Review: THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI Is A Dark Dream at Quantum Theatre

Out of nowhere, the silent film classic The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari rocketed back into the zeitgeist about five years ago. It's name dropped, adapted, referenced everywhere from art films to children's cartoons. The classic film by Robert Weine was never exactly obscure, but it was very much a "thinking man's silent film," less popular than Chaplin, and not as approachable as Nosferatu. It's been adapted dozens of times over the past century-and-change, with ballets, operas, puppet shows, one movie remake, and two in-name-only cinematic reboots. Despite this, Caligari has never found its footing as an established, canonical work of legitimate theatre. In Jay Ball's adaptation (technically more of a total rewrite ABOUT the film), Quantum Theatre asks the question, "what if it had?"

Ball's adaptation, as directed by Jed Allen Harris, imagines the show-within-a-show as an unfinished adaptation by Bertolt Brecht. We are in East Germany, circa the early 1970s, where Brecht's widow and collaborate Helene Weigel is now an aging, infirm woman despite her ongoing revolutionary passion. She rages against the younger, softer members of her theatrical troupe, who she believes have been lulled into complacency by the Communist state in which they have been born and raised. They have not known true risk, true revolution, she states, and attempts to warn them by presenting the premiere of Brecht's lost Caligari. As the show goes on, Wiegel plays a series of small but pivotal roles within the reimagined tale of German civilians encountering a mysterious showman and his sleepwalking associate. What is real and what is fantasy, and where do we draw the line between the play and the frame story? 

As directed by Harris, the play veers wildly between comedy, drama, horror and polemic in much the same way Brecht's classics do. When combined with the heavy use of multimedia (film, audio distortion, projections and puppetry), the effect is undeniably one of Brecht's "Epic Theatre," in which the audience is kept at arm's length both from being engrossed in the drama and from being complacent in watching habits. Many of these visual effects and theatrical flourishes are extremely effective, such as a shadow puppet bureaucrat who appears repeatedly throughout the show. Some others, however, are stylisticaslly and period accurate (like the floating cutout heads that occasionally appear) but have become emblematic of retro midcentury kitsch in ways that sometimes undercut the seriousness of the moments. Then again, in Epic Theatre, that mixed response may indeed be intentional. 

At the center of the evening's events, Catherine Gowl makes a tragicomic master stroke of the role of Helene. Chameleonic but still clearly animated by the same psyche, Gowl slips in and out of Helene's harsh Teutonic accent, alternating between immense militaristic vigor and feeble frailty. Her final appearance at the end of the show is a bizarre, Brechtian turn that veers the show into a welcome, though unexpected, surrealist bent. Gowl's roles are routinely accompanied by the equally chameleonic Mark August, playing all the minor characters encountered throughout the story while also serving as Helene's caretaker and assistant. The two of them play well together, and navigate the constant shifts between the serious and the silly equally adeptly. 

Within the realm of the story itself, the characters are all cast in shades of grey. Nick Lehane's Franz (analogous to Francis in the silent film) plays his role of cynic everyman well, leaving the audience forever unsure if his doubts are Franz's doubts about the story, or the Franz actor's doubts about the Communist ideals Helene platforms. Sara Lindsey and Cameron Nickel are all charisma as Franz's more happy-go-lucky friends Hannah and Uli (analogous to Jane and Alan in the silent film). They are rays of quirky sunshine, existing in a space somewhere between "friendship" and "throuple." On the darker side of the spectrum is Daniel Krell as Caligari. Ball and Harris have reimagined the showman from a spooky sideshow mad scientist into a rather quiet, polite and almost mild-mannered little Italian. What makes this Caligari sinister is not so much his menace as his prosaic quality, messing with mind control and the German psyche with the gentle precision of a family doctor with impeccable bedside manner. This subtlety is countered by the intense presence and physicality of Jerreme Rodriguez as Cesare the sleepwalker. Rodriguez plays Cesare as semi-conscious and semi-verbal, an awake and aware mind trapped in a psychoogical straitjacket he is almost, but not quite, able to break free of at any given moment. WIth his alternating gentility and brutality, plus limited ability to speak, there is a distinct element of Boris Karloff's Frankenstein in Rodriguez's Cesare, making the audience hang on every moment to see if the man inside can loose his bonds or not.

For being a ninety-minute play based on a sixty-minute silent film, this is an immensely dense and challenging show. When it ends it ends with a question delivered to the audience that seems to be less about what happened on stage, and more about our emotional and intellectual responses to art itself. I won't spoil what the question is, but be prepared to ponder it long after the show is closed. 

(And now, a bit of full disclosure: I feel I need to slightly recuse myself in the body of this review, as I'm something of a Caligari expert. In fact, I wrote a musical adaptation of the same silent film, which has workshopped in Pittsburgh from 2022 to the present and is expected to premiere in 2025. Quantum and I have long been aware of each other's adaptations, which are as different from each other, and indeed from the original film, as two separate takes can be. Having been asked repeatedly over the last month, I would like to state officially: Quantum's Caligari is not the same show as my Caligari. Neither of us has knowingly ripped off the other. If Pittsburgh can handle two different Macbeths, let alone Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story and & Juliet within the same twelve months, they can handle two different Caligaris. That said, I obviously can't review my own production, though I can mention that the 2022 workshop of the musical won BWW's audience choice award for "best new play or musical in Pittsburgh." So please, enjoy Quantum's Caligari, and then watch for news of mine once theirs closes. That is all.)