Review - I'm A Stranger Here Myself & The Testament of Mary

Mark Nadler is one of those cabaret performers who serves up his entertaining antics with healthy portions of art education and history lessons. In I'm A Stranger Here Myself, now transplanted from its nightclub roots to the York Theatre stage, Nadler gives a frequently fascinating overview of the pre-Hitler period known as the Weimar Republic; Germany's first democracy and a haven for individualists and eroticists who gleefully indulged in a period of artistic freedom.

This is no dates and facts textbook lesson but more of an exploration of the emerging attitudes of the era that gives context to the music and lyrics left behind. Nadler uses Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "The Bilbao Song" to wax nostalgically about a rowdy, inclusive nightlife culture that gave way to bland bourgeois repressiveness. Though he wears a yellow boutonnière on his lapel with a folded pink handkerchief peeking out of his pocket, a continual reminder of the oppression to come, he's not just singing about Germany. Parallel to his Weimar stories he also tells of his own journey from being an Iowa-raised lad to a young Greenwich Village piano player at the famed Five Oaks, a now defunct piano bar that boasted an atmosphere he compares with 1920s Berlin. Frederick Hollander's "Oh, How We Wish That We Were Kids Again" sets the mood as Nadler explains how, "We glorify that time in our lives when we were young and broke."

Weill takes center stage for much of the narrative. Nadler imagines the satisfaction it must have given him, once arriving in America, to be able to collaborate with Howard Dietz on a song like "Schickelgruber," which not only spoofed the rise of the fuehrer, but teased him with his actual last name. But there was also the deep sadness he felt in being separated from his wife, Lotte Lenya, who, not being Jewish, remained in Germany where she took on several lovers. Though it was Maurice Magre who wrote the words for "Je Ne T'Aime Pas" ("I Don't Love You"), Nadler suggests Weill's music for the song expressed his feelings about his marriage.

Hollander's "Oh, Just Suppose" has a coy lyric about imagining a homosexual relationship, and Nadler goes out into the audience to make sure the meaning of the song comes across, but in a more serious vein he marvels at the courage it took for Mischa Spoliansky and Kurt Schwabach to write "The Lavender Song," a protest anthem demanding gay rights, in 1920.

The running theme throughout the show, for both the German artists and for Nadler himself, is taken from Hollander's lyric, "I don't know who I belong to, I believe I belong to myself, all alone," stressing the conflict between individualism and the comfort of assimilation. At one point he talks of the young boys who joined the Nazi movement and passionately insists, "I refuse to believe that every one of these kids was a monster. They just wanted to belong."

Franca Vercelloni on accordion and Jessica Tyler Wright on violin help provide period texture and director David Schweizer's production features an upstage screen where Justin West's projections of photos and film clips illuminate the lecture. A particularly powerful moment comes when we see a sequence of names and faces of some of the artistic and scientific geniuses that escaped the Nazis to make great contributions to humanity, suggesting that the Weimar years nurtured what would have been a glorious era for German culture had Hitler not chased them away.

Photo of Mark Nadler by Carol Rosegg.

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Fiona Shaw's depiction of a Jewish mother practically reached Molly Goldberg proportions when she flung both hands in the air and rolled back her eyes in sarcastic reverence to, "my son and his followers." Of course, those who were expecting a more traditional portrayal of the mother of Jesus Christ most likely abandoned all hope once she took out a joint to calm her nerves.

Colm Tóibín's stage adaptation of his novella, The Testament of Mary, which sadly closed last week despite a Best Play Tony nomination, never mentions her son by name, though we all knew who she was talking about. "Something will break in me if I say his name," she concludes.

Director Deborah Warner gave audiences a sneak peek at a familiar vision of the BVM by allowing them on stage for a pre-performance art installation where the actress was sitting in a plexiglass display case, perfectly still as a wax figure in a humble, biblical pose, only slightly upstaged by the live vulture (named Pinhead) perched nearby. But once the patrons were seated, this Mary emerged from her enclosure as a theatre character created from thinking outside of the box.

The Playbill told us the time of the play was "Now," so the protagonist has had quite a bit of time to stew over her child's place in history. An inserted brochure explained the setting as a home in what is now Turkey where Mary was taken after the crucifixion to live out her life, which set designer Tom Pye revealed as contemporary biblical.

Though grief-stricken by the death of her son, she is also infuriated with those (again, never directly identified, but we know) who visit her daily and encourage her to confirm a version of his time on earth that's consistent with the message they want to convey. "A group of misfits," she calls his followers. "Only children, like himself."

The ninety minute monologue is her considerably less-miraculous view of the events that highlighted those thirty-three years, such as the resurrection of Lazarus and the turning of water into wine. As proven in her last Broadway outing, Medea, Shaw is an actress who can whip up furious intensity - vocally, physically and emotionally - that teeters at the edge of believability without plunging into falseness, which she used here as a rail against a situation where Mary believes her son fell in with a fanatical group that raised him up to be their pawn.

But while the subject of the piece is attention-grabbing, the text itself was continually overshadowed by the star's performance and the director's high concept. Though certainly an exciting evening, it was more about the passion of the actress than the passion of Christ.

Photo of Fiona Shaw by Paul Kolnik.

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