Insite

First word: funny. 

Then, in no particular order: sexy, witty, moving, elegant, touching, poignant, nostalgic, sad, thoughtful, mysterious, literary, scientific…and yes, complicated. But always entertaining.  All you have to do is listen carefully. 

Two more helpful words: Pay attention! From the opening instant of Tom Stoppard’s play—when the precocious and brilliant Thomasina Coverly looks up from her math textbook, leans across the table, and asks her astonished tutor, Septimus Hodge, an amazingly preposterous question—to the breathtaking choreography of the final scene (which, of course, I dare not reveal) Arcadia will share its many riches. 

The action of the play shifts in time, shuttling back and forth from April 1809 to the present day. However, the place remains the same throughout: Sidley Park, a Derbyshire country house in scenic central England. 

Two hundred years ago, the occupants were the aristocratic Coverly family along with various relatives, attendants, and houseguests, including the celebrated and notorious Romantic poet Lord Byron. 

Today, the modern descendants of the Coverlys are visited at Sidley Park by Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale, two researchers into its secret history with separate motives. Here is the intriguing literary murder story—the  mystery at Arcadia’s heart—who did what…who wrote what…and to whom—and how can we the living ever come to know the absolute truth about those who came before us simply by tracking down and reading old letters, lesson primers, and journals? 

Read more »

On the eve of Homburg’s opening, production dramaturg Neil Baldwin shares journal excerpts from the final week of rehearsals. 

Mar. 3:  One week to go. I noticed afresh the motif of freedom. So many times through the play this thread appears, as it does throughout the aesthetic of Romanticism. We are only as “free” as we think we are—or as others with (ostensibly) more power decide we are. Freedom, in this Kleist-world, is relative and interdependent; one person’s freedom is another’s consternation/inhibition. 

As when, in Act IV, Princess Natalie goes to see her uncle, the Elector, to plead for the release of her lover, Homburg… Tonight was about the contesting nature of the dialogue, the fact that Natalie comes to present a case and therefore needs to maintain her composure within a certain range, whereas the Elector, because of his finely tuned consciousness of his station, has likewise to keep some reserve even as he struggles with empathy for his beloved niece. “Heart” battles with “mind” within both characters—”Fatherland” vs. “blood,” leaping back and forth as the advantage is seized then relinquished, by one and then the other. Read more »

In this third installment of excerpts from his Homburg production journal, dramaturg Neil Baldwin gives a taste of the first month of rehearsals. 

Jan. 14:  Today in my inbox received set sketches from Erhard [set designer Erhard Rom]. The first impression was as if they had emanated from inside the brain of Heinrich von Kleist—as if the set was a manifestation of what someone else was thinking: “walls” evocative of manuscript pages ripped open to reveal the actual brick wall of the theater and, on the floor, magnified sheets of paper strewn about, the rejects of the author’s fevered brain. In another view, Erhard had placed a strip of script handwriting around the walls at molding level, with Kleist positioned in front of the writing as if he had walked out from the words, been made flesh by them…. These are supremely literate visual interpretations wherein the stage is a text to be read. 

Jan. 20:  First rehearsal.  Jorge [director Jorge Cacheiro] started by delineating the course of the journey and the main themes as he envisioned them: that The Prince of Homburg is one of the great plays of theatrical literature; that it is a really difficult piece (he said it as a challenge, not a threat); that it is the classic story of one man’s struggle between the exercise of his free will and the pressures to fall in line with the rest; that it is equally going to be (in our production) a meditation on the dynamics of making a work of art, following the artist’s way instead of the proscribed mores of one’s society. In Jorge’s adaptation/rendition, the author Kleist has been added as a character within the drama. Thus, the audience will become privy to Kleist’s inner world grafted upon the dramatic construct of the preexisting play….  Read more »

Homburg dramaturg Neil Baldwin chronicles his inquiry into the life and writings of Heinrich von Kleist, in this second installment of excerpts from Neil’s production journal. 

Nov. 13:  Jorge [director Jorge Cacheiro] asked me to find “texts” from the Kleist play [The Prince of Homburg] and from his letters, as well as from Christa Wolf’s novel No Place on Earth. We spent a hurried fifteen minutes in my office talking about Kafka (The Trial), Kant (dialectic), Wagner (bombastic music), and other German cultural matters of mutual interest. 

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p>Nov. 15:  Woke up today thinking about the endless “journeying” of  Kleist—his peripatetic, obligatory, Romantic wanderjahr throughout continental Europe, all while resolving to be a writer; yet, when you get down to it, his productive period really only spans five years. Everywhere he went, Kleist found it difficult to remain focused, and there is still debate to this day about what he actually did do in some of the places he went (i.e., was he a spy…or some such). Read more »

From March 10–14, MSU’s Department of Theatre and Dance will present Homburg, a world premiere production created by faculty and students. Over the next three weeks, Insite will feature excerpts from the journal of production dramaturg Neil Baldwin. These notes provide an insider’s view of the collaborative process involved in creating a newly devised theatrical experience. We begin with an introduction of what Neil calls the “mise en scene”. 

This “born-digital” journal is a work in progress and a work in (and about) process. It was inspired by the request of my colleague, director Jorge Cacheiro, that I serve as the dramaturg for Homburg, Cacheiro’s new adaptation of The Prince of Homburg by German author Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). I decided to keep track of the show from the moment it entered my life as a responsibility and challenge on October 8, 2008, through its world premiere opening and run at the MSU’s Kasser Theater, March 10-14, 2009.  Read more »