Quartet
His politics weren’t much different: a constant undermining of accepted texts.
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Choosing to remain in East Germany when he had more than one chance to leave, Muller assumed leadership of Bertolt Brecht’s prestigious Berliner Ensemble and won the Lessing prize but also endured bouts of official proscription. His Stalinism discomfited the avant-garde while his avant-gardism upset the Stalinists. And the postunification discovery that he informed for the Stasi, Erich Honecker’s secret police, has only added to his mystique. (Though, truth be told, it seems as if everybody informed for the Stasi at some point or another. One pictures East German intellectual life as a kind of Feydeau farce for dialectical materialists–people always slipping out on their handlers to dally with that cute little essay by Herbert Marcuse.)
For all that speech’s power, however–and for all the superb stagecraft that Akalaitis, Kandel, and Rishard bring to the piece–I found myself detached from much of Quartet. It wasn’t a Brechtian alienation, though Akalaitis makes intense efforts to introduce great expanses of intellectual distance. It was disinterest. Ultimately Valmont and Merteuil inspired nothing so much as nostalgia. Were they meant to be seen as sexual revolutionaries, destroyed by the logic of their rebellion? No child of the 60s is unfamiliar with that trope. Were they analogues for the corruptions of privilege? Even more familiar. And passe to boot: in these first years of 21st-century America, the answer to the equation sex + power isn’t “indulgence”; it’s “commodification”–the industrialization of pleasure and procreation. This Quartet is energetic, and made intriguing by all the dramaturgic ambiguities Muller built into it. But what was once a thorn in the eye comes across now as a bit of dust from an old book.
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