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The true peak experiences in theatre are oh-so-rare: not just the competent or even brilliant productions, but those special few which engage intellect and emotions, which juxtapose and knit together text, image, sound, movement, space, objects, and the body in such consistently surprising, beautiful ways that they seem to peel open up the fabric of human experience itself to illuminate a profound truth. For me, these intense revelations have nearly always occurred in experimental theatre -- Richard Foreman's "What Did He See?" and Lee Breuer and Bob Telson's "The Gospel at Colonus" -- but until now, I never expected to have one in an undergraduate college production. A third experience now joins my personal theatrical canon: Jane S. Armitage and Nusha Martynuk's production of Peter Handke's "Kaspar "at Oberlin College.
Handke's 1967 language play is a text worthy of a revelation. It is a tour-de-force assault on one of the metaphysical Big Ones: the inherent authoritative power of language itself to shape, twist, expand, delimit, and mediate human experience, the ultimate tragicomic story of socialization and civilization. Handke's meditation is loosely based on the "wild child" Kaspar Hauser, an early 19th century media sensation. Raised in a dark hole, at 17 he wandered into a 1824 German town knowing only a single sentence and became a scientific curiosity: a nearly-adult human without language and external influences, a tabula rasa upon which society and its scientific teachers could write with impunity.
The text presents one on-stage character, the singular Kaspar (today, he'd be labeled autistic), as he is interrogated, taught, lullabied, bullied, coaxed, tortured, and controlled into "normalcy" by a group of authorities -- the Prompters -- represented only by off-stage voices. Read through the lens of 1967, a year I remember my own blood ringing with revolution, it seems a classic rendering of Rousseau meets the Oppressors -- a gentle, pure, bemused, child-like original Adam ("Kasper" being the German word for clown) pounded into tenderized meat with the hammer of language and authority.
Read today after decades of deconstruction, through Armitage and Martynuk's production, Kaspar spills over and multiplies itself beyond a simple us-and-them. In their interpretation, the Kaspars and Prompters are squared and cubed to become an evenly matched 16: 8 Kaspars, 8 on-stage Prompters. The multiplication allows for marvelous moments of theatrical spectacle -- 8 Kaspars in chairs stretched along the proscenium in identical outfits of various colors, a repetition like Warhol's Marilyns, each obsessively miming a different hand gesture, while behind them helmeted Prompters in grey uniforms stand at attention and begin to manipulate their bodies, a pas de deux with variations that is the stunning opening image. But the multiplying of Kaspars and Prompters across gender, age, and ethnicity also dynamites open more gaps in the text to allow a world of associations to whirl through the rich succession of images.
And what images! This "Kaspar" is as visual and operatic as a Robert Wilson creation, a model collaboration of theatrical elements. Armitage is a long-time director of plays, operas, and new works based on shaping actor/participant material; Martynuk a compelling award-winning choreographer who directs the Oberlin Dance Company. Together these two women artists took a group of undergraduate students -- actors, dancers, musicians -- through a semester's process of working and improvising through Handke's text. The results make for a production as firmly based in the body as in the words. Their faculty design collaborators cooperated in an unprecedented way to allow the actors to use Michael Louis Grube's daunting set for months instead of days: an enormous looming upstage metal construction of pipes and two downstage towers which serve as the home base of the Prompters.
This aerie/fortress/cage becomes the literal springboard for much of the extraordinary action of the Prompters, from which they twirl, crawl, and bounce. Three of the Prompters have tour-de-force scenes where they dangle from bungee cords -- hanging upside down like bats, swooping victoriously from cage to tower, attentive and malignant as gargoyles. Although spectacular in every sense of the word, the movements are never gymnastic for their own sake. Instead, the Prompters move with ease through this world of cause and effect, in a ballet where air seems to lend the pressurizing consistency of life under water, where one's dizzying leaps are always grounded and harnessed, where the cooperation of cords and gravity always bounces one back to the System itself. The System is impregnable, superior: within it, the Prompters can peer down at the vulnerable Kaspars with the amused detachment of teachers who have "transcended" their earthbound struggles with objects and the body. They can descend slowly in tandem like guiding angels to carry them upward, a movement so beautiful yet horrific that it recalled one of my childhood's most traumatic images, Dorothy and Toto abducted by the Flying Monkeys. If a Kaspar resists their teachings, they can hang her from her feet, where she dangles as a warning to all.
Meanwhile, the Kaspars play, struggle, fall and fall again in amplified crashes, attempting to extract meaning and engage with their primary sentence: "I want to be a person like somebody else was once." This refrain haunts the play from its first gurglings within the multimix of the pre-show tape's recorded cacophony (Clay Chaplin and Gabe Imlay's sound design is splendidly, subtly ever-present) to being repeated and multiplied on the scrim that covers its final images like a descending wall. A prop magically drops from the flies on a bungee cord -- a lamp, a chair, a broom -- a Kaspar explores it with the voraciousness and energy of an infant in constant discovery, with wonder, confusion, rage, tenderness. In the same way, the Kaspars play with language to find its boundaries and meanings -- discovering its glories, its torments, its surprises -- and in the process, aided by the Prompters' tutorial, cement forever the relationship between objects and words.
The chair still hurts you, but the word chair already pleases you...The closet still hurts you a little, but the word closet already pleases you more...The broom hurts you less the more the word broom pleases you. Words no longer hurt you when the word words please you. The Sentences please you more the more the word sentence pleases you.
Handke, one of our century's most inventive language experimentalists, fills his text with syntactical gymnastics, with repetitive constructions and wordplay that mirror and represent the transformation of language from delightful game into imperative:
You have a sentence to say yes and say nay with. You have a sentence to deny with...You have a sentence you can place between yourself and everything else. You are the lucky owner of a sentence which will make every impossible order possible for you and make every possible and real disorder impossible for you: which will exorcise every disorder from you....You can no longer imagine anything without the sentence...You become aware.
In one of the production's most indelible images, the Kaspars are playing with language as their bodies play anarchically about the stage. The Prompters begin to herd them into a marching tempo, to the rhythm of syntactical constructions:
By the end of the scene, the images of fascism and escalating violence seem inevitably bound up in the invented dichotomies of the sentence structure itself. We are prisoners of our syntax, held hostage to the language at the spine of our culture, all of us, all. Its Procrustean bed never seemed so monolithic, so inescapable. We teach, we write, we raise our children within this prison system, we crush and wrack them and ourselves upon its constructions. It is the primal clown-show of our human experience, our life sentence.
The door swings open. The skin springs open. The match burns. The slap burns. The grass trembles. The fearful girl trembles...
Just as Alice Miller in "For Their Own Good" exposes and deconstructs the violence at the heart of "normal" child rearing, Armitage and Martynuk's rendering of "Kaspar" implicates all of us, teachers and learners, writers and readers, parents and children, in this eternal dance. It is a cautionary fable, an initiatory ritual of great power and beauty, of vulnerability and mastery, of compassion and bottomless sorrow. I will never forget it.
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