A carnival sideshow performer, an old man, promises his audience wonders. He opens a coffin-like wooden container to reveal a somnambulist — a perpetual sleepwalker under his command. Three young adults are seduced and see their lives upended.
Robert Wiene’s 1920 film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is a horror classic. Now Quantum Theatre is hoping playwright Jay Ball’s new stage adaptation will strike contemporary audiences as its own provocative political fable for our times.
Ball, who formerly taught at Carnegie Mellon University, has long been fascinated by the silent “Caligari” film, whose nightmarish set design is an icon of German expressionist art.
He said its central question is, “Is it possible to take a morally normal human being and turn them into a killer against their will?”
The film’s political resonances might not be obvious to contemporary viewers: Nothing onscreen explicitly references politics, or even World War I, which had just ended. But the film has been seen as both an allegory of Germany’s authoritarian government during the war and a premonition of the coming rise of Nazism.
“I’m firmly convinced that we are in a deeply fascistic moment in this country, and also internationally,” Ball said by phone from his home in Baltimore. “I want to create an adaptation that brings out the latent anti-fascist parable that was always in ‘Dr. Caligari,’ its anti-authoritarian politics.”
He offered the play to Quantum founder and artistic director Karla Boos, who in 2021 had staged the former Carnegie Mellon University professor’s raucous revisionist adaptation of Homer's the "Odyssey", titled “An Odyssey.” Boos proved of a like mind about “Caligari.”
“The piece is about an evil controlling figure and he’s specifically controlling the young, the free, and what is that about?” she said, with a laugh. “And why would we be doing that at this moment?”
The premiere production, directed by Jed Allen Harris, opens this week. It’s staged in the 10th-floor auditorium of Downtown’s Union Trust Building, where the marble floors gleam like mirrors.
The show stars Dan Krell as Caligari, with Jerreme Rodriguez as the somnambulist Cesar and Nick Lehane, Sara Lindsey and Cameron Nickel as the three students. The set, designed by Yafei Hu, evokes the film's stark and crazily angled sets, with still and video projections by Joseph Seamans.
Ball’s “Caligari,” like Wiene’s film, avoids any reference to contemporary events or persons. But it is in a sense Ball’s attempt to reclaim the original’s political subtext. The movie’s message is undermined by a bizarre framing device — imposed by the film studio on the screenwriters — that makes Caligari the story’s hero rather than its villain.
A key difference in the play is Ball’s own radically different framing device. His play begins in 1970 East Germany, where Helene Weigel, the real-life actor and founder of the Berliner Ensemble Theater Company, is staging her own version of “Caligari.”
“In a sense, we’re in three different time eras,” said Harris, the director (who also directed Ball’s “An Odyssey” for Quantum). “We’re in the '20s, the '70s and now. The audience is here now so they bring their 2024 sensibility to it.”
Weigel was the wife of famed playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the conceit is that she and her company have completed a “Caligari” Brecht left unfinished at his death, decades earlier.
Like her husband, Weigel was a committed socialist and internationalist, and she is concerned younger generations have forgotten the nightmare of war and what leads to it.
“The horror is still out there. Biding its time. Searching for weaknesses. Counting on our collective amnesia,” she tells her young troupe.
In Ball’s play, Weigel — who also takes several minor roles in her show — is portrayed by Catherine Gowl.
“Part of what I find compelling about this piece is the idea that there are core beliefs that are worth risking everything for,” said Gowl. “And we are in a topsy-turvy time. And so getting to portray someone who was crystal-clear in what she knew was right, and with her last energy is trying to summon her community to act in service of what she believes in, is deeply inspiring to me.”
Ball’s play does not explore electoral politics or political parties, let alone any single election. But while he does have a concept of Dr. Caligari as “kind of right-wing ideologue,” Ball is less interested in labels than in the belief systems that underpin authoritarian political movements like fascism.
Quantum’s Boos chose to open “Caligari” just before a presidential election in which the former chief of staff of Republican nominee Donald Trump said Trump meets the definition of a "fascist."
“You either have to not work during this time or understand that we’re all going to be full of this stuff,” she said. “Straddling [the election] just places the project within those feelings that we’re going to have.”
But while audiences will see the play in light of current events, Boos, too, situates the play outside the election cycle.
“I am just always looking for something that gives me new insights into human beings in relationship to each other,” she said.
“I hope that this adaptation does not fully resolve into a neat answer,” Ball said, “but that there’s a lingering — even dangerous — ambiguity about what has happened and what might happen in the future.”
“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” opens Fri., Nov. 1, and runs through Nov. 24. More information is here.
