At Hyde Park’s Court Theatre, Charles Newell’s production of Mickle Maher’s Berlin brings real power and beauty to its exploration of warring ideologies. The play, adapted from Jason Lutes’s epic graphic novel of the same name, follows a group of Germans as they navigate life in the capital during the turbulence of 1928 to 1933, which saw the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Berlin mostly unfolds through the eyes of young Marthe Müller, who moves to the city to study drawing. Müller flits between journalist Kurt Severing and fellow artist Anna Lenke, falling in love with both and ending up with neither. In the background, a large ensemble of communists, fascists, workers, and aristocrats go about their day-to-day lives, but Marthe, Kurt, and Anna steal the show.
In particular, Raven Whitley as Marthe and Tim Decker as Kurt are terrific. Whitley’s Marthe is a blank canvas on which Germany’s warring factions play out. She is pulled every which way by Severing (who represents the Weimar liberals), Anna (the counterculture), Theo Müller (pre–World War I Germany), Margarethe von Falkensee (the aristocracy), Otto Schmidt (the communists), and Adolf Hitler (the fascists, more than Hitler himself). And yet, Whitley avoids playing naivete. She is curious, not innocent; adventurous, not impressionable.
If Marthe is Berlin’s driving force, Decker’s Kurt is its tragic core. He is, in all his little personal inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and intellectualisms, representative of Weimar liberalism’s promises and failures. And yet, Decker plays him not as an idea or an ideology but as a man, and a sad one at that. Leaning against a table or punching away at a typewriter, Kurt remains perpetually unable to diagnose or cure the rot he sees spreading through Germany.
Berlin is a play about helplessness. How much, it asks, can one person do against the forces of history? Even Hitler himself (or rather, herself, played by Elizabeth Laidlaw) seems to lack agency. This man-against-the-forces-of-history theme is complemented nicely by a creative design that strives for omnipresent light, movement, and noise. Berlin wants to feel like the city in a way that recalls the early Soviet theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold and others: almost a dozen actors are onstage throughout, moving tables, speaking into handheld microphones, drawing, typing, yelling, fighting, dancing to jazz, and playing the guitar. “The city is speed, it is lust, it is a river,” Marthe proclaims. And though Berlin doesn’t quite find the riverlike quality of which it frequently speaks—the production can be a little too stop-start in the second act—it is certainly full of speed and lust.
It is also full of light, sound, fog, and beauty. Keith Parham’s lighting design is serene but playful, keeping the mood appropriate but the audience on their toes. Mark Messing’s sound design is strong too, and he wisely chooses to keep much of the play’s sound endogenous. John Culbert’s scenic design similarly manages immense things with very little; six tables, ten chairs, and a ladder communicate the whole hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. When it comes time to bring the fascists to power, the simple drop of three white curtains evokes 12 years of Nazi imagery. Such striking moments contrast delightfully with real moments of beauty between Marthe and Kurt. One moment involving only a shuttered spotlight, a single chair, and some falling snow is simply extraordinary. Less, in the theater, is more.
This is, unfortunately, something Berlin could stand to remind itself of at times. Occasionally, the play mistakes maximalism for busyness in its movement. The decision to cast a woman as Hitler, insufficiently justified or explored, complicates without real reward. And Maher’s script, though generally quick, witty, and poignant, gets bogged down when it dwells too long in the world of pontificating monologues. If Berlin fails to achieve greatness, it is because this production does not believe sufficiently in itself, its power, and its audience. Too much is explained, and too many threads are tied neatly together.
That is not to say that Berlin is not a valiant exercise in both theater-making and historical engagement, nor to say that it is not beautiful. It is beautiful, and it generally does well to provoke discomfort at the beauty it has created through the depiction of violent, awful events. Berlin does not quite find the perfect path through its difficult subject matter, but, in this case, perhaps the perfect path would not have been the right one.
Mickle Maher’s Berlin, adapted from the graphic novel by Jason Lutes, is at Court Theatre through May 18.
