Dear friend,
I want to share a bit more about Quantum's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with you.
Back in 1920 when film as an art form was just beginning, a film was made that’s still important to many today: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s a full-blown representation of German Expressionism, and it came out of the Weimar Republic in Germany – that democratic experiment when social and artistic movements flourished to a degree that a backlash was sure to come and did – Nazi Germany.
Quantum’s collaborator Jay Ball is knowledgeable of and fascinated by the Weimar Republic and sees parallels to American democracy in the present, in the pendulum swing that shows us liberal movements followed by conservative movements. In his adaptation of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari there’s room for viewers to further the internal dialog they’re likely having with polarization, and to explore some other ideas about political systems.
Jay has added a ‘framing device’ – a theatre company is putting on a play they wrote based on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Not just ANY theatre company but a really influential (and great!) one that rose in Berlin in the 20th century, the Berliner Ensemble, the company of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht believed idealistically in communist principles, in workers as rightful heirs and custodians of 20th century prosperity, and he infused his message with understanding of the human spirit as deeply practical: Mother Courage would sell ANYTHING, including her soul, to feed her children.
Helene Weigel is the woman who stood by Bertolt Brecht at the end of his life (there were other women earlier) and in Quantum’s show, she’s still alive, carrying on as leader of this ensemble for one more show. An aside: Brecht was a bastard who stole writing from the women in his life and passed it off as his own! And yet he gave the world great theatre that influenced us all: Jay Ball, Jed Allen Harris, me, and every member of this cast, a generation younger.
So, the Berliner Ensemble, led by Helene Weigel, invokes the spirit of Brecht to offer The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and to warn against rising fascism, and how a democracy might want to be wary of a lurking backlash to free thinking and progressive social movements. Weigel, in her idealistic focus on Communism, doesn’t look too hard at Capitalism. But Quantum’s production does. A series of ads, newsreels, diversions made on screen by projection designer Joe Seamans pokes fun at blithe capitalism run amok, where cigarette companies spawn billionaires on the backs (lungs?) of the citizenry and British flappers dance themselves into forgetfulness of the war that killed their husbands and brothers. Joe’s work on screen isn’t all fun. He also shows the horror of war. And Quantum’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari can rightly be thought to fall in the genre of horror.
See you at the theater,
Karla
