A German soldier returns from a Siberian P.O.W. camp to Hamburg in 1947, three years after the end of WWII. He attempts suicide after finding his wife took another lover during the war, and from this odd start and his subsequent conversation with the river that rejects his death, he travels, flails and questions his way through the remains of his city, and of his mind.
Wolfgang Borchert’s modular play, “The Man Outside” takes a hard look at a vast body of soldiers that few outside Germany — and, for that matter, since 1945 — have taken the effort to understand. The play offers a vivid, disturbing portrait.
Making the play all the more poignant is the fact that it mirrors the author’s own experiences. Borchert wrote the play knowing he would die just days after completing this work, and so created an autobiographical sketch of his truncated, tormented post-war life.
Performed during four showings last weekend in the Little Theater, “The Man Outside” follows a corporal Beckmann, played by junior Aaron Helgeson, symbolically stripped of his first name during the war by the rigid nature of duty.
The simple yet quasi-absurdist nature of the script and the overtones of Brechtian staging lent themselves very well to the subject matter – the illusions and imagination of Beckmann, who wavers constantly between death and despair.
“The concept was to demonstrate Beckmann’s disconnection with reality,” explained director junior Asher Rapkin. The further the soldier descends into his own mind, the less the characters around him exhibit “naturalistic tendencies,” such as speaking or even appearing onstage, he said.
Artistic director senior Florian Staab, who translated and adapted the play, crafted a clever way to demonstrate Beckmann’s episodes in and out of reality. As the soldier falls deeper into eternal ‘sleep,’ the characters he interacts with speak to him, not in their onstage voices, but through recorded monologues dubbed upon their silent, unmoving lips. The bulk of the dialogue was recorded several weeks before the show and Staab then added music and effects, looped words and phrases, and cast the sound from various speakers surrounding the audience. The production was undertaken by Staab as an honors project in sound design.
Most of the vocal talent also appeared onstage, moving to but not even mouthing the words being played back. Key to the success in the onstage performances was Rapkin’s overall well-conceived staging of scenes and the blocking of the actors. Early on, Helgeson seemed a bit adrift, his character’s movements too out-of-sync with his generally silent co-stars. But as the play moved forward, the performance found a rhythm appropriate to the character’s slow collapse, mixing sharp movements and languid patches with eccentric comic bits.
Of note among the rest of the onstage roles: Senior Matt Franks, as the faceless shadow Other, brought a grace and purpose to the conscience-like character that glides on and off stage. Sophomore Jessica Bedwinek was appropriately tough but feminine as the young widow who pulls Beckmann from the water. And junior Tom Taylor moved effortlessly between the varied physicalities for his roles ranging from disinterested theatre producer to the embodiment of angry surf.
In addition to the physical dimensions of the acting, Staab’s adeptness with the production’s audio design was well complimented by the wealth of talent brought to the table by the rest of the design team. Senior Meg Morley’s at times playful, at times surreal, at times simple and delicate light design mixed candy colors and dusky hues to provide an eerie street, a ghostly riverbed and the panicked, claustrophobic mind of the shell-shocked main character. The lights played against the utilitarian set of sophomore Carolyn Mraz. Mraz did more to open the playing space in Little Theater and deepen the audience’s sense of reality with a sketched mural backdrop and a fading, crumbling stone wall than some designers achieve with a truckload of period furniture and a wall of flats.
Altogether these various aspects certainly helped the message of the play, but at times the whole thing seemed a little heavy-handed. The two central themes of the play – the playwright’s disgust with the unending bloodshed of war and the hopelessness that the playwright and other German soldiers encounter returning to their ruined native cities to find their spouses and families dead or disappeared – revolve around each other and stay tightly focused, yet sometimes border on being excessively preachy.
Both themes provide cutting moments of their own, such as when Beckmann summed up the human interest in war in the second act: “People once mourned for small tragedies,” he said, “but now only deaths in the six figures can do that.” He held up his hands: “These numbers now have more zeros than we have fingers.” Elsewhere Beckmann encounters an unthinking civilian who now inhabits his home, a theatre producer more concerned with looking forward then considering the past, and an unsympathetic army colonel who fails to understand the toll the war and its fallout have had on the young corporal.
These two central ideas of disillusionment and depression are explored in several ways, but never really seem to develop throughout the play. The most interesting ingredient in this play is its unique historical premise, which seemingly takes precedence over everything else. Though there are various episodes, they seem quite willing to rehash the same central ideas, each in a moderately different light. The dramatic arc to the miserable scene never grows as high as it could.
At one point a character notes, “Art needs time to mature.” Listening to the dialogue one had to wonder if such was not the case here. Certainly the actors’ voices needed to be recorded early on to give Staab enough time to develop the design. But one can’t shake the feeling that some of the stilted sections, the conversations with less heart in the voice than in the words, were the result of a production hamstrung by its own ingenuity. A week or two more, were it possible, before the cast headed for the recording studio could have helped avoid the ruts it sometimes fell into. Similarly Helgeson – who was onstage for the entire two-hour performance, and was very consistent in portraying a very temperamental, unstable yet sympathetic character– needed something to keep him from occasionally spinning his wheels in a script replete with soliloquies and long stretches of preachy, often interchangeable dialogue.
When all is said, recorded and done, this is a play about the horrors and ravages of war and its aftermaths - scary, numbing, and intense sensations. The script does not miss these points. But, to again quote the play, this production “is not art yet.” It did not really engage the audience and cause them to grow to care about the scarred traveler from a long-ago war who, in front of their eyes, agonizingly slipped away.
The Man Outside is an ambitious project delving into a realm of history and art that has largely been left untouched. Definitely a triumph for Staab just in terms of the audio, it was visually strong and gave the audience plenty of flashes of an emotional underlay that was interesting, insightful, and disturbing.