City Garage presents the World Premier of

By Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

based on the text Frederick of Prussia by Heiner Müller, translated by Carl Weber

August 10 — September 23, 2001

Directed by Frederíque Michel

Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Assistant Director Paul M. Rubenstein

Rachel Boyle Wilhelmina, Mad Girl, Female Terrorist

Maureen Byrnes Dominatrix, Soldier, Widow, Slow Poke, Senator Mills, Audience Member

Chris Codol Presidential Aide, Rabid Dog, Prussian Officer, Intellectual, Hitler, Roscoe,

Senator Burton, Announcer, Lessing,

Ruthie Crossley Dominatrix, Soldier, Dr. Dee, Makeup Person

Damien DePaolis Gundling, Hitler, Goofus, Didi

David E. Frank Frederick

Richard Grove Frederick William, Zebahl, Senator Thorogood, Audience Member, Hamlet’s Father

Jed Low Presidential Aide, Rabid Dog, Prussian Officer, Soldier, Lucky, Senator Carnahan,

Audience Member

Paul M. Rubenstein The Sleeping President

Tara Tobin Dominatrix, Soldier, Miss Trixie, Senator Amis, Tech Director

Cristian YoungMiller Presidential Aide, Rabid Dog, Prussian Officer,

Katte, Intellectua1, Bandaged Boy, Pettigrew, Audience Member

Set, Sound, Lighting, and Media Design Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.

Assistant Director Paul M. Rubenstein

Costume Design Frederíque Michel, Erin Vincent

Light/Sound Operator Andrea Isco

Stage Managers Jonathan Cobb, Ilana Gustafson, Kathryn Sheer

Photography Rick Pickman

This project is loosely based on the play Frederick of Prussia by East German avant-garde writer Heiner Müller. Müller’s text is eighteen pages long and in it, he sketches a few brief scenes that, in fragmented form, represent the career of Germany’s most powerful and influential leader prior to Adolf Hitler, Frederick II (b 1712, d. 1786). Frederick ruled Germany for 46 years. Through his adroit statecraft, he transformed a fragmented collection of principalities into one of the great states of Europe, and through his military genius, one of its most feared. Modern Germany is inconceivable without his influence; nineteenth and twentieth century world history – and its procession of bloodbaths – is inconceivable as well. To the Germany of Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and finally the Nazis, he was a figure of spiritual inspiration bordering on a cult; his policies of aggression, militarism, and territorial expansion characterized German policy for the next two hundred years and were at the root of most of the European wars that followed Frederick’s reign.

As a young man, Frederick was devoted to culture, literature and art, much to the disgust of his father, Frederick William I, a sadistic martinet obsessed with the military. Frederick, unwilling to endure his father’s beatings and public humiliations, attempted to flee to France with his best friend, a young Lieutenant named Katte. He was stopped at the border, taken to be executed as a military deserter, then forced to watch as, at the last moment, Katte was executed in his place. The experience transformed Frederick. He become cold, cynical, and ruthless. ‘There is nothing worse than man," he later said. "Be convinced of this, my dear." His career as a world leader – and its overwhelming success – was based squarely on that conviction. After assuming the throne at twenty-eight, he launched a series of wars, seized territory, disenfranchised the nobility, systematically consolidated his personal power, and through diplomatic cunning and deceit made and unmade alliances that thrust his nation into pre-eminence. ‘Take what you can," he said. "You are never wrong unless you are obliged to give it back."

Which brings us to today. This sentiment – success on any terms – seems to now rule both America’s political life and its personal life. Take what you can, whatever you can, however you can, and take it under any terms you can get away with. This idea, and the idea that "seduction is the true force"– the seduction of anesthesia, the seduction of disconnection, the seduction of the abdication of moral responsibility – are the two themes this piece explores.

In his comments on Muller’s original text, translator Carl Weber cautions that it assumes "an audience thoroughly familiar with Prusso-German history and culture from the early eighteenth century to the present." We make no such assumption. For us at City Garage, the excitement of working with a Müller text is to take it as a point of inspiration and of departure on a journey of our own, using his themes and concerns to explore our own cultural moment and in our own historical/cultural terms. In the meeting we had with Muller prior to his death in 1995, he encouraged us to use his same technique of collage and artistic collision, to assemble text and image, ‘synthetic fragments" that would bring immediacy and context to the creative enterprise. He wanted art to be a "thorn in the eye," something that would split the audience, create dissension, not agreement. If art is to matter at all, it is because it stirs things up. What we have created here is essentially a new play. In its basic shape it follows Muller’s original but its subject is not Germany’s history but our own. It is about power and how power is exercised, how it seduces and how it destroys, and how we allow and participate in that seduction. The costumes, postures, and ideologies of power change. Its ruthlessness and insanity does not.

Are we equating the far right in America with Nazism? Hardly, though one can find disturbing parallels in much of the underlying thinking. Is the current triumph of market capitalism a new, if vastly more subtle, form of the totalitarian state? That’s hyperbole, yet the evidence is all around us of not just the steadily increasing domination of the public discourse and public policy by corporate interests, but by their ever-growing reach into our private lives. (To cite only one example, is it not disturbing that Clear Channel Communications owns 1200 radio stations in 247 of the 250 largest radio markets nationwide, dominates the Top 40 market, controls 60% of rock radio’s listening audience and that this media empire has been pieced together only since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 went into effect?) Finally, are we suggesting some connection between our current President and the bloody rampages through history we here evoke? Obviously yes, but the connection is complex and it involves all of us. The President we show onstage sleeps through it all; he bears no responsibility for any of it. He simply wakes up at a certain point and is surprised and frightened by what has transpired while he slept.

Which provokes the real question. What have we learned from the last three hundred years of human history? Are we any better at seeing through the orthodoxy of the moment? Are we any less susceptible to the force of seduction? Are we any less willing to give up moral responsibility for the sake of the safety of status quo? Which dreams are being sold to us and are these dreams worth the price? When we wake at a certain point, will we be surprised and frightened by what has transpired while we slept?

This piece depicts a sleeping President, a man who is placed on a throne by others and who then dozes through three hundred years of human history. Only at the end does he awaken to the catastrophe that has transpired while he slept.

When we created this piece, it was meant as a plea for an end to such a sleep–an unawareness both historical and political that seemed to characterize not just our leaders but our society as a whole. That sleep has been ended. To the sorrow of all, it has been ended not by education or a more enlightened leadership or a more thoughtful public discourse but by violence and horror. Nothing in the piece has been rewritten or altered; much of it now resonates in a terrible way none of us could foresee. As a company, we feel the same grief and outrage at the horrifying events of September 11^th as every other American; as citizens and artists we can only hope that in the end they represent not an end but a beginning: a unique opportunity for true moral leadership, a chance to unify the global community not in the hysteria of revenge but in the passionate pursuit of human justice.