MUNICH — Perhaps it’s the onset of winter, the shorter days and the longer evenings, but right now, watching theater at home, online, doesn’t seem quite as dreary or tiresome as it did during the spring lockdown.
Back in March, theaters scrambled to put up as much of their recorded archives as they could, resulting in a staggering volume of nightly streams that was nearly unmanageable.
With Germany’s second lockdown, which began in early November and was recently extended through the end of the year, theaters are trying to keep their current seasons going with a mix of premieres and recent recordings at a time when they can’t welcome audiences inside their auditoriums.
All this shows that theaters here have learned something from the experience of the past eight, mostly performance-free months. While stages remained dark, some theaters made contingency plans for future lockdowns.
It’s difficult to generate excitement about a premiere that no one can attend, but the Deutsches Theater in Berlin managed to create buzz around Sebastian Hartmann’s staging of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” in mid-November. (Performances with an audience are planned for early next year.)
Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, plans to stay a few weeks at a Swiss sanitarium and ends up as a patient there for seven years. In bringing the novel to the stage, Hartmann, a critic’s darling whose productions often seem more like installations or performance art than conventional theater, explored the knotty nexus of time, space and reality with a grotesque intensity.
To all appearances, Hartmann’s point of departure is one of the novel’s most famous chapters, “Snow,” a hyperreal interlude in which Castorp falls asleep during a blizzard and has vivid and unsettling dreams.
For much of the production, the eight actors trudged across the stage in clumpy white bodysuits that made them look like deformed Michelin Men, often accompanied by projected video game-like animation (Tilo Baumgärtel) and ominous music (Samuel Wiese).
In the video stream, shot with multiple cameras from various positions both onstage and off, these elements often blended and blurred: This, plus occasional technical glitches, made it quite difficult to get a sense of what the production might look like onstage.
The stagecraft, cinematography and editing combined to produce a disconcerting effect, like spending two hours in a snowstorm. With no discernible plot, the strange goings on — and shrill monologues — quickly grew tedious.
Aside from several gin and tonics, what kept me going was the highly active live chat that accompanied the YouTube broadcast. And I wasn’t alone: “This chat is the best! I can hardly tear myself away and concentrate on the play,” one user wrote.
“I’m all for tearing things down, but why is this billed as ‘The Magic Mountain’ when nothing remains of the original,” another user wrote. “It needs a different title.”
But perhaps the most perceptive comment of the evening was this one: “This is just one of a thousand ways to do theater. The good news is that none of us paid big bucks for this and we can decide to leave at any time.”
Aside from this, I was surprised by how poorly the excitement of live theater came across in the stream. All the elements that combined to make this a slick online viewing experience — the camerawork and editing effects — sapped it of its raw, immediate power.
The place to turn to for that live wire energy was the Münchner Kammerspiele, which had just started an ambitious new season before the second lockdown hit.
In late November, the theater streamed the premiere of “The History of the Federal Republic of Germany,” a propulsive and engaging concert by the Munich-based musician and cultural anthologist Julian Warner, also known as Fehler Kuti, and his band, Die Polizei. (His alias is a winking homage to the pioneering Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti; “Fehler” is the German word for “mistake.”)
Warner, whose heritage is Jamaican, Singaporean and Indian (his parents were British soldiers stationed in the Lower Rhein region, which is where he was born) narrates and sings about a society built on the pillars of free market capitalism, systemic racism and police brutality. Yet despite these heavy themes, the result is never preachy. Instead, Warner deftly mixes critical theory with pop culture in a performance that is a playful and witty protest.
Warner’s spoken word and sung lyrics come off as a streetwise take on academic jargon. “Class relations have succumbed to mere identity markers.” He raps and croons over funky beats: “Postcolonial theory and critical whiteness discourse have become the lingua franca of our movement.”
The performance, originally programmed for last season at the Kammerspiele, is set to travel to Basel, Switzerland at a later date. But sometimes taking a show online can seem like the only way to rescue it, during a lockdown with no end date in sight. Unless, like the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, you’ve planned ahead.
Even before the fall lockdown was announced, the theater had already made arrangements to upload recordings of several new productions, to widen their audience while numbers in the auditorium were restricted. Of the four plays now available to rent for a small fee on Gorki Stream though the end of the year, the most of-the-moment title is “Death Positive — States of Emergency,” directed by Yael Ronen. (Like the Gorki’s stage productions, all the streams have English subtitles).
Ronen, the Gorki’s in-house director, develops her monologue-based plays in tandem with her casts. In “Death Positive,” six actors demonstrate a range of reactions to the pandemic.
Niels Bormann serves as our M.C. Dressed in an improvised medical coverall that looks like a child’s Halloween costume, he pedantically enumerates the restrictions that theaters in Germany must adhere to, onstage and off. He strikes an uneasy tone between worry and outright mockery, as when he goes after his co-stars with exaggerated vigilance for not wearing masks, or failing to observe social distancing.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Lea Draeger embodies the conspiratorially paranoid style of some coronavirus skeptics. “I’m not denying the situation. I’m just not ready to accept that things are as bad or as good as they tell us they are,” she says. Then she urges the audience to hole themselves up in the mountains with survival gear and a diary, “so you can become famous after your death, like Anne Frank.”
The Israeli actress Orit Nahmias manages to touch an emotional core that her co-stars skirt. Ronen gives her two very different set pieces, including a wrenching monologue about her death-obsessed father that closes the production.
It was Nahmias’s earlier scene, however, that resonated with me more strongly: the monologue of an actress who has been forcibly separated from her public. “I’ve missed you,” she tells the audience in a sweet and witty address. Like a jilted lover craving tenderness and rapprochement, she apologizes to the audience for having been selfish: She realizes how much she needs us; she’s ready to consider our needs.
With humor and a dash of sap, Nahmias connects with her audience — in-person and virtual — with warmth and generosity. It’s just the sort of openhearted gesture we need as we contemplate the prospect of a winter without live theater.
