All of the cast and creative team meet and I introduce our ‘concept’. We want to stress the universal themes of the play, such as forbidden and unhappy love, relationship addiction and the ever-prevailing dominance of (movie-) images. Anja and I talk a lot about what we call the ‘traditional American Naturalism’ – go ahead and hit me… I keep saying I don’t want to do a psychological chamber piece. I don’t want actors who will lose themselves in overemotional and self-absorbed method-acting. I’m German, after all. (I have acted alongside Americans. The good ones were great.) I want irony, I want action, I want grotesque and bizarre ways of dealing with a doomed relationship. I want to laugh. I want to shake my head. I want to fall in love with the actors. I want to go home and start thinking about getting out of a relationship. Or getting into one.
I don’t want the V-effect, though, so don’t get me wrong. (V as in Brecht, that is, not as in V2.) We discuss the stage design. An initial concept of having a double set, one on stage and one down in the middle of the audience, and having a sound boom and a camera filming one of those ‘sets’ and projecting it is trashed. Too complicated, too conceptual, and to much hassle, as we have virtually no budget for this production. It’s all in-house, and everything we want – props, costumes, etc. – should be found in our own theater facilities, our Fundus. So I want to go for a minimalistic, artificial set, something like a small sound stage you would find in film school. There should be no decorative elements. Everything you see on stage will somehow have a functional reason, either being directly used by or posing as a concrete challenge or obstacle for the actors.
A chair, a bed, a little platform with curtain upstage as make-shift bathroom, where everything is totally visible. The Musician/Martin character will have his own little stage at the side, set apart from the main stage. There’re stairs right at the middle that lead up to the stage where the Musician will make his first – and inappropriate – entrance, only to do it again from the side, like real actors do! Finally, the Old Man will be appearing on a huge TV screen down right, as will the little clips that we still want to pre-produce for the countess’s actions scene. Right now, we’re thinking of a comic strip flash animation. I’d have to find somebody outside the theater to produce them, though. Let’s see about that…
