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Director Rafael De Mussa has gathered together a collection of short works by August Stramm, Franz Kafka, Ernst Toller, Gottfried Benn, and Lothar Schreyer and has created a single 90-minute production that is likely to leave your head spinning and your anxieties about the state of humankind confirmed. A group of soldiers, played by a talented and ethnically diverse cast of six that includes the director himself, are hunkered down in a bunker—perhaps a bombed out church—while scenes and sounds of battle are projected behind them. They are surrounded by odds and ends of scattered artifacts and dozens of books. To pass the time, they read aloud to each other from these books (though I hasten to add that the actors—even when their noses are buried in the pages of these books—are not reading from scripts) and use the materials around them as props. What the soldiers are reading does not always make sense to them, but the very act of performing does serve to quell their fear while the war wages on. It is also not necessary that the audience understand everything the various playwrights have to say about religion, art, nature, learning, science, medicine, revolution, nationalism, and man's inhumanity to man that are the subjects of the plays. Expressionist theater was characterized by dreamlike—sometimes nightmarish—imagery, and their plots were similarly dreamlike by being disjointed and fragmented. This is certainly the effect that Mr. De Mussa has brought to his staging, and despite the difficulty of comprehending everything moment-by-moment, it is important to let the entire experience wash over you. You'll get the gist of what is being said. The constant drone of war, along with increasingly disturbing visual images, are at least as important as the words, and the whole makes for a memorable if disconcerting theatrical event.
Culture Shock 1911-1922
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