3 December 2006: Wings of Desire
Matinee. American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Stage adaptation by Gideon Lester and Dirleje Houtman after the film of the same title, directed by Wim Wenders. Directed by Ola Mafaakani. In association with Toneelgroep Amsterdam
Many hands make light work in this radically different (I take it) adaptation of Wenders’s film about transition in Berlin. The overall fictional frame is just that, a frame, in which various characters identify themselves and, in some way or other, tell their stories, even while a Homer character, “an immortal poet” (Frieda Pittoors), wanders the stage, though “blind,” and complains that people don’t tell stories anymore. There is a little more to the frame: two angels, Daniel (Bernard White) and Cassiel (Mark Rosenthal), who begin by perching on top of a large white snack wagon that is wheeled on stage and, reading from their Moleskine notebooks, report the news of the day, and then proceed to jump down and mingle invisibly with the various humans on stage. Gradually, as they do so, we begin to get the idea that Daniel is looking to become human, and it later appears that there are other angels who have become human before now. One of them is on stage, in a fine performance by Stephen Payne; others, we are to presume, are scattered throughout the audience.
But the stellar attraction is Marion, a trapeze artist, a slim woman with a beautiful body (Mam Smith) who is both extremely graceful and tremendously strong, and who does her gymnastic whirls and turns and somersaults and flips and dives, not on a conventional trapeze but on a parachute-like cloth suspended like a long loop twenty or twenty-five feet above the stage. We find out that, in her personal fiction, this is the last night of her career as a trapeze artist, and she is melancholy and morose over the question of what will become of her identity once she no longer does this. At the end of the performance, or near the end (one hour forty-five minutes, no intermission) Daniel changes his angel costume (a plain dark suit, open-collared white shirt) for a print shirt, and then doffs that too, so that he is bare-chested. He has fallen in love with the aerialist, and she comes back on, in something more like ordinary clothes (earlier she wore a sequined bra and G-string over a body stocking — to the delight, I’m sure, of many eyes in the audience), climbs onto her cloth hoop, and draws the willing Daniel up and into her orbit, where once again we are mightily well-entertained and, finally, observe that Daniel has become human, can now see colors, etc. (did you know that angels can only see black and white?), and is in love, with all the pleasures and tribulations that come to human beings.
At the side of the stage, meanwhile — the entire performance has the general ad libitum character of “meanwhile,” like a circus ring where much is going on at the same time, more or less — two electrified guitars are sometimes playing, at ear-offen