Theater in Berlin and America: A Very Short Introduction

After a full week of experiencing Berlin and the theater here, I’ve been struggling a lot trying to identify the reasons why the theater we’ve seen here so far feels so fresh and captivating in a way I haven’t experienced in an American theater in a long time.  On one hand I want to attribute it to the fact that there is still an overwhelming excitement in me that I’m actually in Europe for the first time.  However, it feels dishonest to say that since there is clearly an essence to the theater here that just feels missing from most American theater.

I can confidently say that the essence that I see in the theater here is a sense of danger.  A sense of challenge.  A sense of boldness.  The productions we’ve seen feel so far from the safety that American theater tends to shroud itself in. 

I think American theater can get back to that point of danger, but it will be an uphill battle.  Unfortunately that sense of danger is the exception in America, while in Berlin, it seems to be the rule.  To be fair though, there are a vast number of political, economic, and cultural differences that contribute even further in each direction between to the overall feel of the theater between American and Berlin.

In America for instance, there is almost a necessity to be safe for a majority of productions because of the commercial world we live in.  There is the ever-omnipresent need to sell tickets.  But in Berlin, the theaters are supported directly by the state in a way that they never will be supported in America.  Having that support makes it much easier to take risks with a production and be bold and dangerous with conceptual ideas that may otherwise have been scrapped had it been an American production.

However, as we saw last night though during the Deutsches Theater’s production of Elektra, that can certainly be a double-edged sword.  They took that risk in staging Elektra as a sort of combination of 90’s grunge with 80’s flair visually within a deconstructed and abridged 90-minute performance that just didn’t work in telling the story.  But as they say, if you’re going to fail, fail spectacularly.  It was a very bold and dangerous production, but in this case, it didn’t pay off.

On the other hand though, something like Ostermeier’s production of Hamlet at Schaubuhne was also very bold and very dangerous, but worked spectacularly well in telling the story.  In that case though, the risk taking was based on a deep, deep understanding of the play, so the danger found within the show was all based on what was already there to begin with.  It wasn’t risk taking for its own sake; it was risk taking to be more truthful to the story and character. 

That’s the type of risk taking I want to see in American theater.  The absolute essence of what I would call dangerous theater was that production of Hamlet.  Maybe American audiences as a whole aren’t ready for something that bold…but isn’t that the point? Theater isn’t about playing it safe.  It’s about heart.  It’s about entertainment.  It’s about giving the audience something real to care about.  And sometimes it is about failing spectacularly in the face of everything else.