A.J. Goldmann

“Siegfried doesn’t know any fear, and I think this is the key for doing this role,” said tenor Andreas Schager, who will make his Metropolitan Opera debut in “Götterdämmerung,” the four-opera cycle’s finale, on April 27.

During the past few years, this 48-year-old Austrian singer has emerged as one of the world’s leading heldentenors, singing the most challenging Wagner roles to acclaim across Europe. In endurance-test parts like Siegfried, Tannhäuser, Parsifal and Tristan, his full, ringing voice seems indefatigable. He can channel a character’s wild desperation, ardor or impetuousness with steely yet easygoing assurance.

“I don’t know anyone who can sing Siegfried and Tristan like him,” said eminent conductor Daniel Barenboim, one of Schager’s champions. “For me, he is one of the very few real Wagner tenors today.”

But his path to singing Siegfried at the Met — he also sings in “Siegfried,” the third “Ring” opera, on May 2 and another “Götterdämmerung” on May 4 — was unusual. Schager, who was born Andreas Schagerl in the small town of Rohrbach an der Gölsen, started his career in operetta (precursors to modern musical comedies) and lighter tenor roles.

“Austrian tenors are always going for operetta,” he said. “For 12 or 13 years, I sang works like ‘Der Zigeunerbaron’ sometimes twice a day.”

When he took his first stab at Wagner in 2009 — as David, a relatively lyrical part in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” — Schager dropped the final letter of his last name on the advice of a colleague.

“It’s difficult if you want to start an international career as a heldentenor with the name Andreas Schagerl,” he recalled the colleague telling him. “Because if you type it into Google, you only find operetta. Many opera directors will see this and won’t even invite you to audition.”

But little else about his vocal transition was calculated.

“I always took the roles that I was given and always made them as good as I was able,” he said. “And so when I got this offer to sing my first Wagner, I said: ‘Why not? I’ll try it.’ I didn’t know anything about Wagner or his music at this time and I began to study, and very soon I recognized that this is very good for my voice. I was very excited and my voice didn’t get tired, so I could go on and go on singing, and I felt my voice get stronger every day I trained.”

In April 2013, he became an overnight heldentenor sensation when he jumped in to sing the first act of “Siegfried” at the Berlin State Opera, a sold-out performance conducted by Barenboim, after another tenor failed to show up on time. Schager happened to be in the house to rehearse “Götterdämmerung” but was scheduled to sing a bit role in a concert version of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” across town later that evening.

“At 10 minutes before show time,” he recalled, “the opera director came in and said, ‘Mr. Schager, can you please help us?’”

By the end of the first act, the other tenor had materialized, and Schager could rush to his other performance. “It was a busy day for me,” he said with a laugh.

“For me, of course, it was very good luck,” he said. “This story went immediately around the world. Everyone was talking about it; everybody knew my name as this new Siegfried in combination with Daniel Barenboim.”

Barenboim became a crucial collaborator. “I was already quite old when I started singing Wagner,” Schager said. “I was 39 years old and had mostly sung operetta before. But he didn’t care. He told me, ‘I know you can do it.’ It was for me fantastic to find a great maestro who believed in me this way.”

Barenboim said that Schager “has many unusual qualities. He has a very impressive voice, lots of musical intelligence, and he’s a bundle of energy. I think it was very useful for him to start his professional life as an operetta singer, which can be quite hectic. And it strengthened his stamina.”

He has become the go-to Siegfried for high-profile coming “Ring” cycles, including at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in the summer of 2020; at the Paris Opera that fall (led by Philippe Jordan, his conductor at the Met); and at the Berlin State Opera starting in 2022.

Barenboim brushed away concerns that so many grueling performances would take a toll of Schager’s voice. “There are no rules for this thing,” he said. “For most people, yes, but he’s an exceptional case.”

While Schager said that he doesn’t rank his roles in terms of their difficulty, Siegfried has few rivals in terms of length.

“Yes, the Siegfried in ‘Siegfried’ is very long,” he said. “You have to sing for 4-1/2 hours and always be on stage. But I would much rather speak about the energy that is in it. When you go for it, you don’t feel that it is difficult. The next day when you wake up, you see that it was a difficult, long evening. But when you’re in the middle doing it, it’s pure vitality.”

“At the end of a performance,” he added, “I’m so full of energy. I always have the feeling: Come on, let’s do it again!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/arts/music/andreas-schager-met-opera-siegfried-tenor.html" id="3e1af30d-3ac5-3dc8-a7ef-a7ee8c9f4151">The New York Times</a>.

BERLIN — Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero of Richard Wagner’s monumental “Ring” cycle, is one of the most punishing operatic parts ever written.

To Conquer a Tough Role, Start Light

Roughly a year later, “Am Königsweg” had its world premiere in Hamburg and has since been performed throughout Germany. (In early 2018, English-language excerpts were performed as a sneak preview at the City University of New York Graduate Center). It has taken somewhat longer for Jelinek’s play to reach her native country, where it is premiering this season at the Landestheater Niederösterreich in St. Pölten, outside Vienna.

Jelinek’s play is a screed of outrage at the political, economic and cultural forces that have brought us to an unprecedented — and for many, unimaginable — moment of crisis for modern democracy. Trump is never mentioned by name, but the narration sketches an undisciplined, uncouth monarch who has been propped up by obscene wealth, a nonstop media circus and a remarkable talent for self-aggrandizing. Draw your own conclusions.

Best known in the English-speaking world as the author of the 1983 novel “The Piano Teacher,” which inspired the 2001 film by Michael Haneke, Jelinek writes unconventionally for the stage. Her 2004 Nobel, which came as a surprise to many, was awarded “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power,” according to the Swedish Academy’s statement.

Jelinek’s long monologues, which are both analytic and associative, pose challenges to directors. Nikolaus Habjan, this latest version’s director, populates his phantasmagorical production with an army of diseased- and degenerate-looking Muppet-like ventriloquist’s dummies. Portions of the text are divided among the puppets, which also include seemingly putrefied versions of Kermit the Frog, Gonzo and the two old hecklers Statler and Waldorf. With their deformed, blotchy skin, melting features and splotchy hair, they look as if they were left in a closet for several decades and eaten by moths.

“Am Königsweg” contains no conventional characters, unless you count the prophet narrator, variously represented as a blind Miss Piggy or the author herself. From the Oval Office set (designed by Jakob Brossmann) and the multiple Trump puppets — yes, they have tiny hands — down to the orange nail polish worn by the six energetic performers, the Austrian premiere makes Jelinek’s critique of the president very explicit.

And then there’s the text, outraged and funny, mixing Greek tragedy and Shakespeare with political, pop cultural and social media references. At two hours, this production uses roughly 30% of the full script, which has never been done live in its entirety. (A radio version on the German broadcaster BR runs to more than four hours. )

Habjan, a talented puppeteer, does not himself perform in the production. In a program note, he describes “the wandering I,” a narrative voice and perspective that deftly shifts, sometimes in the course of a single sentence, and how puppetry is particularly suited to capturing this effect.

During a post-performance talk earlier this month, the actors (who double onstage as puppeteers) spoke of carving up a monologue into a dialogue among characters as both challenging and liberating. The actors cavort nimbly around the elaborate stage, effigies in hand, firing off the propulsive text while dexterously operating the hideous puppets.

To attempt a summary of “Am Königsweg” would be impossible, and many audience members seemed thoroughly confused afterward by the lack of a straightforward narrative or dramatic arc. “Am Königsweg” is neither a polemic nor a historical dramatization but an of-the-moment allegory for our deeply troubling political, social and economic reality. Habjan’s disturbing production is a particularly effective showcase for this difficult but urgent material.

When it comes to controversial, politically minded and sexually frank writers, the Viennese dramatist Arthur Schnitzler is one of Jelinek’s most important predecessors. His 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” jolted Viennese audiences with its frank, unsparing discussion of anti-Semitism in a society that viewed itself as sophisticated and enlightened. In it, a Jewish doctor refuses to allow a priest to administer the last rites to a woman dying of sepsis after an abortion, to spare her the knowledge that she is about to die. An ugly media campaign and trial follow, and the doctor is stripped of his post and his license to practice.

In “Doktor Alici” at the Münchner Kammerspiele, in Munich, Olga Bach presents a loose adaptation of “Professor Bernhardi” set in the not too distant future. The young, Berlin-born playwright swaps out the Jewish physician for a lesbian police chief of Turkish heritage, who is subjected to xenophobic slurs and struggles to keep her job after a right-wing conspirator dies in prison on her watch.

The dazzling staging by Ersan Mondtag, one of Germany’s rising young directors, situates us in a sinister Munich in 2023, where the rain rarely stops (umbrellas are a big prop element) and fluorescent lights and neon colors are the only respite from the penetrating darkness.

But as a contemporary re-imagining of Schnitzler, “Doktor Alici” is only half successful. While the political maneuverings around Dr. Alici and the anti-Turkish prejudices they bring out are well dramatized, there is little sense of moral outrage. I’m not sure why pushing the story into the near future was necessary: The dystopian mood gets in the way of the present conflicts that the play examines, and Bach’s social critique is not as strong as Mondtag’s finely honed aesthetic. With its stark lighting, ghoulish makeup and cartoonish sets, the production looks great, but the conflicts that Bach dramatizes seem neither as ethically fraught nor as socially urgent as the ones that Schnitzler explored over a century ago.

While Bach’s political tenor seems off, she has produced a well-made play, and the Kammerspiele has cast it sensitively. Neither of which can be said for “Rojava,” a world premiere by Kurdish-Viennese playwright Ibrahim Amir at the Volkstheater in Vienna. “Rojava” is about an idealistic student who sets off for the Kurdish self-governing region in northern Syria that the play is named after, to create a utopia alongside the local freedom fighters. There he finds danger, adventure, camaraderie and, yes, romance.

Amir’s first play, “Pleasure to Meet You,” done at a small theater in Vienna, won the prestigious Nestroy prize in 2013. “Rojava,” at one of the city’s main theaters, explodes onstage with a megadose of melodrama, kitsch and self-importance.

One bright spot is the Kurdish music, performed live by four musicians and co-written by Sandy Lopicic, the play’s talented director, who was given the impossible task of making Amir’s clunky and repetitive dialogue seem anything less than amateurish and inept. What with the awkward time leaps, the narrative gaps, the tiresome speechifying and a highly predictable love story, I wished I could have left at intermission.

Dramatizing current events in a compelling artistic way, without brimstone or treacle, is devilishly difficult. If Jelinek’s acerbic play has a whiff of Vienna’s storied bitterness and cynicism, Amir shows us the opposite side of the coin: sentimentality and schlock.

Am Königsweg: Directed by Nikolaus Habjan. Landestheater Niederösterreich, April 30; Bühne Baden, May 22 and 23.

Doktor Alici: Directed by Ersan Mondtag. Münchner Kammerspiele, through May 16.

Rojava: Directed by Sandy Lopicic. Volkstheater Wien, through May 28.

This article originally appeared in <a id="3eb0374c-d2ef-3601-a728-a4e02d7d1dd5" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/theater/elfriede-jelinek-am-koenigsweg.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Nobel Prize Winner Puts Trump in Her Sights

ST. PÖLTEN, Austria — The day after the 2016 election in the United States, Nobel Prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek began a play inspired by President Donald Trump’s surprising victory. The result was “Am Königsweg” (“On the Royal Road”), a lengthy monologue about a tacky autocrat whose sordid path to leadership is narrated by a blind female seer.

A Nobel Prize winner puts Trump in her sights

And they are investing in new works to run alongside the old war horses.

When Detlef Glanert’s “Oceane,” inspired by a 19th-century novella about a woman who attempts to live outside patriarchal bourgeois society, has its premiere at the Deutsche Oper on April 28, it will be the third of four works taking their first bows here this season. Just a week later, the Komische Oper will present “M: A City Searches For a Murderer” by Moritz Eggert, based on the classic film thriller by Fritz Lang. Earlier this year, the Staatsoper presented Beat Furrer’s “Violetter Schnee” and a completely revised version of Jörg Widmann’s 2012 “Babylon.”

Matthias Schulz, the Staatsoper’s general director, said in an interview that “to show commissioned works is essential, to show that opera isn’t just a museum. It’s a living art form.”

There are challenges inherent in adding new works to what remains a conservative field. While world premieres generate excitement among enthusiasts, attracting a general audience is tricky, and it is difficult for new operas to gain a foothold in the repertoire.

More often than not, it’s here today and gone tomorrow for fresh commissions, even the most critically praised ones, which tend to present too much of a financial risk to revive past their first performances. State-funded opera houses don’t need to be full every night to pay the bills. But administrators don’t want to perform to half-empty houses.

“I don’t just want my work to be done once,” Glanert, the composer of “Oceane,” said in an interview. (And he has been fortunate, with multiple productions for most of his 10 operas.) Robert Carsen, who is directing “Oceane,” put it more bluntly: ”When I do a world premiere, I always say that I hope I’m not working on a world ‘dernière.’”

Of Berlin’s three opera houses, the Deutsche Oper has shown the most sustained commitment to new work. Its artistic director, Dietmar Schwarz, has scheduled a major contemporary opera each season since he took on that position in 2012, including three world premieres. But only one of those, Aribert Reimann’s “L’Invisible,” is scheduled for revival — on the occasion of its composer’s 85th birthday in 2021.

“We think it’s important to do it again,” Schwarz said, “but financially it will probably be difficult.”

Widmann, the composer, said he didn’t know after its premiere seven years ago in Munich if “Babylon” “would ever be performed again. So many new pieces, especially monstrously complex pieces, never are. I’m very grateful for this house’s trust to give this crazy piece another chance.” (Widmann completely revised the work, a biblical epic, to produce a new “Berlin version.”)

According to the Staatsoper, ticket sales were strong for both “Babylon” and “Violetter Schnee,” an intense and mysterious 100-minute work about people trapped in an apocalyptic snowstorm, even if they received mixed reviews. The company will revive both works in coming seasons.

“When we do efforts like that, and they are successful, we have to bring them back,” Schulz said.

Companies attempt to attract audiences to these new works by promoting them as central events of the season. But working on them, said Carsen, the director, is always a leap into the unknown.

“I always approach anything I’m directing as if it’s just been written,” he said. “And I want people to hear it and see it as if they’ve never seen it or heard it before. Which is, of course, the case with a world premiere.”

Widmann said that much depends on the conditions under which a premiere is prepared. With “Babylon,” the musical idiom of which is complex and demanding, he said he was lucky to have worked with the Staatsopers in Munich and Berlin, two of Germany’s finest companies.

“If the audience feels it’s performed and sung fantastically and if it touches their hearts,” he said, “then the modern musical language should not be a barrier.”

Eggert, the composer of “M,” said, “Many people expect to suffer through a new opera. It’s a challenge for everyone, for the audience and the composers as well: how to create new works that can be understood without reading lengthy program notes.”

His 90-minute score contains an enormous children’s chorus, spoken dialogue, synthesizers, and sound effects to evoke the big city. Barrie Kosky, the artistic director of the Komische Oper and the director of the production, said he asked the composer to channel the Weimar-style spirit of Kurt Weill.

Kosky said this was “a deliberate attempt to create a link with the Berlin music-theater history, and as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’” — a “total work of art” — “it goes in a completely different direction than what Detlef Glanert or Beat Furrer or Jörg Widmann does.”

But whether “M” would come back in a future season, he couldn’t say.

Glanert said that it’s only natural for it to take time for audiences to become acclimated to the new. “Music is performed, evaluated and flops, or is performed again,” he said. “That’s the life cycle of any piece of music. And I think this is normal.”

Is it realistic to expect new operas to ever reach the level of popularity of “Aida” or “Tosca”? Eggert said that opera companies should redraw their programs so that half of all the works presented are new. In Germany, generous state subsidies to opera houses mean they “could be much more adventurous,” he said.

“In fact,” he added, “I’m appalled that it doesn’t happen.”

The polemics to this effect that appear on his blog inspire some hate mail, but also support, especially from people who work in the field. “Something has to change,” he said.

Kosky said he had reservations. “We have a duty, of course, to replenish the repertoire, but there are always questions hanging over my head,” he said. “Are the proscenium and the orchestra pit really the future of opera in the 21st century? Are we just creating these works for institutions? Do we all create them because we’re worried desperately that our Dracula-like dependence on 400 years of repertoire is going to come to an end if we don’t find new pieces?”

Although his house is rolling out the red carpet for “M,” Kosky said his first allegiance is to the classics. “I am a signed-up member of the opera necrophiliacs club,” he said. “I can’t survive without my Mozart, Puccini and Richard Strauss.”

Widmann, whose work deftly blends contemporary and historical styles, said he resisted writing operas when he was younger, but now felt it was his duty. “I need this as a composer, and the audience needs it, too,” he said. “To me, the whole opera system would not make sense at all if you only play the same old operas over and over again.”

He is fortunate to be surrounded by supportive institutions.“We’re very lucky that we have the money to do this,” said Schwarz, of the Deutsche Oper. “It’s very important that you have this kind of art, which is not commercial. That we haven’t yet found a contemporary work that can be part of the repertory over the past 40 years doesn’t mean that we should give up.” (The important works of Philip Glass and John Adams are slowly making inroads in Germany.)

Kosky said he isn’t giving up on world premieres, either, but he’s thinking beyond classically trained composers. He wanted the next one he worked on to be “an operetta. But I want a great rock band or a brilliant jazz composer to do it.”

“I’m sorry,” he added. “I’m an old showgirl and I like a bit of a tune.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="b0e6b37b-4c5c-3456-a199-b0e0ecd2f6b3" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/arts/music/berlin-opera.html">The New York Times</a>.

BERLIN — No place on Earth rivals Berlin for the volume and variety of opera on offer, from Georg Frideric Handel to Hans Werner Henze. The city has three world-class companies, which this season have combined for a total of 85 fully staged productions.

Another day, another opera

<h1>MUNICH — When it comes to misery, the families in Greek tragedies really take the cake.</h1>

The unhappy offspring of the houses of Atreus and Thebes are some of the oldest protagonists of world drama: They have relived their traumas onstage continually since the fifth century B.C., both in the original plays and in adaptations that draw psychological insights and contemporary relevance from the ancient texts. Throughout Germany this season, ambitious modern reinventions of plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus argue for the universality and timelessness of these works.

Now in his last year as artistic director of the Residenztheater in Munich, Martin Kusej has invited back Ulrich Rasche, the visionary director whose 2017 production of Friedrich Schiller’s “The Robbers” was one of the triumphs of Kusej’s eight-year tenure. And Rasche, 50, has once again brought his distinctive brand of “machine theater,” which transforms the stage into an elaborate mechanical assemblage while treating the actors as cogs in an all-consuming apparatus, this time for a production of “Elektra,” adapted from Sophocles’ tragedy in 1903 by Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

In “The Robbers,” massive, continually rolling treadmills dominated the stage, in a production as dramatically gripping as it was technically ingenious. For this one-act “Elektra,” Rasche, who designs his own productions, has devised an even more sophisticated set. The action takes place on a raised disc that rotates on its axis and on which, safely harnessed, the actors march in a pack, fighting to stay in place as it is raised and lowered, often tilting at dangerous angles. Unfortunately, one walks away dazzled by the mechanics but underwhelmed by the drama.

Much of the problem lies with how Rasche lets the rhythm of the production be dictated by Monika Roscher’s throbbing score, performed live by six capable musicians. “The Robbers” benefited from a pulsating soundtrack by American composer Ari Benjamin Meyers that sustained a mesmerizing intensity over four hours. Sadly, in “Elektra,” a work half as long, both the individual performances and the production as a whole seem enslaved to the loud, droning music.

This is especially true of Katja Bürkle’s raw portrayal of Elektra, the daughter of the murdered king, Agamemnon. Rasche’s ritualistic staging is ill suited to a work of such emotional intensity. Amid the monotonous score and the chanting by the chorus (the director’s invention), Bürkle drools and howls while trudging along the spinning disc. Her performance is impressively feral, but not much more than that.

The center of Hofmannsthal’s version is the showdown between Elektra and her mother, Clytemnestra, who killed her husband when he returned triumphant from the Trojan War. It’s a bloodcurdling scene, but here the plodding tempo set by the music makes it fall flat. Perhaps Rasche hoped to build Hitchcockian tension and suspense. In the absence of a ticking bomb under a table, however, the long scene just stagnates and dies. It is a directorial miscalculation that nearly sinks the whole production.

One of the few bright spots is Lilith Hässle as Elektra’s life-affirming sister, Chrysothemis, a necessary foil to the vengeful title character. Only when Hässle tries to supplicate the imperious Bürkle, honestly pouring out her maternal desires to Elektra’s derision and scorn, does Rasche’s industrially rigorous “machine theater” succeed on an emotional, human level.

The vengeance of the children of Agamemnon is also the theme of “The Oresteia,” the only tragic trilogy passed down to us from antiquity. In Burkhard C. Kosminski’s first season leading the Schauspiel Stuttgart, in southern Germany, he has brought over British director Robert Icke’s acclaimed four-hour version for its German-language premiere. The handsome 2015 production, originally seen at the Almeida Theater in London, where Ickes is associate director, has arrived in Stuttgart with only minor changes to Hildegard Bechtler’s minimalistic brick-and-glass set.

Over the course of a long but gripping evening, the fall of the house of Atreus plays out on a sleekly modern set, which transforms from a suburban home to a courtroom in the cycle’s final installment, “The Eumenides.” As the matricidal Orestes reconstructs the bloody events leading to his trial, a clerk presents the evidence to the court, where it is dutifully relayed in print on an electronic console.

Despite the contemporary relocation, Icke’s version remains faithful to Aeschylus. To make the plays work in a modern context, the trilogy is mostly stripped of its religious trappings. Without the context of the Hellenic belief system, the faith that compels Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia comes across as superstition, although Icke clearly lays out the moral stakes in sacrificing a child to win a war.

In this version, the character who comes most clearly into focus is Clytemnestra, the mourning queen, who will take revenge on Agamemnon only to be killed by her son. German actress Sylvana Krappatsch ensures that the focus stays on her, thanks to a courageous performance that is ferocious, grief-stricken and sexually charged. Matthias Leja is her worthy partner, and later opponent, as a severe yet uncommonly sympathetic Agamemnon.

The others in the 12-member cast have less to do. As Orestes, Peer Oscar Musinowski looks panic-stricken and flummoxed as he works through the traumatic memories and defends himself at his final trial, while Anne-Marie Lux seems positively chipper as Elektra compared with Bürkle in Munich.

Icke’s meticulous direction is full of disconcerting, often freaky, touches, including a spooked Iphigenia (Aniko Sophie Huber and Salome Sophie Roller alternate in the role) singing the most unsettling version of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” you’ll ever hear while clutching a stuffed bunny. Icke is also fond of cinematic touches that recall David Lynch during climactic moments, such as the frosted glass dividers that turn transparent at the blink of an eye, accompanied by flashing light and a zapping noise.

Between Hofmannsthal’s fin-de-siècle reworking of “Elektra” and Icke’s 21st century update of Aeschylus lies Bertolt Brecht’s “The Antigone of Sophocles,” which premiered in 1948.

In what was his first postwar work for the stage, Brecht turned his attention to Sophocles’ tragedy about filial duty, civil disobedience and the tyranny of the state. Based on an 1804 translation by the early German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, Brecht’s concentrated version was intended as an indictment of the German bourgeoisie who had embraced Hitler. Brecht scrubbed the play clean of references to Greek deities and shifted the emphasis from one family’s personal tragedy to the downfall of a society that embraces a totalitarian system.

On the small stage of the Berliner Ensemble, the company in Berlin founded by Brecht in 1949, Veit Schubert directs a stripped-down production of this “Antigone” starring students at the Ernst Busch University of Performing Arts. The nine actors clamber on and around a sloping stage that, over the course of the 90-minute performance, is progressively assembled from squares locking noisily into a large frame. (Wiebke Bachmann designed the striking modular set.)

The cast — all in their early- to mid-20s — perform with sweaty determination, if a touch too much studied intensity. A notable exception is Aniol Kirberg, who plays the blind seer Tiresias as a cheeky balladeer, plucking out bluesy tunes on a variety of instruments and annoying the tyrant Creon by parroting his pronouncements in song.

The performances in the 200-seat theater are mostly sold out, which is a vote both for the next generation of Berlin thespians and for these foundational works of world literature. Surely directors and playwrights like Hofmannsthal, Brecht and Icke will not be the last to mine them for fresh insight into our values, our morals, our fears and our passions.

“Elektra”:Directed by Ulrich Rasche. München Residenztheater, through April 24.

“The Oresteia”: Directed by Robert Icke. Schauspiel Stuttgart, through May 27.

“The Antigone of Sophocles”: Directed by Veit Schubert. Berliner Ensemble, through April 2.

This article originally appeared in <a id="573e5a29-53d8-4d4b-a9fc-3c6e728d8cdb" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/theater/greek-tragedy-germany.html">The New York Times</a>.

These plays are 2,500 years old, but they speak to us now

Now in his last year as artistic director of the Residenztheater in Munich, Martin Kusej has invited back Ulrich Rasche, the visionary director whose 2017 production of Friedrich Schiller’s “The Robbers” was one of the triumphs of Kusej’s eight-year tenure.

<h1>BASEL, Switzerland — In the United States, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams form a holy trinity of master playwrights. Their works are also well known in Europe, of course, but they are less often performed than the classics of continental drama: for instance, the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov, which are frequently presented in updated or deconstructed productions. Several new stagings at leading playhouses throughout the German-speaking world show what can happen when American classic drama meets European theater practice.</h1>

This season, British director Robert Icke, 32, has set out to conquer the Continent. Just months after his first German-language production, “Orestie” in Stuttgart, won a prestigious directing prize, Icke, who is the associate director of the Almeida Theater in London, traveled to Basel to direct a new production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”

In London, Icke’s distinctive productions have drawn praise and condemnation. The Times’ critic Matt Wolf named his recent version of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” one of the year’s best productions, while a two-star review in The Guardian called it “a parasitic rewrite.” Considering how controversial and edgy Icke’s past productions have been considered, perhaps the most surprising thing about his “Crucible” (called “Hexenjagd” in German, which means “Witch Hunt”) was how conventional it was.

The austere mid-20th century courtroom (sets: Chloe Lamford) that serves as the setting for the entire production is a nod to the McCarthy-era hearings that inspired Miller’s famous dramatization of the Salem witch trials. At the start of the evening, Icke gives us a single metatheatrical flourish by giving Judge James Hathorne an expanded role as the play’s narrator. Sitting at the bench, he methodically reads out both stage and character descriptions. As the protagonists make their entrances, the women, in particular, object to these introductions.

This is a promising point of departure for play about mass hysteria and the demonization of women, yet the director doesn’t dig any deeper into questions of female agency and representation in the 3 1/2 hours that follow.

Instead, Icke places the production’s focus squarely on the large ensemble cast. While there are many fine performances, the most astonishing and nuanced one belongs to Austrian actor Thiemo Strutzenberger. As the Rev. John Hale, the young minister sent to cast the devil out of Salem, Strutzenberger is hypnotic in his smoldering mix of tension and craftiness; a deceptively mild-mannered outsider whose convictions lead him first to zealotry and then remorse.

The young German actress Linda Blümchen makes Abigail Williams, who accuses her neighbors of witchcraft, a young woman increasingly drunk on her lethal power. And Katja Jung provides many of the trial’s most gripping moments as a charismatic and smooth-talking Thomas Danforth, the head judge. Given all the fiery acting on offer, Icke’s final-act surprise, a lurid pyrotechnic eruption in the courthouse, seemed a cheap and unnecessary stunt.

The year “The Crucible” had its premiere, 1953, also saw the death of Eugene O’Neill, the only American playwright who has won the Nobel Prize. Three years later, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the semi-autobiographical family epic that is often considered O’Neill’s masterpiece, was first performed.

At Vienna’s Burgtheater, the stage for Andrea Breth’s desolate and dark production of O’Neill posthumous work is dominated by the skeleton of a whale and littered with rocks. It is a far cry from Jonathan Kent’s 2015 Broadway revival, whose star-studded cast shuffled through realistically detailed early-20th-century interiors.

Breth, a prolific and influential Austrian director, uses stagecraft to explore the internal landscape of the play’s characters. Against the black expanse of the stage, she clads her cast in white linen, and they shine against the darkness. Although we get the occasional Tom Waits song and the stage rotates frequently, there is little to compete with the fine-chiseled performances that focus our attention on the tragic cycle of addiction, recrimination, and hopelessness that is the characters’ lot.

The magisterial Sven-Eric Bechtolf brings the Tyrone family’s paterfamilias, James, to life with arrogance, humor and a raw tenderness. As the elder son, Jamie, Alexander Fehling shows bitterness, but also furious love, toward his tubercular sibling, Edmund, played by August Diehl (best-known to American audiences for playing a Nazi with an acute ear for accents in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”). Diehl’s performance as Edmund, in many ways the play’s protagonist, is the production’s most fully realized, and certainly the most poignant.

As the morphine-addled matriarch, Mary, Corinna Kirchhoff is the production’s one weak link. Perhaps her exaggeratedly theatrical performance is meant to illustrate the depths of her illness and delusion. More often than not, however, it just comes across as hammy.

Mary Tyrone longs for a real home, and the wasteland conjured by Breth and her set designer, Martin Zehetgruber, makes that sense of dislocation palpable. Blanche DuBois, the main character in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” mourns the home she lost even as she tries to make a new one. In Michael Thalheimer’s vertiginous and visceral production at the Berliner Ensemble, we feel Blanche’s unease and shock at encountering her sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski in their sultry, squalid New Orleans digs.

This entire production takes place, claustrophobically, inside a rectangular box (sets: Olaf Altmann) mounted high on the Berliner Ensemble’s stage. This set, which looks like it was carved out of a rusty iron curtain, slopes down steeply, giving the production a dangerous, off-kilter energy: We have a palpable sense of the gravity-defying effort it takes the actors to perform these punishing roles.

Dressed in angelic white, Cordelia Weges’ Blanche always seems to teeter at the edge of the abyss. Like Mary Tyrone, Blanche is a flamboyant but unstable character. Weges resists the temptation to ham things up, however, imbuing her instead with elegance and pride. The Berliner Ensemble’s versatile Andreas Döhler plays Stanley gruffly, without any rakish charm. Making him such a pure brute brings the play into an uncommonly heartless light, although Williams wrote these characters with more humanity than Thalheimer seems to think they deserve.

By European theater standards, this “Streetcar” is none too radical. Indeed, like his counterparts in Basel and Vienna, Thalheimer is faithful to the script in a way that many other directors working here — and specifically in German-speaking theaters — are not. Perhaps this is an acknowledgment of the skill and precision with which these playwrights draw their characters and fashion their dialogue. When the text’s this good, why mess with it?

Hexenjagd. Directed by Robert Icke. Theater Basel, through March 8.

Eines langen Tages Reise in die Nacht. Directed by Andrea Breth. Wiener Burgtheater, through June 2019.

Endstation Sehnsucht. Directed by Michael Thalheimer. Berliner Ensemble, through March 23.

This article originally appeared in <a id="471d0fa5-d176-43fd-bbd5-2e9fbecf25e9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/theater/american-plays-in-europe.html">The New York Times</a>.

Great American plays, with a European twist

This season, British director Robert Icke, 32, has set out to conquer the Continent.

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