Theatre in Review: The Blue Flower (Second Stage)

	Teal Wicks. Photo: Ari Mintz

The Blue Flower represents a milestone of sorts, I think. In recent years, we've seen many productions to which projections have made a valuable contribution. More recently, we've seen plays in which projections are integral to their existence. (A good example is the excellent By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, at Second Stage last summer.) Now comes The Blue Flower, which seems to exist primarily as a vehicle for projections; this is one trend I'd like to see nipped in the bud.

To the extent that it has any story at all, The Blue Flower focuses on four young people in Europe caught in the tides of history before, during, and after World War I. Max, suggested by the German printmaker and sculptor Max Beckmann, becomes known for his modernist collages, which he turns out in two-minute bursts of activity. Franz, based on the painter Franz Marc, becomes enamored of horses, painting dozens of equine portraits. Hannah, drawn from the Dadaist Hannah Hoch, dazzles everyone with her performance pieces. Maria, the scientist in the group, is apparently based on Marie Curie, although if the latter got around the way her fictional counterpart does, I certainly haven't heard about it.

The Blue Flower begins in New York in the 1950s, where Max has lived for decades. In one of the least appealing inventions of the authors, Jim and Ruth Bauer, Max, appalled by modern world, has given up speaking in any intelligible language, reverting to a patois of his own making known as Maxperanto. This leaves Marc Kudisch, who plays Max, with an evening's worth of nonsense syllables to remember. Occasionally, we get surtitles translating his lines for us; even more occasionally, in typically too-cute moments, Max begins speaking in English, and we get surtitles in Maxperanto. (There's one particularly bizarre sequence, in which Max appears, sometime in the 1950s, before the Texas branch of a group known as Daughters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, lecturing in his made-up language.)

Upon Max's death, the book he is working on is picked up by one of the supporting cast, who uses it as a storybook, narrating the action while the performers more or less act out what we're hearing. In terms of dramatic action, this is about all you're going to from The Blue Flower; I can count on one hand the number of real dialogue scenes. (Since the words often consist of statements like "The greatest mystery of all is reality," this may be for the best.) There are, of course, plenty of songs, written in a faux Kurt Weill manner with occasional country music inflections. (One number quotes heavily -- intentionally, I hope -- from "Mack the Knife.") The lyrics are vaguely allusive, vaguely poetic, and, all too frequently, just vague.

The story is meant to follow Max and his friends as Europe is devastated by the war, followed by the agonies and panics of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. But they barely exist as characters; instead, they're used as posed figures, singing sad, sensitive ballads while the horrors of the 20th century unfold behind them.

Those horrors, and much more, are seen on the prominently placed projection screen. The Bauers have come up with megabytes worth of video, carefully composed to look like bits of scratched black-and-white Expressionist film of the era. These are filled with images -- some moving, some still -- of Germany, Paris, episodes of social upheaval, and war. Some of it looks like custom-made content; some of it is historical. (I think I saw some footage from Lewis Milestone's 1930 film of All Quiet on the Western Front.) Sometimes the images consist of key words from the narration. For example, when the German government brands Max "a degenerate artist with questionable values," the screen displays "degenerate," "questionable," and "values." This is very helpful if you are taking notes.

There was so little of interest happening on stage during The Blue Flower that, for long periods of time, I found myself watching the screen, almost oblivious to the real people in front of me. (On one-stage attention getter is the Act II orgy sequence, which, I guess, is supposed to clue us in to the unhappiness and desperation of '30s Berlin; unfortunately, it kept reminding me of the "Air Erotica" number from the film All That Jazz.) It would appear that the Bauers hoped that, in matching songs to images, a show would emerge; the people and the text seem to be an afterthought. This kind of formal experiment goes on all the time in downtown theatres like HERE -- but shouldn't the piece have something -- anything -- original to say about such important events? And shouldn't the people on stage make some kind of an impression?

As directed by Will Pomerantz, the people never have a chance. In show after show, Kudisch has shown his devotion to new musical theatre artists. Here, they don't return the favor; without meaningful words or actions, his Max fades into the background. Sebastian Arcelus is given very little to do as Franz, who drops out of the action for long stretches. Teal Wicks sings beautifully and has a strong natural presence as Maria, even if she spends most of her time rhapsodizing over some made-up substance that, I suppose, must be the authors' stand-in for radium. Meghan McGeary, who co-founded a band with Jim Bauer, has an eerily intense quality, especially when enacting one of Hannah's Dada routines; one feels that she is truly on the authors' wavelength.

Aside from the video, The Blue Flower has an elaborate, multi-level wooden set by Beowulf Boritt. The designer's best work consists of simple, strong images, and this contraption, filled with gears and gangways, seems awfully fussy. Aaron Rhyne provided projection design and film supervision for the Bauers; the work is accomplished, and its over-prominence on stage should, I think, be charged to the authors rather than him. Dan Moses Schreier's sound design is generally natural and unforced; Kudisch is sometimes hard to hear, but I have the feeling that's intentional, especially since his words intentionally don't make sense. Don Holder's lighting and Ann Hould-Ward's costumes are typically classy.

In any case, The Blue Flower is a notable example of form hijacking content. This is a musical about music, images, and movement, but none of these elements combine to say anything original or compelling about some of the key events of the 20th century. In other circumstances, this approach might yield a dull show; here, given its subject matter, the result is dismaying.--David Barbour