International Culture Lab
Theater Production Blog
International Culture Lab’s production of Outside Inn had
traveled through many incarnations to its Off-Broadway premiere. The
University of Pittsburgh, ICL and Theater Rampe Stuttgart originally
commissioned playwright Andreas Jungwirth to create a text to serve as
a vehicle to explore cultural difference among the collaborators and
their respective countries. From its conception, the project called for
four bilingual actors to perform the play in both languages on both
continents. Outside Inn rehearsed and previewed at the
University of Pittsburgh in September 2007, where it played two German
and three English language performances. It then traveled to Stuttgart,
Germany, where it played at Theater Rampe Stuttgart in the month of
October 2007, including five performances in English and one impromptu
mixed-language performance. This mixed-language version was further
rehearsed and then returned to Stuttgart July 1-5, 2008, as part of the
first annual American Days, sponsored by the German-American Center
there “to further improve and intensify the transatlantic dialog.”
Throughout the project, language evolved into a dominant creative
element that drove and shaped character development, rhythm and tone,
and actor/audience relationship.
Audience members who had seen the same actors play in two languages
had commented on how different the characters seem in one language or
the other. The actors, in turn, noticed differences in the ways their
characters responded to the same narrative circumstances depending upon
the language they were using.
As we moved toward the New York leg of Outside Inn
then, we wanted to interrogate in a more detailed and experimental
manner the role language plays in rendering the story of our
contemporary lives. The generous in-kind equipment loan from Digital Performance Institute
made this possible. We redesigned the set and decided to use projection
to reexamine, among other things, the role and use of supertitles. Need
they be only functional? Can they be used to tell a greater story? Can
a foreign language be part of the soundscape of a production and
thereby ‘translate’ culture not just words?
The main element of the set was a 14-foot-long 10-foot-high
structure which was both literally and figuratively a wall, with the
capital case text letters W A L L stenciled and
constructed into the design. This WALL served both as entrance/exit and
projection site for text and images. Two projectors mounted in the grid
halved the projection area. This binary helped serve our expanded
deliberation on and experimentation with translation. The original
German/English duality from the initial stages of the project was
minimized in the mostly English-language New York production. Here, the
German language was employed as Brechtian device that underlined the
twofold spoken/visual rendering of text and story.
In our multi-layered, digital age of information, communication has
become a complex juggling act. We are able to “text” or “talk” to the
whole of the world from the palm of our hand, but the process of
“translating” – intention, emotion, culture – has become more
challenging than ever in a globalized world.
The projection of stock market ticker crawl and current news
stories were interlaced with the characters’ representations of their
personal narratives. Which is the real or true story? Or perhaps more
correctly, which is the realest or truest representation of the story?
The representation of text or image on the literal W A L L
was used not only to emphasize or complement the story the
character/actor was telling, but also to counter and negate, thereby
adding a deeper second layer onto the main narrative. The lives of the
characters were as fictional or real as “Kalowski,” the unseen
arch-capitalist that dominated all their choices.
Coincidently, the same financial system that dictated the
characters’ actions and personal relationships in the play, was
imploding in real time in all the headlines during the October 2008 run
of the New York production.
As all current news stories suggest, the US and the world are
conscious of having reached some kind of historical precipice in the
capitalistic system. The globalized economy no longer allows simple
nation-to-nation agreements and “translations” of wealth and resources.
Just as the communists were the only ones who could screw up communism,
only the capitalists could ruin capitalism. Some will argue that
capitalism has now entered the same undead zone in which Soviet-style
communism has existed in the two decades since the fall of the Berlin
Wall.
Photo Credit: Stephanie Mayer-Staley
A fantasy of flagrant disobedience to authority, OH WHAT WAR follows a band of deserters stuck in No Man's Land. A mash-up of mud, vintage war songs, b/w video footage and battle noise, this original Juggernaut production zeros in on the great war machine that holds us captive.
