Foolishly, an Angel Falls in Love and Rushes In ... and Up
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: December 5, 2006
Mam Smith as the trapeze artist and Bernard White as Damiel in a scene from the American Repertory Theater production of “Wings of Desire.”
foto's Andre Costantini
Robin Young, left, and Bernard White in "Wings of Desire."
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 3 — There must be a Barneys in heaven.
That idle thought tugged at my mind on occasion during the alternately stimulating but unsatisfying 100 minutes of “Wings of Desire,” a new stage adaptation of the Wim Wenders movie here, a co-production of the American Repertory Theater and the leading Dutch theater company the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. (That company is run by Ivo van Hove, known to New Yorkers for his radical reinterpretations of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Hedda Gabler” for New York Theater Workshop.)
Cassiel and Damiel, the sad-eyed angels eavesdropping on the sorrowing soul of humanity, perform their ministering duties dressed in the sleekest pair of suits you’ll see outside Barneys or Bergdorf’s. These black, beautifully cut peak-lapel numbers repeatedly drew my eye during the cooler passages of this adventurous but diffuse production.
The suits were by no means the only handsome images onstage. In translating to three dimensions Mr. Wenders’s much-admired meditation on the transient but treasured wonders of life, the director, Ola Mafaalani, conjures a few stark, evocative images.
Columns of slowly falling sand, illuminated by golden spotlights, symbolize the steady drift of time through the lives of all the human characters. The angel Damiel (Bernard White) aches to join the flow of life, to know the taste of an apple and the touch of a woman’s skin, but these streams of flowing sand, which collect in pitiful-looking, uneven piles on the stage, wordlessly and movingly express the heavy weight of time’s inexorable passing.
Ms. Mafaalani and her collaborators wisely do not choose to match the somber visual poetry of the movie with elaborate feats of stagecraft. (They would fail in any case; there is no way of recreating onstage the moody caress of Mr. Wenders’s camera as it roams through and above the streets of Berlin, seeming to leave a trail of celluloid compassion in its wake.)
The presence of the trapeze artist, Marion (Mam Smith), among the characters is naturally a theatrical asset. Ms. Smith’s airborne dancing is enchanting, and the production’s conclusion, with Damiel joining Marion in the air for a kinetic celestial embrace, closes the production on a dazzling note.
For the most part, however, the set design, by André Joosten, is rigorously minimalist. There are no sets to speak of besides a humble food cart, which is put to witty use: the smell of sizzling onions would be enough to seduce an angel with any taste to give up the wings and take up a fork.
The adaptation by Gideon Lester (associate artistic director of the American Repertory Theater) and Dirkje Houtman is faithful to the collagelike screenplay (by Mr. Wenders, the playwright Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger), trimming and rearranging its densely patterned, elliptical and sometimes pretentious dialogue. But onstage the elements never cohere into a moving whole.
The stage version substitutes a sense of simultaneity for the more linear pull of the movie. The experiences of the characters are layered on one another, evoking the dizzying flux of city life, although Berlin is left behind in this version, which substitutes local references as needed. (The production had its premiere in October in Amsterdam and later toured the Netherlands.) It’s a canny choice in a way. Why not take advantage of the theater’s multiplicity? In movies the director’s autocratic eye tells you exactly where to look and what to absorb. At the theater you’re free to focus on what you choose. So Ms. Mafaalani allows the stories in the movie to overlap, the characters to wander the stage freely.
A little boy, Andris Freimanis, doesn’t have any dialogue proper, but he skateboards around the stage or punches away at a Game Boy in the food cart or in the audience, seemingly at his own discretion. Homer, played by Frieda Pittoors, moves to the lip of the stage to deliver her musings on the art of storytelling, then recedes to the fringes to observe the action. Stephen Payne plays the Peter Falk role: himself, in other words, and an ex-angel. A battle-scarred, salty type, he regularly breaks the fourth wall in his wry monologues: “Hey, buddy, do Bostonians make pasta?”
When Cassiel moves into the human sphere, the stage breaks out into a heady rock jamboree, with stagehands joining the party to sweep the sand around and Cassiel flinging the plastic chairs across the stage, presumably in an access of joy at his new physical being. Live music — mostly grinding electric rock — is provided by Jesse Lenat and Hadewych Minis, who remain onstage throughout, here and there taking a small role in the action.
This atomization eventually begins to be more distracting than engaging. (This is the only stage production I’ve seen in which the interruptions of audience cellphones seemed to be less an offense than another random element in the mix.) The crucial sequences from the movie are recreated, but too many of them lose their impact in the stage version, which comes to feel slack and shapeless. The use of extras made sense in the movie-within-the-movie, but it seems forced and confusing here.
Most significantly the movie made poetic use of voice-over dialogue that revealed the inner thoughts of the characters. As the camera trailed across a row of passengers in a subway car, their anguished or idle or bitter thoughts were heard on the soundtrack, a poignant commentary on the roiling inner life we all hide behind a placid public facade. Absent the intimacy of film, the device is ineffective and sometimes confusing.
While you can admire the ingenuity that Ms. Mafaalani and her associates have brought to what was clearly a challenging project, “Wings of Desire” onstage adds up to a lot less than the sum of its many parts. The gentle tug of Mr. Wenders’s camera was the binding ingredient necessary to turn this spiritual collage into a legible portrait of humanity struggling through life, surprised on occasion by a moment of hope or happiness that some might like to think of as the brush of an angel’s wing.
WINGS OF DESIRE
Adapted by Gideon Lester and Dirkje Houtman from the film “Wings of Desire” (“Der Himmel über Berlin”), directed by Wim Wenders, screenplay by Mr. Wenders, Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger; directed by Ola Mafaalani; translated by Mr. Lester and Ko van den Bosch; sets and lighting by André Joosten; costumes by Regine Standfuss; music and sound by Andy Moor; additional music by Jesse Lenat and Hadewych Minis; aerial choreography by Mam Smith; stage manager, Chris De Camillis. Presented by the American Repertory Theater, Robert Woodruff, artistic director; Robert J. Orchard, executive director; in association with the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. At the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass; (617) 547-8300. Through Dec. 17. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
WITH: Bernard White (Damiel, an angel), Mark Rosenthal (Cassiel, an angel), Mam Smith (Marion, a trapeze artist), Stephen Payne (a former angel) and Frieda Pittoors (Homer, an immortal poet).
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
