We Repeat the Discussion …

It is a Thursday afternoon late in the semester. A group of students is working through the final pages of Die Maßnahme (The Measures Taken). Four, scripts in hand—in this session taking the parts of the Agitators—are in the center of the small studio, spaced in a gentle, irregular arc, facing another seven students seated behind a handful of trestle tables: the Control Chorus. All are wearing their street clothes: the usual student assortment of jeans, t-shirts, casual shoes. A careful, animated discussion unfolds as the group negotiates the staging of the appropriate Gestus for the scene to come. I lean against a wall to one side, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. The students are cautious, heedful of the—my own—often-repeated injunction against falling into representational formalism. They avoid obviously “geometric” choices, working against forced symmetries, trying instead to capture nuance of status and alliances, of shifting negotiations among the various characters. They have worked already to differentiate the Agitators, endowing each with a distinct attitude to the events they are restaging, as well as to the Party apparatchiks for whom they are presenting the account of the death of their Young Comrade. Similarly, the members of the Control Chorus adopt a range of attitudes, experimented with and refined over the preceding weeks as the class has rotated through the various roles. Some lean forward, engrossed; others doodle on notepads, look at their watches; in previous sessions the students have worked with a more homogenous, monolithic, sometimes quasimechanical rendering of the Chorus, and found it lacking in dynamic, too readily falling into mechanical formalism. We balance and test these details against determinations of the overarching Gestus of each scene: rehearsal as a recursive hermeneutics of part and whole.

Having decided upon a provisional staging, the students take up their places for a fumble-through. One holds a copy of the score of the final song in the text, just before the eighth and final section, allocated to the Chorus. Brecht and Hauptmann's somber, desolate rerendering of Paul's characterization of the apostles in his first letter to the Corinthians, set to Hanns Eisler's haunting score, grimly addresses “Those who help the despairing.”