Interview about Europe Central  

Manbites Dog's Associate Managing Director Katja Hill conducts an interview with Jay O'Berski and John Justice on January 6, 2008.

MDT: Alright. So, we're out here in front of Manbites Dog Theater on the corner of Foster and Geer with Jay O'Berski, Artistic Director of Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern and director of EUROPE CENTRAL, the newest offering in Manbites Dog's Other Voices Series, and John Justice, one of two playwrights who managed to adapt William Vollman's National Book Award-winning 750 page novel into an evening's passage on the stage, along with his co-playwright, Michael Smith, who couldn't be here today. Jay, John, thanks for joining me. I understand you just finished a technical rehearsal?

O'BERSKI: Yes.

MDT: How'd that go?

O'BERSKI: We got through half of it.

MDT: Well, the set looks like a war zone in there, and I mean that as a compliment. Can you tell me a little about what's happening on stage with the design motif?

O'BERSKI: The stage is divided into a Russian half and a German half, based on the way Vollman's book pops back and forth German and Russian chapters. So in each hemisphere, there are areas which each character gravitates towards. With twelve characters in the play, that added up to the creation of a lot of different, disparate playing areas. On the Russian side, we worked with a constructivist, futurist motif. On the German side, it's an expressionist world.

MDT: It looks like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI over on the German side, am I right?

O'BERSKI: Yeah, that's Hitler's area. Hitler appears as a somnambulist from CALIGARI, and his henchman Hermann Göring is actually dressed as Caligari himself, with a wolf mask.

MDT: Hmm.

O'BERSKI: Yes, we just took it very literally from both the film, and the book, that he was this -- I mean, Vollman calls him "The Sleepwalker."

MDT: Wow. Who are the characters aside from Hitler?

JUSTICE: On the German side--besides Hitler and Göring--there's Kurt Gerstein who was a scientist of sorts in the Germans' extermination campaign, and who had pangs of conscience over his role there. There's the artist Käthe Kollwitz, who lost a son in the first World War, which nearly undid her, and then lived on through the Second World War to continue bearing witness through her art to what was going on in Germany in her part of EUROPE CENTRAL. There's also one of the Nazi mid-level soldiers who gave Gerstein the orders to come up with faster, better, and more economical ways to exterminate Jews and other victims. Who am I leaving out, Jay?

O'BERSKI: How about Hilde Benjamin?

JUSTICE: Oh yes, Hilde Benjamin who was in her early life a great friend of working class people and was generally speaking on the leftist side in Germany. Later on, the conditions of her life and the choices she made led her to be a fairly draconian judge in post-World War II East Germany. She became, roughly speaking, a hanging judge, despite the fact that in her youth she had been sympathetic to the aspirations of people, the workers, and so forth, but she survived as best she could.

MDT: Who's on the Russian side?

JUSTICE: On the Russian side, we have the great composer Dmitri Shoshtakovitch, who has to continue somehow living in such a way that he doesn't forfeit those parts of his soul that make him a real artist. He's got to avoid offending people, namely Josef Stalin and everyone under him--which includes everybody in Russia--and somehow not truckle under to them so much that he becomes just another functionary. If he did the later, he would be somewhat in the camp of Roman Karmen, another player on the Russian side. He was a documentary filmmaker, cameraman, and writer who filmed everything from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to Vietnam and Cuba in the sixties. He fancied himself something of an artist in addition to being loyal to the state. And there's a character that Vollman, as I understand it, made up: he imagined a Comrade Alexandroff, who is an energetic functionary of the Russian Secret Police and spy who knows everything about everybody because he's good at what he does, who is not above brutalizing artists in order to enjoy it, or to get something that he wants from them, and who, as it works out, is more or less a guide through the labyrinth of Russia. There's the great, great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who through time is going to be considered the voice and soul of Russia and who kept herself intact with integrity throughout it all. We hear her poems, we hear her songs. There's also...who else is there in Russia? Who am I leaving out?

(A car horn blares on Geer Street. )

O'BERSKI: Is that it, maybe? No, wait: there's Zoya.

JUSTICE: Yes, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a real person. She died fighting for the Russian side against the Germans -- she was executed by the Germans. An iconic photograph was made of her in her death that the Russian Communists used as propaganda to rally their troops. She appears both in her emblematic role as a martyr to rally Russians to kill more Germans and also as a voice for a something a bit nobler and less propagandized than that. So I believe that's everybody.

MDT: It sounds like artists are playing big parts in the telling of this story. I was reading about Kollwitz and found out that when the Nazis came to power, they banned her from showing her work in the museums, but at the same time they chose certain works of hers to use as propaganda. Is that something that comes into play in the story of EUROPE CENTRAL -- the way regimes fear artists but also need them to broadcast a certain message?

O'BERSKI: Absolutely, and it's the case with all the artists in the piece. It's really a matter of the ones that could keep their integrity and the ones that sort of sold out to both sides of the fascist coin, the German Nazis and the Russian Stalinists. Kollwitz is one of the examples, but Akhmatova and Shoshtakovitch are surely in the same boat. And then there's people like this now largely underground documentarian who was hugely popular at the time, Roman Karmen, who was a sort of toady to the status quo under Stalin.

JUSTICE: But he had a great eye. He had a great, great eye for what makes strong images. So he was a gifted toady.

O'BERSKI: He's largely buried because he was complicit within these fascist regimes. And conversely, you can have someone who perhaps errs too far on the other side of their morality, like Hilde Benjamin. That was someone who was later marginalized and swept under the rug, this hanging judge. She went so far anti-fascist that her own obsessions brought her down.

JUSTICE: Oh! You know who we've forgotten? Say something about Elena, please.

O'BERSKI: Oh, of course. Elena is the muse figure between Shoshtakovitch and Karmen, caught in a love triangle, and while not an artist herself, she inspires both of them to create great art. In fact, she's in a long line of twentieth century muses who fueled and focused the passion of these artists.

MDT: What could the world have been like in the midst of such political horror? How does anybody create art in times like that -- or, must people make art because they're in times like that?

O'BERSKI: Art's irrepressible. It adapts to whatever. It's like a cockroach. It adapts to whatever foul conditions it's placed in and it comments on them and is informed by them--

JUSTICE: --And sometimes the fouler it is, the livelier the cockroach is, or the livelier art is, as in a totalitarian countries where the least little bit of light or hope or artistry means so much because the lid is on everything. You know, these Eastern European writers were a source and influence for William Vollman for this story, and you can see how it is a tremendous problem to stay true to art, to make art that matters and means something, without getting your head chopped off.

O'BERSKI: And even if it's not a political oppression, it can be an emotional repression, as Shoshtakovitch expressed in his very gnarled series of love affairs and an unhappy marriage. His work in the romantic field was just as great as his work politically.

JUSTICE: Did you see the Romanian artist at the Nasher Museum?

MDT: Oh, that guy...Dan Perjovschi?

JUSTICE: Yes, Dan and his partner, Lia. I loved that, and I think that some of his drawing and commentary, both on America and Europe, has something to do with coming from a country like Romania which has been pretty much under the thumb of dictatorships until recently -- I don't know what's happening there now after Ceauşescu and his wife, who were pretty stern to say the least. So Dan's an example of how the filth and the foulness can lead to something that is cleansing for artists, if they stick to their guns, which is hard to do. A lot of people in EUROPE CENTRAL risked everything and went out there only to get shot. A lot of artists, both Russian and German, committed suicide.

O'BERSKI: Shoshtakovitch and Akhmatova were certainly the exception to the rule. Most of their contemporaries were erased for lesser infractions than both of them pulled off.

JUSTICE: Yes, and Anna herself couldn't be published for a long many years under Stalin. So one of the things you have to do is be able to keep on making whatever you make under the conditions as far as they will let you make it -- that is, she kept writing! Sometimes she would just have pieces of paper, sometimes she would have her words memorized, or have friends memorize them, and that was it. They would bury her poems in people's yards and so the poems would either be scraps of paper, buried, or in people's heads, carried along until they would be allowed to write them down.

MDT: You would think she was making dynamite--

JUSTICE: Yeah, yeah!

MDT: --and not poems.

JUSTICE: And that's what the rulers thought, too.

O'BERSKI: Well, it's the truth! They are.

JUSTICE: Well, sure they are. Or should be. At the best, they are.

O'BERSKI: I mean, they're all about dissent and individualism and humanitarianism and kindness, so they were completely antithetical to the status quo. Just as with Stalin's going after Shoshtakovitch's music. Shoshtakovitch would take a few steps back and do something that sort of conformed and then it would creep through again: this individualism, a love of mankind.

JUSTICE: Yeah. And you had to step lively. Stalin liked his Seventh Symphony because it was very martial and has a lot of bombast of war in it, kind of like the 1812 Overture does. And so Shoshtakovitch got a prize for it, but he would also turn around and write string quartets like Opus 110 that was a raucous, screechy kind of thing but also had parts that did not sound very gung-ho for the party, the state, or the army. Or he would write lyrical things with melodic passages that would evoke love and passion, a whole other world that didn't help any from Stalin's point of view. So he'd get out of trouble with one thing and back into the hot water with another, and so it went.

MDT: Is any of his music used within the sound design of the show? How does it figure in?

O'BERSKI: We have a live cellist who plays his pieces throughout many of the scenes.

MDT: We've heard gunfire and bombs going off in there, too. So is it like a soundscape of destruction competing against art?

O'BERSKI: Yeah. We've also got an accordian, a guitar, and some drums. We're using newsreels and documentary footage from the era, as well.

MDT: How does the theme of surveillance manifest itself?

O'BERSKI: Well, definitely everybody's onstage pretty much the whole time, and they are often voyeurs to each other. But throughout the entire thing, there's also a busy KGB agent, Vollman's Comrade A, played by Greg Hohn, who is always watching, taking notes, and interjecting. There's also an the ear of Stalin that listens in from time to time, like Big Brother.

MDT: What's different or unique about the point of view on the world stage of World War II within this production compared to the way we've usually seen stories about the era?

JUSTICE: You go on that one, Jay.

O'BERSKI: I would say this is a surreal dream version of it. There's no glorification about the time. The war itself is actually sort of an off-stage character. And it's not a concentration camp story about anybody's heroism. It's really just about artists at that time creating and surviving this external maleficent force. I don't know of another story that's been told about these types of characters in this way.

JUSTICE: When Vollman got the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005 for this, he gave a little talk when they gave him the prize. One of the things he said--which I'm paraphrasing from memory--is that he started thinking about this not as a way of describing evil dictators and horrifically injured victims, but by asking the question, "What would I have done?" His family came from Europe a couple generations back, and he starting thinking, "Well, what kind of decisions would I have made then?" And he asked these questions realistically, without falling prey to that easy sense that we all have: that we would have behaved nobly and correctly if we had been in that situation. In the book and, I believe hopefully, the play, we're not painting facile portraits of people who did hellish things nor of people who did noble things, but trying to put it out there on stage so that we the audience can get a sense of what it's like to be under that almost impossible to understand pressure. And hopefully we'll continue to think about it after the play's over. What would we have done then, and what are we doing now?

MDT: So it's not a neat-and-tidy period piece.

JUSTICE: I hope not. That's not the intention, correct?

O'BERSKI: No.

JUSTICE: Neat and tidy is not what we're aiming at.