Axel Strothmann

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.

Brian Russell

Axel, I have to agree with Richard about not underselling the whole “Western” notions inherent in Shepard.  There truly is a whole mythos to the cowboy image here in America….the rugged, individualistic loner taming the vast unmapped and wild territories of the equally harsh landscape of the frontier coupled with the other prevalent idea of Manifest Destiny, that it was all set in motion and pre-ordained by God above.  (Why else would Bush 2 want that as his predominant iconography?)  That image however is matched with its equally harsh opposite notion:  that of the taming of this wild land coming at the expense of the Native peoples that first inhabited here and usually at the point of a gun.  This two-sided coin of American identity is what Shepard specializes in.

Richard Northcutt

This post is being written by Richard Northcutt who lives in Woodbury,
Tennessee USA where he makes his primary living as an attorney.  When not
practicing law, he works in theatre, having been an actor, director,
producer, and designer for more than 35 years.  He was among the group of
American actors who spent two months in Germany working on Das Treffen in
Magdeburg, an experience he still warmly cherishes.

First, a disclosure (because Gunda encouraged me to):  I am not a fan of
Sam Shepard, either as a playwright or actor. 

Production diary Fool for Love

Axel Strothmann
ensemble actor at the Theater Magdeburg
Excerpts from my production diary Fool for Love: October

20-year celebration of our reunification everywhere. I look outside and wonder: How could I ever think my life would not be touched by all that…

Earlier this year my Boss Jan Jochymski came up to me and asked: would I like to do a play in English. I said sure, great, let’s do it. Initially he had been thinking of a play for older kids and young teens but after some talks we realized the audience would need a stronger grasp of the English language in order to get something out of this. We found a couple of plays but they didn’t really seem feasible for our cast and crew due to several reasons. In the end Stefan Schnabel, the head of our dramatic department, proposed a play that he felt was well scripted, worked with a little cast and wouldn’t exhaust our resources too much. And still is a great play. So now a decision has been made about the first home-made foreign language production at this theater. The play will be Fool for Love (FFL for the blog’s sake) by Sam Shepard.

Comments

Here readers of the blog are invited to comment on the entries of the professional panel.