Brecht at 100

Woodruff and ART explore the Jungle

by Scott T. Cummings

Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Germany, on February 10, 1898. In recent decades, the reputation of the great epic dramatist has been under attack at home and abroad, first by a younger generation of playwrights with an Oedipal need to kill off the father and then by a handful of theater scholars eager to expose Brecht as an exploiter of his collaborators, many of them female. Now that the centennial of Brecht's birth has arrived, these grudges are being set aside in order to celebrate perhaps the most influential playwright, director, and theorist of the 20th century.

The American Repertory Theatre is joining the international Brecht fest with a production of In the Jungle of Cities directed by Robert Woodruff. This is the first Loeb appearance for Woodruff, who is best known around the country for his association 20 years ago with Sam Shepard. In the late 1970s, he directed the premieres of Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West, plays that brought Shepard to national prominence. Since then, he has turned his attention more to the classics, both Jacobean and modern -- what he calls "these big plays by dead guys."

Woodruff is the type of theater artist who would rather let his work speak for itself. But over take-out ziti in an ART rehearsal space, he talks about his new teaching appointment in the graduate directing program at Columbia University, his peripatetic career and the perils of American regional theater, his continuing collaboration with a group of theater artists in Israel -- and, of course, his work on In the Jungle of Cities.

The play is only Brecht's third, written after Baal and Drums in the Night when the dramatist was still in his early 20s, living in Munich, and working in the Weimar cabaret scene there. This was the time of Brecht's anarchic expressionism -- before he won the prestigious Kleist prize and moved to Berlin, before he learned the form and formalism of epic theater from Erwin Piscator, before he read Karl Marx and got dialectical. "It's still a play by a poet, as opposed to a playwright," Woodruff explains. "And that's why it is great. You have a young writer who is writing LOUD. He's not stuck with dogma and ideology. When something is written with a kind of freedom, you hear that voice when you are interpreting it and you're released. He's inventing a new form, and you can invent on top of it with him. You get to run. Anytime you are working with someone who is basically an experimentalist in his soul, which Brecht was in the beginning, then you feel that kinship."

No stranger to the early Brecht, Woodruff has felt that kinship before. With the help of accomplished physical actors Bill Irwin, Geoff Hoyle, Raymond Barry, and Ebbe Roe Smith, he explored A Man's a Man as a boisterous clown play at La Jolla Playhouse, and at Trinity Rep he channeled the omnivorous sexual energy of Baal into a Latino-transvestite-club setting. "This production is less contextual than the other two," he observes. "I never found a singular something to hang all the pieces on. It feels much more fragmented, more like a movie."

Inspired by two gritty contemporary novels set in the urban jungle of Chicago, Sinclair Lewis's The Jungle and J.V. Jensen's The Wheel, Brecht's play tells the story of a simple bookstore clerk named George Garga and his unnerving and ferocious battle with a Malay lumber dealer named Shlink. Spanning three years (1912-'15) and 11 scenes, their savage struggle takes them through a series of jarring ups and downs and role reversals until their final showdown in the gravel pits on the shores of Lake Michigan. The homoerotic tension in the play and the muscular lyricism of much of the language derive in part from Brecht's interest in the poetry and the relationship of the French symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

The ART production features a specially commissioned translation by Paul Schmidt (who also provided the adaptation of this season's The Bacchae). "The poetry is strong," says Woodruff of Schmidt's version, "yet it feels more grounded to me than many of the other translations. It feels very much of the earth, and yet it still has these Rimbaud flights of machine-gun language and great imagery. The words are really a weapon in the play, and they're good that way. A character can penetrate another character with these words."

Woodruff's work on Jungle has benefitted from a workshop production of the play that he did last spring with students in the ART's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. What did the workshop reveal? "It's a real addiction play. How do you break the addiction to job, to place, to role in a family, to relationship? And when you do, what are you left with? If you're not in touch with something that transcends the physical, then where are you ultimately? What is left? That's a really frightening question. That's why getting clean is so hard, because you have to face yourself."

For Woodruff, this makes the action of the play one of stripping away "all these coats that we wear to protect us from what might be considered consciousness or existential nausea. Every character in the play gets stripped. As Garga is stripped, his battle with Shlink is stripping everybody. Once this level of protection is stripped away, there is a real rawness underneath it and a sense of emotional free-fall for all the characters that makes them cling to something else on the way down. That is essentially the movement of the piece. You wind up with a kind of post-traumatic-stress-syndrome world where everybody is laid bare -- which is good for a company to explore."

The results will be laid bare when In the Jungle of Cities begins previews this weekend. The play runs in repertory through March 14. Tickets are $22 to $52. Call 547-8300.