An old man, a carnival sideshow performer, promises surprises to the audience. He opened a coffin-like wooden container and revealed a somnambulist, an eternal somnambulist under his command. Three young men are seduced and see their lives changed forever.
Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a horror classic. Now, Quantum Theater hopes playwright Jay Ball’s new stage adaptation will resonate with modern audiences as a provocative political allegory for our time.
Ball, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has long been fascinated by the silent film “Caligari,” whose nightmarish set design is a symbol of German expressionist art.
The central question, he said, is “Is it possible to turn a morally normal person into a murderer against his will?”
The film’s political resonance may not be obvious to modern viewers. There is nothing on screen that explicitly references politics or even the just-ended World War I. However, the film is seen as both an allegory for Germany’s wartime authoritarian government and a foreshadowing of the coming rise of Nazism.
Jason Snyder
/
quantum theater
Jerome Rodriguez as Cesare and Sarah Lindsay as Hannah in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”
“I strongly believe that we are in a period of serious fascism in this country and internationally,” Ball said by phone from his home in Baltimore. “We want to create an adaptation that brings out the latent anti-fascist allegory that was always present in ‘Doctor Martin’: Caligari, its anti-authoritarian politics.”
He offered the play to Quantum founder and artistic director Carla Booth. In 2021, Carla Booth was performing “An Odyssey,” a raucous revisionist adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey” by a former Carnegie Mellon University professor. Booth proved to have similar thoughts about “Caligari.”
“This work is about an evil person who rules over people, especially young people and free people. What does that mean?” she said with a laugh. “And why would you do that at this very moment?”
The premiere film, directed by Jed Allen Harris, opens this week. The setting is the 10th-floor auditorium of the Union Trust Building downtown, where the marble floor shines like a mirror.
The show stars Dan Krell as Caligari, Jereme Rodriguez as sleepwalker Cesar, and Nick Lehane, Sarah Lindsay, and Cameron Nickell as three students. Designed by Yafei Hu, the set evokes the film’s bleak, crazy-angled sets, with still photography and video projections by Joseph Seamans.
Ball’s Caligari, like Wiene’s film, avoids any references to contemporary events or figures. However, in a sense, this is Ball’s attempt to recover the political background of the original work. The film’s message is undermined by a strange framing device (imposed on the screenwriters by the movie studio) that makes Caligari the hero of the story rather than the villain.
The main difference in this play is Ball’s own radically different framing device. His play begins in 1970 in East Germany. There, Helene Weigel, a real-life actor and founder of the Berlin Ensemble Theater Company, is performing her own version of “Caligari.”
“In a sense, we’re in three different eras,” said Harris (who also directed Ball’s “Odyssey” on Quantum). “We’re in the ’20s, we’re in the ’70s, and we’re in the present. The audience is here now, so it brings a 2024 sensibility to it.”
Weigel is the wife of famous playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the conceit is that she and her company completed Caligari, which Brecht left unfinished when he died decades ago.
Like her husband, Weigel was a committed socialist and internationalist, but she worries that younger generations have forgotten the war and the nightmare that led to it.
“The fear is still there, waiting for its time. Looking for weaknesses. Counting on our collective amnesia,” she tells the young troupe.
In Ball’s play, Weigel is played by Katherine Gaul, who also plays several bit parts in her show.
“Part of what I find compelling about this work is the idea that there is a core belief that is worth risking everything for,” Gaur said. “And we’re in fast-paced times, and I want to play someone who stands out for what he knows is right and is trying to muster every last bit of energy to rally his community to act for what he believes in. That is a deep inspiration to me.”
Ball’s play does not explore electoral politics or political parties, much less a single election. However, while Ball has the concept of Dr. Caligari as “a kind of right-wing ideologue,” he is less interested in labels and more interested in the belief systems that underpin authoritarian political movements like fascism. .
Quantum’s Mr. Booth decided to release “Caligari” just before the presidential election, when Republican candidate Donald Trump’s former chief of staff said that Trump met the definition of a “fascist.”
“You have to either not work during this period or understand that we’re all going to be filled with things like this,” she said. “Moving over[the election]just puts the project in the emotions that we’re going to have.”
But while audiences will view the play in the context of current events, Booth also positions the play outside of the election cycle.
“I’m always looking for something that gives me new insight into human relationships,” she said.
“I hope that this adaptation is completely resolved and we don’t have any solid answers,” Ball said, “but there are dangerous and dangerous questions about what happened and what will happen in the future.” I hope that a certain sense of ambiguity will remain forever.”
“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” opens on Friday, November 1st and runs through November 24th. Click here for details.
