Adaptation of gay German’s life falls flat
Fine performance by Curtis marred by bland setup
German playwright Bertolt Brecht used to try to create shows that alienated the audience, because he didn’t want them to have an emotional catharsis. He wanted them to leave fired up and ready to change the world.
The problem was that Brecht’s plays were so much fun and the songs of his musical collaborator Kurt Weill so engaging, no one got very alienated. Bertolt needed to take a few lessons in theatrical alienation from Theatrelabor.
They’re the German theatre group behind Schlachter-Tango, the dry-as-dust monologue (gamely performed by One Yellow Rabbit’s Andy Curtis) that explores the life of Ludwig Meyer, a German Jew who survived six and a half years in Auschwitz, fought afterward for compensation, opened a gay bar in Hanover and carved out a life in grey, provincial Germany of the 1950s and ’60s until he was killed in 1975.
It’s an epic story, but Theatrelabor’s Michael Grunert, who wrote and originally performed it, delivers the details of Ludwig’s life in an anti-dramatic manner that almost challenges the audience to engage with it.
Curtis is the three-piece-suitwearing, strait-laced narrator who relates, in relentless declarative sentences, what little is known about the life of Meyer, the son of a man who ran a slaughterhouse.
Business is business, until Hitler comes to power in 1933, and the slow, systematic purge of all things Jewish commences. While Auschwitz remains one of the most enduring symbols of evil known to humanity, SchlachterTango doesn’t spend much more than a brief segue on it.
Because the show is based on official records, most of what is known about Meyer concerns his postwar experiences.
Those primarily are about his fights for wartime compensation that were denied because of his prewar conviction for having sex with men on several occasions.
Meyer eventually won a compensation settlement of over 12,000 marks, which he used to open a gay bar in Hanover in 1953.
It wasn’t an easy time to run a gay bar. It was against the law for men to dance with other men, but luckily for Meyer, Hanover’s vice squad captain was a lesbian who drank at his bar and tipped him off whenever a raid was scheduled for his establishment.
What makes Schlachter-Tango a bit of a chore to endure isn’t the story, but rather the point of attack chosen by the show’s creators, which is to distance themselves — perhaps in the name of authenticity — from Ludwig’s up-close-and-personal life experiences.
From time to time, the show breaks into the first-person and gives us Ludwig (sometimes in the form of a creepy-looking papier mache department story dummy) as he’s being interrogated by the police or Ludwig as he gets beaten to death.Other times, Curtis, dressed in a suit as grey as the era Ludwig lived through, breaks into a German song, and even though the lyrics are in German, the humanity of Meyer comes shining through.
As grim and graphic (and unintelligible, in the case of the songs) as those moments are, they show the world Meyer lived in.
The rest of the time, it’s like listening to your transistor radio in the middle of the night and somehow stumbling on the East German version of CBC Radio, circa 1955, where emotion and intimacy and humanity and heart are all viewed as tools of the bour- geoisie. Schlachter-Tango tells a story about an interesting, sad and dramatic German life. The disheartening news is, despite the best efforts of Andy Curtis, one of Calgary’s most entertaining and watchable actors, they found a way to drain all the drama out of the tale of Ludwig Meyer.