A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR
“Puppets, that’s all we are, made to dance on strings by unknown forces; ourselves, we are nothing, nothing.”[1]
So says the title character in Georg Büchner’s drama about the French Revolution, Danton's Death. Büchner was obsessed with puppets: they appear in his plays, his novella, his radical political pamphlet, and even his letters to friends and family. His comedy Leonce and Lena can be read as a treatise on puppetry and human life, a laboratory experiment for Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theater,” which provocatively declares puppets to be more graceful than human dancers. Büchner’s Leonce und Lena is a comedy about the interchangeability of identity, about how people are determined by the roles they must play, and about the endless repetitions of our daily formulaic performances with one another. In his first soliloquy, Leonce asks:
“Why can’t I take myself seriously like everyone else and stuff this poor puppet of a body into a nice smart coat, stick an umbrella in its hand, and turn it into something thoroughly decent, thoroughly useful, and thoroughly moral?”[2]
This production takes Leonce’s conceit seriously. Eight different actors play Leonce; seven play his comical sidekick, Valerio. As the players dress their puppet bodies in grunge flannel and Kurt Cobain wig, they become the melancholic Prince Leonce. As they don the jester’s motley coat, they become the Hanswurst Valerio. The performers are marionettes and many forces pull their strings: Büchner’s text; the transformative heft of costumes; the energy of fellow actors; the droning of teachers or directors; and also you, dear audience members. Your laughter and applause are the cords that will engage the actors' internal mechanisms of satisfaction, pride, and gratitude. Please pull freely and often.
What’s with the flannels and cassette tapes?
The characters of Lena and Leonce are at once a parody and celebration of Weltschmerz, a brand of melancholy that was faddish in the nineteenth century. Their brooding teen angst, disillusionment with bourgeois norms, and eloquent fascination with death make them dead ringers for the plaintive introspection of the grunge music scene of the 1990s. The aesthetics of the “Seattle Sound” and its transatlantic parallel, the “Hamburger Schule,” provide the visual and audio palette for these characters in our production.
Content by Ellwood Wiggins
[1] Danton’s Death, II.5, cited from Georg Büchner, Complete Plays, Lenz, and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick (London: Penguin, 1993) 38.
[2] Leonce und Lena, I.1, ibid. 80.