City Garage Presents the World Premiere of

MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore
based on the Medea texts by Heiner Müller, translated by Carl Weber

adapted for City Garage by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

June 2–October 18, 2000

Directed by Fredenque Michel

Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Medeas Ilana Gustafson, Liz Hight, Andrea lsco

Jasons Jeff Boyer, Stephen Pocock, Crisfian YoungMiller

Women of Colchis/Task Force From Another Planet Jennifer Dion, Katharina Lejona, Cynthia Mance

Creon’s Daughter Jody Moschetti

Phallus/Interviewer/Argonaut David Frank

Set, Sound, Lighting, Slide/Video Design Charles A. Duncombe Jr.

Assistant Director Doria Valenzuela

Light and Sound Operator Jesse Levy

Costumes Lee C. Smith

Stage Managers Ruth Crossley, Greg Hecht

Slides/Photos Adam Knoff

Production Photography Lisa Morton

Slide Projector Dissolve Unit Engineered By John ZuehIke

Heiner Müller was born January 9, 1929, in Eppendorf, a small town in what used to be Saxony. His family was of working class background; his father was an office worker who before the war became a political activist and member of the Social Democrat Party. His father was arrested when the Nazis came to power; one of Müller’s earliest memories was visiting him on the other side of a concentration camp fence. Not surprisingly, Muller grew up as a Marxist, first under Fascism, then under a Socialist system he strongly believed in. He began writing in 1951 – poems with titles such as "The People Are On the March," which showed little deviation from the ideological party line of the GDR. Like many though, his illusions were shattered by the events of 1956. By the sixties he found himself in increasing conflict with official doctrine and consequently isolated. His writings were regarded as "dangerously subversive" and he was expelled from the Writer’s Association. In reaction, he began writing adaptations of Greek myths and dramas – vehicles which he used to explore what he called the "German schizophrenia – two souls dwelling within one breast." The success of these adaptations culminated in a 1969 production of his PROMETHEUS at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. The following year he was invited to join the Berliner Ensemble as a dramaturg. Many felt he would eventually assume Brecht’s mantle as playwright in residence of the Ensemble.

But by then Muller had broken free of the early influence of Brecht and what he termed his "A-B-C dramaturgy." He became increasingly interested in what he described as the "synthetic fragment," a text consisting of a rudimentary plot yet disrupted by scenes from myth and history which are presented in surreal, grotesque, gory, or cartoon-like fashion. As translator Carl Weber writes "Seemingly disparate scenes, or parts of scenes are combined without any particular effort at a coherent, linear plot. The result is a kind of assemblage, much like a not-fully structured work-in-progress, such as Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck." Muller was seeking a style that would use abundant imagery and a text crammed with allusions, historical references, strains of pop culture and contemporary iconography, as well as literal and paraphrased quotes from his own writings as well as those of others. These texts would take on the character of splintered dreams and memories, chaotic eruptions from the shared social and political imaginations of his own time and place. He wanted texts that would feel like a composite assembly that challenged the audience’s knowledge and imagination.

Though Muller considered Brecht’s "theatre of enlightenment" an obsolete tool for the treatment of the complex reality of our age, he was still convinced that theatre should be a means to influence audiences. But to do so required a new dramaturgy, a new concept of theatre, a new strategy of performance, or even "different strategies for each prospective audience." Unlike Brecht, Muller refuses to give answers. As Weber writes: "[Muller] offers the problem, poses the question, presents the conflicting altitudes and challenges the spectator to take sides, or to withhold involvement entirely.... He is not the demiurge who creates his own controlled world on stage but a man who tries to rid himself of the contradictions life forces on him by giving them body and voice."

Until 1975 his work was exclusively concerned with problems indigenous to his native country. After an extended visit to the United States in 1975/76 his work began to explore new directions and he began to focus on problems of worldwide social and political dimensions. Again, according to Weber, he became one of the few contemporary playwrights who could be described as "a universal playwright, a playwright asking questions and expressing traumas that concern all of contemporary mankind.... He observes man as if from another planet, through an immensely powerful telescope and writes with the hope that what he calls ‘a universal history of man’ is going to begin, setting his utopia against the reality of universal misery he sees everywhere."

It is from this period onward that Muller wrote his most well-known and influential works: Hamletmachine, Frederick of Prussia, The Task, Quartet, and his Medea texts Despoiled Shore/Medeamaterial/Landscape With Argonauts. These texts and the performance strategies they encourage played a major role in creating the Theatre of Images as exemplified in the work of Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars, and the dance theatre of Pina Bausch, and, in many ways, with them, helped create the entire language of performance art. His was a new dramaturgy entirely, and one which immediately set the tone for what might be described as the "poststructuralist" or "deconstructionist" drama which still represents theatre’s most vigorous avenue of exploration.

Müller continued to flourish as both dramatist and director throughout the 1 980s and 1990s, playing an increasingly prominent role in international theatre. He directed productions with the Berliner Ensemble, the Berliner VolksbUhn, and won numerous national and international prizes, including the Georg Büchner prize in 1985, the National Theater Prize in 1986, European Theatre Prize in 1994, and the Kunstpreis Berlin in 1 996. Muller died December 30, 1995, in Berlin.

–Heiner Müller

Müller’s Medea texts are very brief – just a few pages, much like his text for Hamletmachine (which we did in 1996). They contain no stage directions; no characters are identified except in the center section in which there is a speaker called Jason and another speaker called Medea; the beginning and ending are simply long blocks of text without interruption. These pages form the basis of this production.

We met with Muller during one of his visits to Los Angeles in the mid-nineties. He encouraged us, in tackling his texts, to use them as point of departure; to create a distinct landscape in which the collision of ideas can explode into disparate and conflicting meanings; above all, to create a synthetic fragment of culture and ideas that draws on our particular time and place. Muller always wrote about his contemporary context his Colchis/Corinth was the GDR; ours is Los Angeles.

In creating this production we have accumulated our own shattered fragments: inverted echoes of the Euripidean Medea; the Müller text itself and the departures it suggests; adaptations of his specific German historical and cultural references to Los Angeles equivalents; much of it is our own material intended to play out in more concrete ways ideas that are suggested or implied in the original. Layered throughout are the shouts, murmurs, and babble of our own contemporary cultural voice.

There are two primary themes Muller explored in his texts: betrayal– both sexual and ethical; and colonization – the physical and intellectual colonization of alien lands by the brute force of cultural domination. Medea, the world mother, or natural order, has been betrayed by the male Jason, conqueror and despoiler. The alien land of Colchis is the thing robbed, raped, wined by the appetite of the hungry, if short-sighted, Argonauts; Medea is the tool of betrayal who is used and then cast aside. In our own time, the global market –first, second, and third world alike – is the prize for those who reside in the glittering glass towers of the corporate adventurers; in this case, our indifference is the tool, and it is we ourselves who stand to be used up and cost aside.

Are we at the end of growth? Surely, we ore at the end of something and the attempt to inquire into that something is in the nature of the theatrical act, and what we seek to do with this production. Los Angeles, and the media machine it contains as the most dominant element of its landscape, has executed a peculiarly forceful colonization of the global imagination, so powerful a colonization that it has begun to displace reality itself. The unreality so successfully mass-produced here in this desert city seems to have now overwhelmed nearly the entire weight of the thousands of years of culture that has proceeded it, to the extent to which no event now has meaning, only the representation of an event signifies, and that only briefly.

Do we live now in the chaos of the birth of some other, as yet only dimly understood cultural sense of self? Or, as Muller also suggests, is this only the accelerated wish toward catastrophe? As Muller insists, the only role the theatre can play in preventing this catastrophe is the representation of these questions; it is to "mobilize the imagination," to create the image that is "the thorn in our eye," for in no other way can we ever really ~.