CHICAGO’s TRAP DOOR THEATRE opened its 2006–07 season with a production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The play, written in 1971, and made into a film the next year with Fassbinder as director, tells a story of a famous fashion designer from the title who falls for the first time in her life for a woman, young, pretty Karin, and experiences unknown feelings that, at the end of the play, turn her into a changed woman. The play is about a lesbian love affair’s dynamics and the lessons learned by the characters and the audience alike. In the Chicago production co-directors Beata Pilch and Krishna LeFan, enormously helped by their all-female cast led by Nicole Wiesner as Petra and Kim McKean as Karin, succeeded in bringing out some of the major characteristics of all of Fassbinder’s plays—his focus on language, his performative approach to identity in the context of role playing, and the centrality of the audience in the building of play’s meaning.
The place of dramatic action throughout the five-act play is Petra’s apartment, but Ewelina Dobiesz’s stage is set as an ambiguous performance space—a catwalk, or a dance floor. Strategically positioned are microphones of various sizes and shapes—the actresses use them to stress the particular emotion, word, or moment. In the physical absence of the male characters on stage, the microphones act as symbols for that synecdoche of male power and dominance, the phallus. The staging of the play begins with a division between the back of the stage and the front. When performing one’s part, each actor is positioned before all the other actors, who become his or her audience. The latter, in turn, are still part of the spectacle for the audience in their seats. This is performance paradigm taken to its peak: the audience in the theater witnesses a performance of Fassbinder’s play, of the characters’ identities and roles, of the actors’ portrayals of the fictional types, and of their own performance as spectators in a live theater.
Fassbinder is internationally known as the bad boy of the New German Cinema and a director of, among more than forty films, The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Veronika Voss (1982) and Querelle (1982), starring American actor Brad Davis as a gay wet dream of a dangerous, beautiful sailor. Fassbinder lived fast (born in 1945, dead at the age of 37 in 1982), worked hard (41 feature films made between 1969 and 1982, and numerous other projects for different media), and partied even harder (girlfriends, boyfriends, tricks, whiskey, smoking, cocaine, leather, rock’n’roll). That Fassbinder started his artistic career in the theatre as an actor in 1967, and proceeded to work there until 1976 as a director, playwright, and artistic director, is known only to a few. This may start to change with the 2005 publication of David Barnett’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (Cambridge University Press), the first study in English solely devoted to Fassbinder’s work in the theatre, and the 2006 publication of Klaus Ulrich Militz’s Personal Experience and the Media: Media Interplay in R.W. Fassbinder’s Work for Theatre, Cinema and Television (Peter Lang).
Fassbinder left behind seventeen or so plays—original texts, adaptations of the classics such as Sophocles’ Ajax, de Vega’s The Burning Village/The Sheep Well, Goethe’s Iphigenia on Tauris, and Goldoni’s The Coffee Shop, plus some plays written for the radio. During his lifetime Fassbinder was perceived primarily as a film director, and his writings for the stage were seen as an afterthought or, at best, of secondary importance. Since his death, however, there’s been a huge push among theatre makers across the globe to put his plays onstage (and even in some cases on-screen, such as 2006’s The Marriage of Maria Braun). What happened at the Chicago’s Trap Door Theatre is not an isolated instance: Petra von Kant, to take just one example, has seen around a hundred productions in 25 countries so far, and half of those were made since 1990. This essay introduces Fassbinder and his dramaturgical legacy in the context of the post-World War II German and European drama in general and GLBT drama in particular.
Fassbinder wrote his first play, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, when he was twenty, but never saw it performed during his lifetime. François Ozon made a French movie based on the play in 1999. Fassbinder wrote his last play, Garbage, the City and Death, in 1974, but it was accused of anti-Semitism and never performed. In 1975, the Swiss director Daniel Schmid made a movie entitled Shadow of Angels based on the play to little controversy. Between these two bookends lie Fassbinder’s opera drammatica. Several themes reappear in his plays: the destiny of the outsider (the criminal, the immigrant, the sexual outlaw); the twisting together of sex and violence, desire and frenzy, rebellion and sensuality; the drama of class liberation staged in the theatre of vicious circles with the oppressors returning back to the victims who, once liberated, turn into the oppressing victimizers on their own, and on and on.
Within this framework Fassbinder often focuses on a female protagonist: Petra von Kant in the play bearing her name; Geesche Gottfried from Bremen Freedom (1971); Phoebe Zeitgeist from Blood on the Cat’s Neck (1971). Petra was a fictional character, perceived by many critics as a self-representation of Fassbinder in drag, perhaps related to his use of theatre as a substitute for psychoanalysis; Geesche is based on a German female serial killer from the 19th century; and Phoebe is borrowed from the 1960’s American popular comic strip heroine created by Michael O’Donoghue. Regardless of where they’re coming from, all of them want to find out who they are and what world this is that they find themselves in and share with other people. A great number of questions, confusions, and silences surround Fassbinder’s women. Most critics have regarded his plays as pessimistic, melancholy, and depressing. This is because at the end of the play, or so they claim, the heroine doesn’t know much more than she did at the beginning.
Petra von Kant can serve us as an exemplar here. At 34, divorced, with a teenage daughter and a great career as a fashion designer, Petra is a poster child for the liberated woman of the 70’s. Using a traditional dramatic structure reminiscent of Henrik Ibsen in Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House, Fassbinder puts Petra into a five-act journey of love and exploitation within the surrounding male-dominated, profit-oriented society. The new element in this timeworn structure is the lesbian theme. The play is about the exploitation of a working class female beauty, Karin, by the successful, powerful Petra. Twice divorced and hurt, Petra falls in love with the girl and seduces her by promising her a career in the fashion industry. Once Karin’s dream of becoming a cover girl turns into reality, the two exchange roles: now it is the pretty, famous, and young Karin who victimizes her live-in lover by cheating on her, missing her birthday party, and pushing her to the edge of a nervous breakdown. This experience forces Petra to realize that she needs to atone and come to terms with her life to date. To be sure, many critics saw Petra’s eleventh-hour change as improbable. If we interpret the text as a play with a message, the lesson for Petra derives from a lesbian relationship in which she learns for the first time about the importance of equality, sharing of power, and communication in intimate relationships.
Fassbinder explains his choice of women as protagonists as based on his understanding of women as involved in a more complex social and psychological drama than are men. Women, because of their status as the non-dominant sex, are more likely to search for an individualistic, personal response to societal demands; men, as the dominant group, follow the path laid out by tradition and hierarchy. Given this view of women’s position in society, Fassbinder’s heroines often end up as criminals. In this respect, his typical female is a quintessentially “queer” character, an outsider struggling against a world of hegemonic power, straight male dominance, and sadism. But even as she negotiates the norms and expectations of mainstream society while seeking freedom from them, she also has personal needs for love and warmth from another human being. The result of these conflicting demands is that Fassbinder’s dramatic heroine is a creature without anchor, power, or ideals, a cynical monster who announces her presence in the world through rejection only—rejection of what the patriarchy has placed before her.
Not surprisingly, many critics regarded Fassbinder’s heroines as offensive and unacceptable, as caricatures from the mind of a male chauvinist. He was also criticized for his refusal to portray his gay characters in a positive light, which earned him the charge that he was homophobic. Fassbinder offered the best response to these objections by refusing to create positive images of any of the marginal groups he portrayed, defying the identity politics of his time. Instead, he offered complex, multi-dimensional characters unafraid of contradictions, imbalances, ugly sides, and miseries. This is how Fassbinder saw human beings, whether gay, straight, or in-between, but this was also his way of loving human beings for all their imperfections.
Fassbinder’s work as a dramatist took shape at the end of the radical 60’s and the first half of the 70’s, and within this historical context his work was considered retrograde and questionable. Although highly political, Fassbinder refused to politicize his plays to accommodate prevailing ideologies and party lines. In that sense, he was anti-Brechtian. His early theatre work with “action-theatre” and his collaborations with the radical Marxist director Jean-Marie Straub seem to have been influenced by the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse, the student protest in Paris in 1968, and the plays of Peter Weiss (Marat-Sade, Mockinpott). However, Fassbinder ultimately distanced himself from revolutionary, agitprop endeavors and made a more ambiguous turn toward a concept of language as action. This linguistic turn became better known as postmodernism or post-structuralism. Fassbinder was at that point already dead, but I would argue that he was the grand, leather daddy of them all before “queer theory” reared its head in the late 1980’s and eventually entrenched itself in the academy.
Within theatrical tradition, Fassbinder is usually positioned between the two 20th-century giants, Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht. This placement itself is perverse: to be influenced by both Artaud’s mad dreams and screams of cruelty in the world, represented in minute, excruciating detail, and by Brecht’s anti-realist strategies—his “distancing effect” whereby the audience is constantly reminded that this is in fact a play—is to embrace the whole gamut of possible influences. Still, it can’t be denied that Fassbinder’s plays are marked by a vast eclecticism that led some critics to accuse him of indecision, going with the flow, or accepting and rejecting ideas on a whim. Others have seen this as a decidedly postmodern or “queer” performance strategy that allowed the playwright to explore all the possibilities that were available to him.
Fassbinder rejected psychology as a realist strategy of reading the characters as if they are real people and instead embraced their existence exclusively through language and dialogue they engage in; thus, they could all be be critically approached as discursive constructs, not unlike “queer” itself, existing only in/through the performance. Some of this discourse is placed within the traditional formulas, such as the elements of melodrama in Petra von Kant. Fassbinder uses well-known form in order to attract a larger audience, but the subtle interventions along the way are there too. The narrative form and dialogue of Petra are full of clichés and stereotypes, but the playfulness of style and the play’s ambiguous ending point to a more nuanced interpretation if one decides to sweat it out.
On the other end of Fassbinder’s dramaturgy is the open play of forms, such as occurs in Pre-Paradise Sorry Now (1969). The play was inspired by the famous English moors murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hendley in the 1960’s. While the Ian–Myra case is at the narrative core, Fassbinder goes beyond the particular event to construct a textual web that’s open to multiple readings. Ian and Myra were notorious neo-Nazi child murderers who committed their crimes in the name of Hitler’s Übermensch myth. Their personal relationship was founded on the sadomasochistic dynamic and the master/slave script. Myra called her man “My Führer,” and the power imbalance in their relationship was the catalyst for their erotic games and sexual thrills. This layer of the play reports, as if objectively and scientifically, a historical case of cultish and fanatical behavior of common people in search of a way out of their daily routine. A contrasting world is offered in fifteen short scenes, which Fassbinder called contras, in which the masses, consumed by the fascist ideas, attack physically or verbally the individual simply because his or her views of the world differ from those of the common herd. The third layer returns, via a fictional dialog, with insights into the lovers’ psyches being turned on by the concepts of race supremacy, nationalism, submissive eroticism, and a mechanical approach to sex practice as base physical expenditure. Eventually, nine liturgical sections on Christian faith and cannibalism are added to the mix.
This concoction is a prime example of a postmodern, post-dramatic text—Fassbinder’s directions for its use ushered in what we call today the participatory culture. The order of scenes, except for the chronological narration of the Ian/Myra murders, is left to the director and the company that produces the play. This approach to the issue of the dramatic form is what makes Fassbinder a queer playwright par excellence. The dramatic texts left behind by Fassbinder could be approached as the theatrical versions of our video games—they invite us to move on from being mere spectators and take charge as agents. The multiple voices and standpoints are already provided by the (dead) author; the open form invites playfulness, not satisfied by the finite answers and certainties, which produces additional ambiguities, surprises, new insights, and fuzziness.
The resulting dialogue may look to some like the random ramblings of an egocentric, irresponsible provocateur, but others see it as a queering of the dramatic forms and theatre heritage to date, reminding us that gay and lesbian plays and playwriting could be about so much more than the last night’s tricks, divas’ tantrums, or red carpet faux pas. This is not to say that Fassbinder was immune to those kinds of preoccupations. He embraced all the aspects of GLBT culture but refused to be content with assimilation or appropriation into mainstream society. In his famous words, “I wanted them [the audience]to experience the kind of rage I feel, and then there was something else, too: it also had to be beautiful.”
References
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Plays. Ed. and trans. Denis Calandra. PAJ Publications, 1985.
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. The Anarchy of Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes. Eds. Michael Töteberg and Leo O. Lensing. Trans. Krishna Winston. PAJ Books, 1992.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Ed. Laurence Kardish with Juliane Lorenz. The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 1997.
Milan Pribisic, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the department of communication at Loyola University in Chicago.
