Insite

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…. 

Reviewing my notes as I type, I see that the most frequently recurring word is “Why?” Why will we be moving lines of text around? Why are these events happening in the way that they are? Why does it always seem as if the Prince is choosing between what he should do and what he actually does do? Why is it that no matter what he does, there are no apparent consequences? Does he ever come out of his apparent sleepwalk? Does he ever really want to conform to military order, or is that just a façade? 

Jan. 22:  Tonight Jorge spent the first hour working with Christian (Kleist) and A.J. (Homburg) on the beginning of the play, in a kind of dimly lit, speechless pantomime to establish the premise of Kleist as the maker of the play—or, as Jorge put it, to show the audience…Homburg as a character emerging from the imagination of Kleist. 

Jan. 30:  5:45 a.m.  I clambered upstairs in the darkness to my study and started leafing through excerpts from other works by Kleist in the David Constantine anthology [Selected Writings] and soon found what was nagging at me—a short essay, “Reflection,” that Kleist wrote in December 1810 for the Berliner Abendblatter in the form of a letter addressed to the son he never had. “The proper time for reflection,” Kleist says, giving hypothetical advice, “is not before you act, but after…[W]hen the deed is done, our powers of reflection may serve the purpose they were actually given us for, namely to bring us to consciousness of what was wrong or unsound in how we acted and to regulate the feelings for other occasions in the future. Life itself is a struggle with Fate; and in our actions it is much as it is in a wrestling match…” 

Noon.  Tara (Princess Natalie) came to see me to talk about the play. She was very concerned about how to achieve a better understanding of her character…the more we talked, the more I realized that what Tara—and probably many of the others—needed was an insight into the transcendent European Romantic mentality, the zeitgeist consciousness of the brink of the nineteenth century when The Prince of Homburg was written—rather than attempting to probe the historical moment when the events giving rise to the play occurred…. I reassured Tara that to spare her further tribulations wandering around the Library, I would find some good Web sites on Romanticism. I chose ones where the emphasis was on the visual: art.com’s Artchive and the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. 

Feb. 3:  Jorge spent an hour during the first part of rehearsal this evening in a one-on-one session with Christian (Kleist)…. Jorge explained to him that the priority is to get the play crystallized first and then to work on specific, calibrated “interventions” in the form of excerpts from Kleist’s writings…. “You have the biggest acting challenge of anyone,” Jorge told him. “I am going to keep feeding new lines to you up until the end and maybe even while the show is in performance.”… The three of us talked about the adverse circumstances of Kleist’s brief life, his chronic inability to resolve the dialectic he saw and felt in every circumstance, the extreme degree to which his creative endeavors were suffused with suffering… “What if you did not fit into a structured world; how would you react?” 

Feb. 9:  Jorge took A.J. (Homburg) aside tonight…and talked at length with him again about “using his imagination” to create a truly “Romantic character.” How, Jorge asked, would he envision a modern-day Romantic figure? ”You need to come into a room in a way that everybody notices,” Jorge said. “You are playing an extraordinary human being—the best soldier and the best lover…and this play, in itself, is a war in which the stakes are high—who does the audience care about the most?” 

The Romanticism of this play permeates every scene, no matter who is talking, because the play is a haunting reflection of the ethos of the epoch in which it was composed by Kleist. The year 1675 is a pretext in much the same way that Hamlet’s “Denmark” and Macbeth’s “Scotland” are pretexts for mental situations of rampant indecision. 

Feb. 14:  An interesting point arose about how important it is for the actor to “come in [to the scene] on text—to explode with text.” They’ve got to burst onstage with a message already internalized and percolating in their minds so that it comes across to the audience before a word is even uttered…. Not only in spoken words but in written modes the text is always there in Homburg. We lose count of the hurried letters, crumpled notes, military dispatches, and other epistolary signs that behind the façade of the drama resides the compulsively generating mind of a writer writing about writing…. 

After a break, Jorge continued with inductive notes on the pervasively anxious atmosphere of the drama. It’s a time of rampant instability and political insurrection—the rumor mill grinds, murmurs of gossip drift here and there, the nexus of control changes hands from one moment to the next, flitting mothlike and erratic across the stage. 

Feb. 17:  From Pierre Courthon, Romanticism (1961): “There will always be Romanticism, and there always has been since primeval man took his first steps on the path of culture. But it seems unlikely that there will ever be another movement so wholeheartedly devoted to the cult of the heroic, of sublimated passion, of reckless violence and untrammeled freedom, as that which launched a revolt against the frigid conventions of society.” 

Feb. 23:  Two weeks to go.  I remarked how in re-reading the play again over the weekend I had noticed how often the Elector mentions “the Prince of Homburg,” like an escalating refrain throughout the story, from all different points of view—benign, bemused, accusatory, anticipatory, angry, vengeful…. The Prince is onstage even when he is not physically there. He is a ghost in absence and remains partly spiritlike in presence. 

Neil Baldwin, Ph.D., cultural historian and author, is Distinguished Visiting Professor in MSU’s Department of Theatre and Dance. His Web site is neilbaldwinbooks.com.