Word: cabinet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Everything about the production design hints that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari does not seek the audience to make any deep emotional investment in the story or its characters. Instead, the production jars the theatergoer into a peculiar world, encouraging reflection on the many layers of theater and the violent and lewd tendencies of society...
...American Repertory Theatre production of John Moran's new multi-media the-artical creation The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a unique and disorienting event. Theatergoers find themselves literally surrounded by a strange, stylized world full of colorful, clownish costumes, creepy music and sound effects and a good measure of farcical blood and gore. Drawing upon several esoteric influences, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a lushly imagined theatrical piece, but its seventy minutes of bewildering entertainment is a mostly unpleasant experience with little lasting impact on the audience...
Some background on the show's sources helps explain its weirdness. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is based on a silent 1920 German Expressionist film of the same name about a mysterious hypnotist who enters a German town and causes all manner of horror and havoc. The film, in turn, draws upon the work of a curious theater of the time based in Paris called the Grand Guignol. For over six decades, the Guignol produced plays resembling a grotesque puppet show, but with live actors. Real-life crime and bawdiness were brought to the stage for elite audiences craving campy...
...silent film or the tradition of the Grand Guignol, because the production never explains why it bothers to resurrect these influences. There is some thing to be said for paying attention to pieces of theatrical history that many historians would like to sweep under the rug, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari exhibits postmodern tendencies by creating a Guignol play-within-a-play. But while the production has its own modernized aesthetic, it remains essentially a fragment of the past. Even with all its technical wizardry, this production doesn't add nearly enough contemporary insight to offer anything more than...
Moran's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seeks to unify these two influences in one wild story. Penny Price (Phoebe Jonas) is the owner of a penny arcade which has been struggling financially ever since her lover died years ago. At the height of her despair, Caligari (Alvin Epstein) and his dubious troupe blast into town, demanding to use the arcade as a setting for their show. Caligari tricks many of the townspeople into participating in his performance, and they all realize too late that they will not make it through Caligari's twisted and absurd variety act alive...