A horror play no theatre will produce - Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays

More than Henry James’s ghost stories, my Halloween reading was the Lulu plays of Frank Wedekind – The Earth Spirit (1895), Pandora’s Box (1904), and the odd coda Death and the Devil (1905) – which at this distance are still lust-crazed nightmares, climaxing in the murder of much of the cast by Jack the Ripper.  Spring Awakening (1891) is a children’s play by comparison.

That last act of Pandora’s Box must be deeply uncomfortable to see performed.  Merely reading it was unpleasant.  I have not seen the 1929 G. W. Pabst film adaptation, nor have I seen a stage performance, but I assume that anything goes, and the more Expressionist and crazy the production the better, to distract the poor audience from the horror at the heart of the plays.

RODRIGO:  You’ve written a horror play with my fiancee’s calves as the two leading characters and that no theatre will produce.  You crazy fool!  You miserable worm!...  I’ll pollute the whole auditorium with my stink.  (Pandora’s Box, Act One)

That’s about right.  The great struggle in the play is between Lulu, who is a human woman of ordinary intelligence, depth, and character cursed with such strong sex appeal that she becomes a kind of living embodiment of sex to everyone who meets her.  Men compete for her, cheat each other, kill themselves, etc. to possess her.  They all rename her as a primary act of possession – “As you know, I christened her Nelly in our marriage contract” (Erdgeist, Act One).  Three of the four acts of Earth Spirit end with the death of one of her husbands, which is comic but increasingly disturbing.  Pandora’s Box starts high and ends at the end, fulfilling Lulu’s dream of escape:

LULU (as though telling a fairy tale):  Every other night I used to dream I’d fallen into the hands of a sex-murderer.  Come on, give me a kiss.  (Pandora’s Box, Act One)

It’s a George Grosz illustration brought to a simulation of life.

For all of the creeping horror, Wedekind’s humor is pervasive.  Here Rodrigo the trapeze artist is making his escape from Lulu, or at least trying:

RODRIGO:  Besides that, she loves me for myself.  She’s interested in more than just obscenities, unlike you.  She has three children by an American bishop; and all of them show the greatest promise.  The day after tomorrow we’ll be married by the registrar.

LULU:  You have my blessings.  (Pandora’s Box, Act Two)

The irony is that in the previous scene Lulu barely evaded being sold to an Egyptian brothel.  She may be shallow, but it is everyone else who keeps returning to obscenity.

Earth Spirit begins with an animal trainer in front of a circus tent.  Lulu, “dressed in a Pierrot costume,” is silent, carried around like a beast, exhorted not to “dislocate our views.”  But the trainer, armed with a whip and pistol, does not use his weapons on her.  No, he fires into the audience.

I read the Carl Richard Mueller translations, which did their job.

The tormenting doubt of everything - Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening - I warm myself in my rotting decay and smile

Once upon a time, perhaps earlier this year, when I was reading Alfred Jarry’s Ubu nightmares, I wondered, amidst the adolescent violence and adolescent scatology, why there was no adolescent sex.  It turns out that the topic had already been covered in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy (published 1891, performed 1906), along with other pressing subjects like over-competitive schools and test anxiety, as if the theatrical avant-gardists of the 1890s had planned out an efficient division of labor.  To be clear, they did not, and Jarry could hardly have known Wedekind’s work, but the plays are kin, in subject, in audacity, and in their destruction of the clichés of the theater.

Melchior and Moritz (not Max and Moritz) cram for exams and ponder the mysteries of their pubescence,  while innocent but curious Wendla is protected from sex by her timid mother.  The children are all fourteen years old, but they are all played by adult actors.*  The result is pregnancy due to inadequate sex education, teen suicide, pornography (prints of famous paintings!), a botched abortion, homosexual exploration, nude modeling, and headless ghosts.  Much of this actually takes place off-stage.

Strangely, this hormonally over-heated tragedy is actually a black comedy, or could be.  In Act III, Scene One, Melchior is interrogated by his professors, accused of the crime of disseminating accurate information about sex.  His professors are Thickstick, Flyswatter, Sunstroke, and so on, and they spend much of their time debating whether and which window should be opened.  Conclusion:

FLYSWATTER:  Should it appear to our respected colleague that our room is not sufficiently ventilated, might I propose that he has a ventilator bored in the top of his head?

And then Harpo pulls a hand drill from one of his enormous pockets and Chico says “Atsa no good!”  The Ubu-like madness of the play comes from this lurch from Naturalistic “social issues” to surrealist nonsense to almost abstract pure theater, aided by the play’s short, fragmented scenes.  In the climax, Melchior escapes from prison to confront his ghosts, or something like that, but is rescued, or damned, by the intervention of The Masked Man (“In the end everyone has his part – you the comforting knowledge of having nothing – you the tormenting doubt of everything”).

To reduce this play to an attack on the complacent German bourgeoisie or poor sex ed does it an injustice.  Wedekind’s real concerns are existential.

Here’s the end, which is as likely as anything to spark curiosity about the beginning – the first line is meant literally:

MORITZ (alone):  I sit here with my head in my arm.  The moon covers its face, the veil falls away, and it doesn’t look any wiser.  So I go back to my place.  I straighten my cross after that clumsy idiot’s kicked it over, and when everything’s in order I lie down on my back again, warm myself in my rotting decay and smile.

* I am reading the Edward Bond translation, performed in 1974 – Moritz was played by a young Michael Kitchen, Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle himself.

Coming up: weird German playwrights for German Literature Month

German Literature Month, so designated by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, approaches.  At either link, you will find an orderly, well-defined schedule for the month.  My understanding is that it is should be followed only in spirit, although the schedules for the readalongs of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel might have more meaning.

I have written before, if I am not imagining it as the result of a wine and tobacco induced E. T. A. Hoffmann-style dream, about my bewilderment and irritation at the poor status in the English-reading world of pre-20th century German-language literature.  Goethe, a titan, the equivalent, in English terms, of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Wordsworth combined in a single person, shrivels down to the author of Faust (part I only) and the “autobiographical” Sorrows of Young Werther.  German poetry is hopeless, despite numerous fine translations; German fiction, the rich line of novellas, is too weird.  Theodor Fontane can be credited with bringing Flaubert into German, Frenchifying German fiction, so I hope many readers in the “too weird” crowd will enjoy Effi Briest a lot. The business with the crocodile and Chinese servant is still a little weird.

Weirdest of all, though, is the startling German dramatic tradition.  The strange and wonderful things one found on the German stage.  That stage might well be imaginary – I am thinking of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, “finished” (by his death) in 1837, published in 1879, performed in 1913.  Large parts of Faust seem unstageable, too, although they have all been staged.

My point here is actually to pin up my German Literature Month reading list, except that I have not really decided yet.  I will mess around with some of the late 19th century playwrights, that’s all I know, the three almost exact contemporaries – Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind.  (Sorry – Wedekind’s first name must be Franz, not Frank.  Let me look that up.  Ah, his full name is Benjamin Franklin Wedekind.  Of course.)

Wedekind is most famous, I think, for Spring Awakening, which was recently bent into a Broadway musical, and the two Lulu plays.  Schnitzler’s best known play is Der Reigen / La Ronde.  Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912, but seems to now be the least known in English, meaning: the titles of his plays do not ring bells for me.

I am tempted, too, by some younger playwrights, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lively poet, librettist for the dreary Richard Strauss – someday I hope to be able to spell Hofmannsthal’s name correctly without looking it up.  Or I might try the Expressionist Georg Kaiser, author of Gas and also Gas II.  The titles alone attract my interest.  I’m not going to read all or even much of this in November, though.

This piece must be among the most ignorant I have ever written for Wuthering Expectations.  Speculative might be a kinder word.  Corrections, admonitions, and recommendations are most welcome.

Oh, there will also be some of this in November:

That’ll be fun, right?