Word: wedekind
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...POSSIBLE that no dramatist of similar stature could match the sexual activity of Frank Wedekind; it was characteristic of him that he would bring this personal obsession to the stage. "His greatest work," Brecht eulogized, "was his own personality." Wedekind was the first playwright of the polymorphous perverse, and his sexual emphasis and stylistic departures from photographic naturalism opened the door for Brecht, as well as all of the modern drama that followed. Somewhat simian in appearance, Wedekind was the Missing Link in German drama between the mad prodigy Georg Buchner and the Twentieth Century, the first one to come...
...Brecht might be said to be the cynosure for the contemporary theatre, so is Wedekind, as Brecht's mentor, a star ascendant in the night sky. This is Wedekind year at the Loeb; the American Rep is scheduled to perform Lulu early next year, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club started its season last week with an auspicious production of Spring's Awakening, Wedekind's first work...
Under Colin Graham's direction, the story-adapted from two plays by German Pre-Expressionist Frank Wedekind-unfolds in swift, biting scenes (given fine clarity by Arthur Jacobs' translation). The mysterious Lulu is a dancer, an amoral enchantress, perhaps a force of nature. She first rises through society, then falls disastrously, as lovers contend for her elusive soul and all too accessible body. Throughout the opera, a large portrait of her hangs onstage-one of Berg's many specifications that were sometimes ignored in the past...
...Lulu, Soprano Nancy Shade sings her precipitous vocal lines strongly and accurately, which is more of an achievement than it may sound. But she only acts out bewitching allure; she does not embody it. During rehearsals, the cast screened Louise Brooks' Lulu in the 1928 silent film of Wedekind's Pandora's Box- which may partly account for Shade's tendency to play the role as a jazz-age vamp...
Despite the high quality of the acting and the consistently clever staging, the play itself somehow remains insubstantial. By failing to people his sinister world with real human beings, Wedekind never touches emotion. It's like waking up from a nightmare, only to find nothing there to worry about...