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Wedekind, The Actor: Aesthetics, Morality, and Monstrosity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

David F. Kuhns
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Extract

According to his good friend and first biographer, Artur Kutscher, Frank Wedekind decided to become a professional actor because he felt that his plays were being misrepresented to the public by actors who didn't understand the characters he had created. Specifically, the failure of the first performances of Der Marquis von Keith [1899] in 1901 spurred Wedekind, the chagrined playwright, to brush aside any hesitations that had previously deterred Wedekind, the amateur and occasional actor. Wedekind was a man of intense contradictions. He increasingly would aspire to the respectability of middle-class family life; yet his self-assumed, dogged notoriety as a bohemian was to frustrate this ambition to the end of his life. He was a playwright who both celebrated the awakening of human sexual vitality and at the same time probed its inherent life-destroying potential. In rendering his own unique understanding of human nature, the totality of expression to which he aspired as a playwright hurtled him, as an actor, right into the torrid center of the dramatic world he had created.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , November 1990 , pp. 144 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1990

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References

1 Kutscher, Artur, Frank Wedekind: sein Leben und sein Werke, 3 vols. (Munich: Müller, 1927), 2:71.Google Scholar Translation of this and all subsequent German language reference passages are my own unless otherwise credited in the citation.

2 Kutscher, 2:185–86.

3 Ibid, 187.

4 Gittleman, Sol, Frank Wedekind (New York: Twayne, 1969), 22.Google Scholar

5 Kutscher, 2:71; Gittleman, xi.

6 Newes, Tilly Wedekind, Lulu: Die Rolle meines Lebens (München: Rütten und Loening Verlag, 1969), 174–92.Google Scholar

7 Kutscher, 2:192.

8 Bab, Julius, Das Theater der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Weber, 1928), 175.Google Scholar

9 Kayser, Rudolf, “Das neue Drama,” in Literaturrevolution 1910–1925, ed. Pörtner, Paul, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1960), 2:235.Google Scholar

10 Ball, Hugo, “Wedekind als Schauspieler,” in Pörtner, 1:340.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 339.

12 Kortner, Fritz, Aller Tage Abend (München: Kindler, 1959), 197.Google Scholar

13 Brecht, Bertolt, “Frank Wedekind,” in Brecht on Theatre, trans, and ed. Willett, John (New York: Hill, 1964), 3.Google Scholar

14 Edschmid, Kasimir, “Schauspielkunst,” in Das deutsche Theater der Gegenwart, ed. Krell, Max (München: Rösl, 1923), 118.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 120.

16 Ball, 340.

17 Gittleman, 13.

18 Wedekind, Frank, “Zirkusgedanken,” in Werke, 3 vols., ed. Hahn, Manfred (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1969), 3:156.Google Scholar

19 Ibid, 161.

20 Ibid., 155.

21 Ibid., 154.

22 Ibid., 155.

23 Wedekind, , “Über Erotik,” Gesammelte Werke, 9 vols. (Georg Müller München, 1924), 1:197–206.Google Scholar

24 Wedekind, , “Zirkusgedanken,” 155.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 156.

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27 Ibid., 145–46.

28 Wedekind, Frank, The Lulu Plays, trans, and ed. Mueller, Carl Richard (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1967), 50.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 124.

30 As Boa, Elizabeth has shown in her recent study The Sexual circus: Wedekind's Theatre of Subversion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar, Lulu, in both Erdgeist and Büchse der Pandora, is the locus of a considerable ambivalence of socio-moral attitude attributable to Wedekind himself. In her discusion of sexual psychology and the economic position of women in Erdgeist, Boa observes that, “as in Spring Awakening, here too a powerful social argument is partially vitiated by an ambiguous attitude towards the sexual fantasies the play critically illumines” (74). Indeed, Lulu destroys representatives of the very patriarchal culture that has reduced her, through its sexual and economic exploitation of her, to the role of femme fatale. The degree of her sexual objectification is poignantly evident in her narcissism and her desire to be possessed. In fact, she has come to identify so thoroughly with that objectification that she completely internalizes it. For example, in Act IV, scene 7 of Erdgeist, as Boa points out, Lulu gazes at herself in a mirror and expresses her pleasure in doing so by saying she wishes she were a man (72). It is this complex character psychology, as I shall show subsequently, that led Wedekind the actor to the correspondingly complex and reflexive mode of performance he felt such characterizations required.

31 Kutscher, 2:190.

32 Seehaus, Günter, Frank Wedekind und das Theater (München, Laokoon-Verlag, 1964), 336.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 432.

34 Ibid., 410.

35 Kutscher, 2:190–91.

36 Irmer, Hans-Jochen, Der Theaterdichter Frank Wedekind: Werk and Werkung (Berlin: Henschel, 1975), 260.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., 266.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., 261.

41 Bond, Elisabeth, Introduction to Spring Awakening, by Wedekind, Frank (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), xvii.Google Scholar This translation is Bond's.

42 Irmer, 262.

43 Ibid., 263.

44 Ibid.

45 Kutscher, 2:189.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., 2:183–84.

48 limer, 263.

49 Ibid., 262.

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51 Irmer, 264–65.

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53 Wedekind, , The Lulu Plays, 161–42.Google Scholar