The Ark, Day Three: Mired In the Jungle

With the echoes of Remembrance Day still reverberating, it was great to start the day with a little music.  Our musical director, Allen Cole, spent the first part of this morning working us through a couple of songs from Happy End, and with a company of 40 artists in the room it felt almost like working on a large-cast musical again. This is something I haven’t done in a very long time.  Singing brings me great joy (when I can do it freely, without being stymied by my occasional lack of confidence), and the sound of large numbers of people with voices raised in song is exquisite.

Brecht’s take on theatre — that people should never be unaware that they are watching a play and not Real Life — has given me a new bullet in my arsenal of reasons why musicals are awesome.  People often complain that “in the real world, people don’t just burst into song“: well, no they don’t.  And that’s the point.  Brecht believed that an audience couldn’t comment on a play if they were completely enveloped by it, but today’s entertainment (especially cinema) is rooted in absolute realism and the idea that we create impact by creating empathy with characters.  I’m sure that very strong cases can be made for both perspectves, but Brecht’s thoughts on the matter are quite clear, and it is surely one of the reasons why music plays such a huge role in his work.

But I digress.

After the music, we had a terrific introduction to “In the Jungle Of Cities” from Andrey Tarasiuk, who has a deep love for the piece.  The play was first written in 1922 but, like many Brecht plays, was rewritten numerous times and the version we are working with dates to 1927.  Mr. Tarasiuk was able to cite some incredible examples of how the play evolved between 1922 and 1927, and it’s clear that a great deal of intentional revision was done.  What was terrific about today’s approach was that it acknowledged the scope of a ‘work in progress’, which helped to illuminate Brecht as a playwright.  Shakespeare scholars, for example, exhaust themselves debating which “version” of Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth is the ‘definitive’ one, but the truth is that the Folio and First Quarto and Second Quarto versions of these plays probably reflect different stages of development in an author who was constantly revisiting and revising his work for production.  What a novel idea.

“In The Jungle of Cities” outlines a four-year fight, beginning in Chicago in 1912, between a man from the prairies and a man from Asia.  The play consists of 11 scenes, thought to represent ten rounds of a boxing match plus an epilogue, defining the duel between the two men.  Issues of capitalism, of race, of class, of sexuality, and more play out across the landscape of the work, but the prologue for the play gives specific instructions on how to navigate it:  “Don’t worry your heads about the motives for the fight,” it says. “Concentrate on the stakes.”  In this light, the play felt to me like Brecht’s version of “Fight Club“: the goal seems to have been to understand what it takes to make people feel something, and how the absence of struggle leads to a fruitless existence.

Despite the existence of the prologue, though, the play is quite difficult to digest.  As an audience, we find ourselves continually asking WHY events take place, which ends up clouding the fight itself.  If you take each scene on its own, looking at it in terms of the game being played and in terms of which man wins each round, the fight finds some clarity; if you try to look for a narrative throughline or character motivations, the piece is really difficult to comprehend.  Was this intentional, and did Brecht expect people to understand it easily?  I don’t know the answer to that.

I’m fascinated by the play’s construction and I love the themes it explores, but I can’t help but wonder how acceptable the play would be to a modern audience.  Without a firm directorial hand it would be very difficult to say anything cohesive, and this is on top of the fact that the play presents a whole host of challenges because of the 1922-Germany cultural context in which it was written, versus the context of today.  For my money, I think there are more contemporary works that deal with these themes in more approachable ways… but I’d still like to see this beast on stage some day.

Tomorrow we’ll be reading “Man Equals Man” — a play I loved on first read.  I’m looking forward to good discussion on that one.  And more singing.

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