The Washington Post "Lulu" Article - 17 June 2001

The Unveiling Of desire

The most scorchingly erotic play possibly of all time was conceived on Paris in June of 1892, when a young German dramatist, songwriter, cabaret performer, itinerant journalist and sometime publicist by the unlikely name of Benjamin Frank Wedekind strolled down the Champs Elysees and was struck by a revenge fantasy.

Not yet 30, he had already experienced a sex life considered appallingly prolific and demented by the prevailing standards of European society. Then again, he had always been outraged by those very standards - hypocritical and destructive, in his opinion. Why not write a play attacking them and their parent culture ?

"Lulu", the tale of a beautiful young woman who destroys and is destroyed by sex, which opens this week at the Kennedy Center, is more or less that play. Probably far more than less, but it's hard to be sure. Because no producer would go near the original script, which was brazenly explicit for its time. Wedekind (pronounced VAYD-kint) rewrote the thing almost beyond recognition.

He discarded whole scenes and characters while adding new ones. He mixed genres (melodrama, vaudeville, expressionism, you name it). he also changed his initial title, "Astarte", to "Divine Birth", which he then changed to "Pandora's Box: A Monster Tragedy". When it was finally performed and published years later, he had cut the massive five act play into two long interrelated pieces, "Earth Spirit" and simply, "Pandora's Box", though he continued to call the double-bill "Pandora's Box: A Monster Tragedy". he then added another superfluous act to each piece. As if that weren't confusing enough, the plays quickly came to be known collectively as "Lulu", in honour of the story's antiheroine.

By the time of publication, Wedekind had restored some of the original scenes he'd cut, but the plot was unwieldy where it wasn't impenetrable and contradictory. The "Lulu" plays did see some life, though, thanks largely to attention generated by the still-startling silent film based on them - "Pandora's Box", directed by the legendary GW Pabst in 1929 and starring Louise Brooks. They were also staged in New York in 1970. But the wanton, raw vision of Wedekind's original story had long been blunted.

Then in the 1980s German scholars published as meticulous a reconstruction as possible of the original, which was performed in New York in 1991 in a translation by Eric Bentley. British playwright and author Nicholas Wright, working from a different translation, adapted the reconstruction for the Almeida Theatre's production, which premiered in London last March. When it opens Thursday at the Kennedy Center, its only US stop, American theatergoers will have their first chance to see this version of what Wedekind originally wrote.

Those familiar with the previously published version or the Pabst movie are in for a few surprises. Those completely unfamiliar with the tale are in for something else. Something weird and a little unnerving. Call it the "Blair Witch" of sex plays.

"As he rewrote the play, Wedekind made it much more expressionistic," says Wright. "It acquired an almost cartoon style, a violent style. This version is less expressionist." It also has a darker, heavier tone than the Pabst film, the weight coming primarily from moments of grotesque farce. And yet, while far more explicit than any subsequent version, the original text still derives is power more from what is implied than from anything directly said or done.

Wedekind implied the most with the bedevilling character of Lulu, a femme so fatale that her lethal sexuality, which she so willingly and knowingly dispenses, dooms anyone who falls under its spell. But she is also in a way a virginal innocent - the only one, in fact, in a lurid story thick with moral corruption. The enigma of Lulu the character is what made "Lulu" the play so far ahead of its time. Small wonder then that it is also the one element of the story that manifested itself in every subsequent version. Quite an achievement, considering that four other films besides Pabst's were made of the story, and at least one opera was based on it. In all of them, Wright says, "the character of Lulu never changed at all".

When we meet her she is in fin de siecle Berlin, the stunning young wife of a rich older man who has commissioned an artist to paint her portrait. She poses in a revealing dress and drives the artist mad with desire. Before the first act is over there are two attempted seductions and one death. (None of this was in the Pabst silent).

As she passes from marriage to marriage and affair to affair, several men and one woman - one of the first overtly lesbian roles in the theater - pursue her. Most end up dead or destroyed, but never by Lulu's hand. Their obsession with her leads to their undoing.

The object of their desire seems at first glance completely amoral, seducing or allowing herself to be seduced by almost everyone. But unlike everyone else in the play, Lulu has no illusions about herself. She is the pleasure principle incarnate and she knows it. Love ? A fine thing, she thinks - if it makes you feel good.

More than likely she's never known love. As a child she was raped and prostituted by a man who may have been her father. Her experience with love as an adult isn't much better. She has an affair with a prominent publisher, who later tries to end it when he's going to marry a society lady. he clearly loves Lulu, but his standing prevents him from marrying a woman of no pedigree who is so easily bedded. She's fine for a romp in private, but a proper man would have nothing to do with her in public. This is the kind of thing that later makes Lulu rightly claim innocence. She's never even feigned acceptance of the hypocritical social values of her time.

Indeed, when the publisher, nearly insane from wanting to be rid of her but finding it impossible, demands to know whether she is "angel or devil", she retorts : "I'm neither. This is me. I've never pretended to be anything else. All the rest is just your imagination. Think about that".

Playwrights sometimes talk through their characters, and you get the sense that Wedekind, not always the subtlest of writers and a despiser of the bourgeoisie, was elbowing audiences into seeing Lulu as beyond good and evil (Not for nothing does he have another character writing "a dance extravaganza inspired by the words of Fredrich Nietzsche"). But if that's all there were to Lulu, then the play would be just another tiresome polemic. Wedekind may have first wanted a revenge fantasy, but fortunately, he went for something deeper. As a result he came up with a genuine creative triumph, which is rooted in the penultimate line of Lulu's above retort.

To wit: In the late 19th century the first waves of modern thinkers were challenging the very foundations of bourgeois culture, particularly in its three most vulnerable parts - economics, religion and sex. Wedekind advocated sexual freedom. In the field of psychology, meanwhile, Freud was stirring up the world with his ideas about the human unconscious as it related to sex, and to some degree, religion. On of his associates was Hermann Rorschach, whose theories about psychological projection, along with Freud's ideas of the id, could easily have served as templates for "Lulu".

From beginning to end, all of Lulu's lovers see in her both what they want and what they need to see. And she encourages them to, readily serving as a blank screen for any admirer because she knows it will get her what she wants - pleasure. In a sense, she's a sexual Rorschach test, existing only as a reflection of the deepest fantasies and desires of those around her. That includes audiences. Which is why Lulu has been endlessly intriguing. Every generation has its own ideas of sexuality and eroticism, not to mention right and wrong, to project on her.

Not surprisingly, Wright's biggest challenge in adapting the translation (by Wes Williams) for a contemporary Anglo-American sensibility was finding the delicately appropriate way to render Lulu, to submerge her true character - whatever it may be - and yet somehow make it palpable, if only vaguely. "To be true to Wedekind's character you have to have someone who never gives too much away," Wright says. "You almost have to not characterize her.She has to speak in an almost transparent way, so that she can be a different thing to each spectator. Just as she is to each of the men in her life".

Not all the ideas Wedekind wrestles with in "Lulu" make much sense or retain interest more than a century later, but he was certainly onto something modern about erotic love. Forget all this bond-between-soul-mates stuff that Shelley was always rhapsodizing about. It's an extension of the self, having little to do with the object desired, but ultimately its true nature is unknowable.

Why that might be isn't terribly clear in "Lulu", but almost everything in the play is steeped in some discomforting ambiguity. To that extent, Wedekind shares DH Lawrence's notion of sex as a "sacred mystery". But by linking Eros with death in the way he does, Wedekind, who died at 53, put more stock in Freud's belief that unchecked sexuality can destroy society. Wedekind differed only in his belief that sexuality wouldn't need to be checked in a society that's honest about sex.

Accordingly then, Lulu the character, who lives and dies for erotic love, is ultimately unknowable. Is she the perpetual victim of a hypocritical bourgeois society ? Or, in the end, is she just an exploiter of human weakness who gets what she deserves when she finds herself one December night forced to work the streets of London where Jack the Ripper is afoot ? Or is she the woman as played by the inimitable Louise Brooks in the Pabst film, who once said of Lulu's last moments: "It is Christmas Eve and she is about to receive the gift which has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac."

People are still arguing these questions and their many implications. And, given any well-done production of this reconstruction, they'll continue to argue, probably with more force than before.

- William Triplett