Erwin Piscator

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Erwin Piscator, gypsum bust by Hermann zur Strassen, 1958
Erwin Piscator, gypsum bust by Hermann zur Strassen, 1958

Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator (17 December 1893 in Greifenstein-Ulm – 30 March 1966) was a German theatrical director and producer who, with Bertolt Brecht, was the foremost exponent of epic theater, a genre that emphasizes the sociopolitical context rather than the emotional content or aesthetics of the play.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Piscator worked experimentally in Berlin after 1919. As stage director at the Volksbühne (1924–1927), and later as managing director at his own theater (on Nollendorfplatz), he produced social and political plays especially suited to his theories. His dramatic aims were utilitarian—to influence voters or clarify left-wing policies. He used mechanized sets, lectures, movies, and mechanical devices that appealed to his audiences. In 1926, his updated production of Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers (Die Räuber) stirred up controversy at the distinguished Preußisches Staatstheater in Berlin. Piscator cut the text heavily and reinterpreted it as a vehicle for his political beliefs. He presented the protagonist Karl Moor as a substantially self-absorbed insurgent. As Karl's foil, Piscator made the character of Spiegelberg, often presented as a sinister figure, the voice of the working-class revolution. Spiegelberg appeared as a Trotskyist intellectual, slightly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin in his cane and bowler hat. As he died, the audience heard The Internationale sung.

Piscator founded the influential, but short-lived Piscator-Bühne in Berlin in 1927. In 1928 he produced a notable adaptation of the Czech novel The Good Soldier Schweik. As British Brecht expert John Willett put it, throughout the pre-Hitler years Piscator's "commitment to the Russian Revolution was a decisive factor in all his work."[2] In 1931, after the collapse of the third Piscator-Bühne, Piscator went to Moscow in order to make a motion picture for Mezhrabpom, the Soviet film company associated with the International Workers' Relief Organisation.[3] With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Piscator's stay in the Soviet Union became political asylum. After his years in the Soviet union, Piscator, whose exit from the USSR in 1936 "has been described as 'fugutive', had no wish to work under a Communist dictatorship again."[4] In 1937 he married dancer Maria Ley in Paris. Bertolt Brecht attended their wedding.

When Piscator and Ley subsequently emigrated to the United States in 1939, Piscator was not received as a stranger. In 1936, he had already collaborated with Lena Goldschmidt on a stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's bestselling novel An American Tragedy. Under the title The Case of Clyde Griffiths and with Lee Strasberg as director, it ran for 19 performances on Broadway. In New York City Piscator became director of the Dramatic Workshop which he founded at the New School for Social Research in 1940. Among Piscator's students at the Dramatic Workshop were Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Judith Malina, Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte, Elaine Stritch and Tennessee Williams.[5]

Piscator had to return to West Germany during the McCarthy era in 1951. He was appointed manager and director of the Freie Volksbühne in West-Berlin in 1962. To much international critical acclaim, Piscator premiered the controversial play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth "about Pope Pius XII and the allegedly neglected rescue of Italian Jews from Nazi gas chambers"[6] in 1963. Until his death in 1966, Piscator became a major exponent of contemporary and Documentary theatre. Piscator's wife, Maria Ley, died in New York city in 1999.

[edit] Impact on theater

In lieu of private themes we had generalisation, in lieu of what was special the typical, in lieu of accident causality. Decorativeness gave way to constructedness, Reason was put on a par with Emotion, while sensuality was replaced by didacticism and fantasy by documentary reality.
Erwin Piscator, 1929.[7]

Piscator's contribution to theater has been described by theater historian Günther Rühle as "the boldest advance made by the German stage" during the 20th century.[8] Piscator's theater techniques of the 1920s such as the extensive use of picture and film projections from 1925 on as well as complex scaffold stages had an extensive influence on European and American production methods. His dramaturgy of contrasts led to sharp political satirical effects and anticipated the commentary techniques of epic theater. In the Federal Republic of Germany, Piscator's interventionist theater model experienced a late second zenith. Several productions trying to come to terms with the German's Nazi past and on other timely issues made Piscator the inspirer of a mnemonic and documentary theater from 1963 on. Piscator's stage adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace has been played in some 16 countries since 1955, including three productions in New York.

[edit] Erwin Piscator Award

In the fall of 1985, an Erwin Piscator Award was inaugurated that is annually being awarded in New York, the adopted city of Piscator's second wife Maria Ley. Additionally, a Piscator Prize of Honors has been annually awarded to generous patrons of art and culture in commemoration of Maria Ley since 1996. The host of the Erwin Piscator Award is the international non-profit organisation "Elysium − between two continents" that aims at fostering artistic and academic dialogue and exchange between the USA and Europe.

[edit] Work on Broadway

[edit] Films

  • Revolt of the Fishermen (Vosstaniye rybakov). Director: Erwin Piscator, Book: Georgi Grebner, Willy Döll, Producer: Michail Doller, USSR 1932-1934.

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Piscator, Erwin." Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, volume 15, copyright 1991. Grolier Inc., ISBN 0-7172-5300-7
  2. ^ John Willett: Introduction, in: Erwin Piscator. 1893-1966. An Exhibition by the Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin, in cooperation with the Goethe Institute. Ed. by Walter Huder. London 1979, p. 1-4, p.1.
  3. ^ Gerhard F. Probst: Erwin Piscator and the American Theatre. New York etc.: Peter Lang, 1991, p. 7. ISBN 0-8204-1591-X
  4. ^ Christopher D. Innes: Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre: the Development of Modern German Drama. Cambridge 1972, p. 7.
  5. ^ Thomas George Evans: Piscator in the American Theatre. New York, 1939-1951. Wisconsin: University 1968.
  6. ^ Gerhard F. Probst: Erwin Piscator and the American Theatre. New York etc.: Peter Lang, 1991, p. 19. ISBN 0-8204-1591-X
  7. ^ From a speech given on 25th March, 1929, and reproduced in Schriften 2 p.50; Quoted by Willett (1978, 107).
  8. ^ Günther Rühle: Erwin Piscator: Dream and Achievenent, in: Erwin Piscator. 1893-1966. An Exhibition by the Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin, in cooperation with the Goethe Institute. Ed. by Walter Huder. London 1979, p. 12-19, p. 16.

[edit] External links

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