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Bertolt Brecht (Daniel Zacapa) and Odon von Horvath (Gregory Gifford Giles) in Hooray for Hollywood. |
By Ed Rampell
Local theater’s leftward trend continues with the revival of Christopher Hampton’s 1980s play, Tales From Hollywood, which includes: A rendition of the revolutionary anthem "The Internationale"; Jewish-American screenwriter Helen Schwartz (Jennifer Sorenson) who joins the Communist Party USA; actor J.P. Sarro portraying an L.A.-based Soviet diplomat named Lomakhin in a minor part; and in a lead role, Daniel Zacapa as Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. The latter is essential for Hollywood’s plot, which is about European – mostly German – artistic refugees from Hitler, who fled the fatherland and wound up in La-La-Land.
(By the way, if you want to catch a whiff of the militaristic mindset they were fleeing, see L.A. Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, which is playing through Dec. 12.)
This comedy drama’s émigrés include a rather long-winded, pompous, if anti-fascist, Thomas Mann (Kent Minnault) whose novels include 1924’s The Magic Mountain; his more radical older brother Heinrich Mann (Walter Berry), who wrote the novel that Josef von Sternberg adapted for 1930’s The Blue Angel, which brought stardom to another anti-Nazi German artist, Marlene Dietrich; “Heine’s” wife Nelly Mann (Australian stage and screen actress Ursula Brooks); Salka Viertel (Elizabeth Southard), who was a screenwriter for that other European émigré, Greta Garbo, and hostess of soirees for the Continental exiles; etc.
All of the above dramatis personae were actual historical figures, with probably the exception of Schwartz, who is the girlfriend of the play’s main character, Odon von Horvath (Gregory Gifford Giles). Horvath was another real life personage, although Hampton takes great liberties with him -- dramatic license, and all that. In any case, as Hollywood’s narrator, Horvath plays a role somewhat similar to that of Joel Grey’s emcee in Cabaret, based on the stories by that other Christopher – Isherwood – that deal with related subject matter during at least part of the period Hampton’s play covers.
Hollywood actually goes beyond the 1930s to at least the 1950s, focusing on the interaction between exiled European members of the literati and the movie colony’s studio system. Towards the play’s end the refugees in “the land of the free” confront another form of totalitarianism: The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism, during the Hollywood Blacklist.
Much frustration and fun is derived from the clashes between these highly cultured men/women of letters and the vulgarians at the gates who ran the motion picture industry. In a dual role, Sarro also plays the aptly named producer-writer Charles Money, who is probably a composite character. As a studio cheat and chiseler, Sarro reminded me of the comical Wayne Knight, who played Jerry Seinfeld’s nemesis named Newman in that sitcom.
Zacapa steals the show as Brecht, portraying the cigar wielding German playwright with great comic panache as part Karl Marx, part Groucho Marx. The role as played and written is a droll send-up of Brecht and his Theatre of Alienation theatrical techniques. Not only does Brecht succeed in alienating practically everybody with his endless harangues and egotism, but his Brechtian methods provide much grist for the comic mill, as Zacapa appears in various scenes wielding signs stating what is happening onstage. I may be prejudiced because Brecht is my favorite 20th century playwright, but Zacapa’s performance was my favorite in the play. Viva Zacapa!
Brooks is another stand out as Heinrich’s long-suffering, far younger wife. A stranger in a strange land dislocated from her homeland, Nelly yearns for a younger man’s touch and for the Germany Hitler has stolen from her. Like Odon (whom she pursues), Nelly hides a terrible secret the comedy drama eventually reveals.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed Hampton’s highly literate, droll, insightful Hollywood script. However, I found the transition from comedy to drama to tragedy to sometimes be jumpy. Brecht’s wife, actress Helene Weigel (Niki Blumberg), says and does little, if anything other than appearing in the background. This is a pity because I would have enjoyed learning more about this woman who rocked the theater world as Mother Courage, etc., and she never comes alive onstage in Hollywood. The postwar L.A. production of Brecht’s Galileo starring Charles Laughton as the beleaguered astronomer forced to recant by the church, which was a thinly veiled attack on HUAC (and Stalinism) and quite a cause celebre at the time, is also neglected.
Hampton depicts Brecht’s appearance before HUAC in 1947 around the time the Hollywood Ten also testified. Brecht seemed so cooperative that the congressional committee actually commended him as an example that the Hollywood Ten should emulate. But Hampton does not develop that, nor that Brecht had the last laugh on the HUAC dictators: His “cooperative” testimony merely pulled the wool over their eyes, and immediately after he appeared before Congress, he fled America and wound up in the German Democratic Republic, where he established the famous Berliner Ensemble. (Hampton’s script merely indicates that Brecht returned to Europe – not that he crossed the so-called “iron curtain” into East Germany.)
Poor Brecht: He was one step ahead of Hitler’s invading armies in various European countries, was not especially welcome in the Stalinist Soviet Union during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, left Vladivostok on the last passenger ship out of the USSR before the Nazis invaded Russia, managed to make it to Hollywood, only to eventually have to pack up and flee again from “democratic” America. Good grief! It’s great that Hampton reminds us of these exiles in La-La-Land, and of course the ensemble cast, deftly directed by Michael Peretzian, covers much more than just Brecht and his trials and travails. This play is a lot more than just a bio-play about Brecht. It also has a gloriously sexy nude scene with a thespian wearing only a birthday suit that will make you want to sing "Happy Birthday." No phony blankets or sheets here to cover up the human body. Hampton is one of the few playwrights boldly using the freedom that artists have fought for over the years.
So over all, I sing “Hooray for Tales From Hollywood”!
Tales From Hollywood runs through Dec. 19 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. For more info: 310/477-2055, ext. 2; www.odysseytheatre.com
