time shortly after the rebellion led by Scottish national hero William Wallace (recently immortalized by Hollywood in Mel Gibson's "Braveheart") against Edward's father, Edward Longshanks, and coincide with the subsequent Scottish rebellions (1314-1323) led by Robert the Bruce. The play portrays Edward II's historic "fatal infatuation" with Piers Gaveston, a Gascon knight who was banished by Longshanks as a bad influence on his son. It begins with his father's death, when Edward II recalled his lover. While doing so, he incurred bitter opposition from the powerful English barony over mismanagement and loss of the Scottish war due to his negligence. The play traces the king's transformation from a frivolous, foolish and irrational young man to a tragic hero, toughened by hardships and by his soldier's life in the field, who struggles first not to abandon Gaveston and, ultimately, not to give up his crown. Edward's ability to resist is ennobling. His ability to say NO--to which Brecht attached lifelong importance--recalls a major theme of Brecht's work, associated with the inability Brecht perceived in his own people, the Germans, to say no to bullies of many stripes. While the play greatly exceeds Marlowe's in profundity and dramatic craft, it borrows from it a distance from immediate experience which Brecht later called Verfremdung, or alienation--a key ingredient of his later dramas. Brecht's dramatic genius is fully at work, illustrating the futility of human ambition and the blind turnings of fate. The dramatic virtuosity of this tragedy is unmistakable, yet Brecht never again wrote in the tragic vein, in accordance with his adopted communist philosophy that "tomorrow will be better."
Brecht wrote of gay themes in three of his earliest plays, "Baal," "In the Jungle of the Cities" and "Edward II." In Marlowe's version, the homosexuality was aesthetic and ambiguous; in Brecht's, it was coarsened and made more real (as is the whole play, whose choppy overall verse style eschews the sublime sinuousness of Renaissance rhythms for iambic pentameters interspersed with shorter lines). Brecht made Edward's love for Gaveston real, as when Gaveston testifies, "I...do not know/What it was about me of too much or too little/That made this Edward, now the King,/Unable to leave me alone...." In doing so, writes translator Bentley, Brecht made the downfall of Gaveston more poignant because it is so much more than he "asked for."
Whether Brecht was writing to specific gay people he knew is something we may never know. But it is likely that he was advocating against gay self-victimization and against the characterization of the Gay Man as found in Marlow: an object of pitiful contempt who, in the end, lies miserably in his dungeon and goes pitifully to his death. Interestingly, Brecht has never been given credit for being the first major playwright to put a gay plot central in a modern play, a practice which was not "accepted" until decades later in his century.
The production features Cocteau veteran Harris Berlinsky in the title Role and Jason Crowell as Gaveston. Craig Smith plays Mortimer and Elise Stone plays the Queen. The cast of twelve also includes Tim Deak, Marc Diraison, Jennifer Lee Dudek, Jolie Garrett, Angela Madden, Neil Shah, Ashley Smith and Michael Surabian. Sets are by Robert Klingelhoefer; costumes are by Robert J. Martin; lighting is by Trui Malten.
Karen Lordi directed Julie Harris in a new play "Amber Patches" by Peter Dee at Pendragon Theater in Saranac Lake, NY last August. Her "downtown" credits include "Don Juan and Faust" by Christian Grabbe in Nada's Faust Festival. She was Assistant Director to Marshall Mason on the Broadway production of Lanford Wilson's "Redwood Curtain." She has also directed at the Circle Rep Lab and staged "Terra Nova" at the Attic Theater in LA, which won Drama Logue's Best Director and Production in 1993. She earned MFA and DFA from Yale School of Drama and is currently Assistant Professor at Dickinson College in PA. She is fluent in German and directed "Threepenny Opera" for Pendragon in 1998. She directed her first Brecht play, "The Wedding," at the Yale Summer Cabaret in 1991 (while she was also its artistic director).
"Edward II" will be presented January 21 to April 20, in rotating repertory with "The Servant of Two Masters" by Carlo Goldoni (runs through February 24) and "Medea" by Euripides (begins April 7). [NYTW]
RELATED ARTICLE: Jean Cocteau Repertory's 1999-2000 Season
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