Valerie Leonard as The Second Mother, Antoinette Lavecchia as The Empress and Robert Emmet Lunney as Starhemberg. Photography by Stan Barouh.
The Potomac Theatre Project, now known as PTP/NYC, had great success last year with another of British playwright Howard Barker's plays, "Scenes From An Execution," which garnered a Drama Desk Award for Best Leading Actress for Jan Maxwell. And the year before that, Barker's "No End Of Blame" had multiple nominations by the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. So, Howard Barker has been good for PTP/NYC.
This year, the company has decided to do the American premiere of "The Europeans," a play more opaque and furtive than the other two in both its intentions and obsessions, and for the most part, except for a few scenes with dramatic impact, director Richard Romagnoli and his cast did not manage to make Barker's meditations and investigations about war, freedom, morality, history, and power (and its attendant eroticism) take on dramatic life.
Barker locates the play in an actual event: the aftermath of the 1683 siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks which is repelled by General Ernst Rüdiger Von Starhemberg (who appears in Barker's play, along with another actual historical figure of that event, Emperor Leopold -- the rest of the characters are Barker's inventions). Barker focuses on the aftermath because it gives him a forum for speculating about the possible liberations that wholesale destruction can bring -- from sclerotic moralities, imperial follies, shallow art, even accepted norms of sanity.
Each character populating this flattened Vienna is now without a compass, except, perhaps, for the most basic (and base) impulses. For some, like Orphuls (Robert Zuckerman), a gluttonous priest who murders his mother to gain a proper knowledge of evil, becoming unhinged from the past gives him license to indulge his every human appetite without restraint or judgment, whatever the consequence and without remorse. For others, like Emperor Leopold (Brent Langdon) and Empress Elizabeth (Antoinette LaVecchia), the direction is retrograde, a return to the verities that established their power and kept them at the top of the heap. Others have urgencies more mixed and porous. Starhemberg (Robert Emmet Lunney), the successful general, shuns all official accolades and seeks, among the human refuse of Vienna and especially in the raped, mutilated, and Turk-impregnated body of Katrin (Aidan Sullivan), some path that will not lead to an "official" morality that cements injustice in place and honors the impostors. Katrin, for her part, wants to make her suffering a public spectacle, even a public art: she insists that 10,000 pictures of her breastless torso be distributed throughout the city and stages the birth of her half-Turkish child outdoors in the city's center for all to witness. In Starhemberg she finds a companion who will love her in the way she demands: without pity, without concern for beauty, attracted to her by her defaults and absences.
And elsewhere in this urban chaos, sex is exchanged for food and vice versa, a severed head is cradled like a baby, intellectuals discuss art while people starve -- the world off-kilter and thus (at least to Barker) ripe for amendment.
In short, in "The Europeans," consistent with his formulation of a Theatre of Catastrophe, Barker presents his audience with the obverse of what he thinks are their settled beliefs so that they have the chance to question themselves and, in that questioning, come to know what they did not know they knew. At least, that's the theory.
In practice? In this play, more so than in the other two Barker plays PTP/NYC has produced, the theatrical world is more hermetic and arid. I would even go so far to say that Barker, despite his intention to get his audiences to reëxamine in themselves what does not get examined often enough, is not particularly concerned if an audience is in attendance here. The debates, badinage, aperçus, sermons, renditions all come out of the characters' mouths as what they are and very little more. Occasionally, Barker jobs in what an audience might recognize as dialogue or subtext or narrative forward-motion (there is an actual story being told here, mostly focused on Starhemberg and Katrin), but for the most part Barker has his characters deliver his/their words and then move on to the next oration.
That being said, Romagnoli doesn't help the situation as much as he could have because he chooses to stage the play with his characters in "period" costume (i.e., tightly cinched gowns for the court ladies, rough-wool pants and heavy boots for Starhemberg, etc.) and uses projections on hung cloth to set literal places for the action -- in other words, trying to find some "naturalistic" vernacular to frame Barker's quite non-natural and abstracted theatrical world. I kept wondering if a different sort of staging might have helped sharpen the focus on Barker's intentions here, something less ornamental and more "estranging," to use Victor Shklovsky's critical term. As it is, while at times the production has undeniable dramatic power (as in Katrin's narrative of her despoilment and the handing back of Katrin's child to the Turks at the end of the play), it fails to catch fire overall.
This is not entirely the production's fault. Barker's play, even though supposedly an outwardly aimed meditation upon what makes Europe Europe (written, as it was, in 1990, when Europe debated this question itself in relation to forming the EU), is insular and self-indulgent, and much of the "obverse morality" he posits as the antidote to our aesthetic prejudices, such as the equation of beauty and cruelty, is a morality best left for the actors on a stage or, like the intellectuals in Leopold's court, bandied about by people who have no power to put it into effect -- it is not useable in the real life most of us have to lead.
So kudos to PTP/NYC for bringing more of Barker to the United States, and for participating in the international celebration in October that will honor his work and the theatre created to stage it, The Wrestling School. I look forward to their next Barker project.
(July 2009)