Some Observations by an American Acting in the German Theater (1984)

Summary

I CAME TO MY ROLE as Arnold Stern, the murdered Wagnerian opera conductor in George Tabori's Jubiläum (Jubilee; Bochum, West Germany, 1983), with many years’ experience in the American and the German theater worlds. Yet my experience had been primarily as a composer and musical director. As an actor, I had appeared briefly in just two films and in the 1978 Munich Kammerspiele production of Tabori's Shylock Improvisations.

I was, however, thoroughly familiar with Tabori's rehearsal method, having contributed to its development myself. Jubiläum had a four-week rehearsal, short by German standards, average by American. The initial acting work for Jubiläum relied heavily on theater games, a number of which I already knew. Many of the actors of the Bochum Ensemble were new to this kind of work, and their usual method was antithetical to it, but they took to its demands quickly and fearlessly. As is the case with many American actors starting in this style, the confusion between Schein (appearance) and Sein (reality) was initially great, but generally the work went well. One of the primary goals of the exercises, in addition to the opening up and “quickening” of the actor, is the creation of a community or true ensemble, and we achieved that.

But the content of the piece was a problem for me. Although I had worked on a number of plays in Germany dealing with the Nazi period, each time I opened this particular box of horrors, the monsters leapt out. As a Jew—in spite of my homogenized, assimilated American upbringing— I suffered from intermittent rage and fear while living and working among Germans. I am also always tempted to present an idealized, laudable portrait of the Jew vis-à-vis Nazis and neo-Nazis and I therefore struggled with the fact that my character, Arnold Stern, is a less-thanwonderful man, that his imperfections extend to striking out at the weak, although he perceives himself as possessed by a Brechtian “unbearable goodness.” I think I was able to create a believable character on the stage, perhaps because the concurrences with my own life and person were not as far removed as I first thought.