The Man in the Attic - Out North - Acting a Different Culture

In the first post on this world-premiere of Timothy Daly's play, The Man in the Attic, presented at Out North Theater in Anchorage, I said there were parts I liked and one I didn't. In the first post I discussed the part of "Speaker" which I liked a lot.

In this post I want to talk about the issue of producing a play where the language and culture of the actors and audience are different those from the those of the characters in the play. In this case the play, by an Australian playwright, was put on in English in the United States. The play was about Germans at the end of World War II.

The first time I can remember thinking about this issue was long ago watching American movies dubbed in Thai. Imagine John Wayne or Steve McQueen speaking Thai. It was a joke, which destroyed the mood of the movies. I also recognize that Thais didn't react as I did.

But many people don't want to read subtitles in a movie. I suppose there are people who simply can't read that fast. I know trying to read Thai subtitles was totally out of the question for me. I just couldn't read that fast. It is often difficult to impossible to read the subtitles through the gaps between the heads in front of you. Opera has found a way to scroll the words being sung in 'surtitles' above the stage.

But switching languages can change everything. Language is more than content. Language is a major conveyor of culture. Even if you don't understand the words, you learn something about the other culture, experientially, by hearing it. Language also affects how people's tongues and lips move and how their whole body moves. Language affects who you are and what you do.

When I asked Thai teachers, long ago, to write in English on topics like "The Most Important Day of My Life" they wrote very personal, often tragic stories they would absolutely never have told me out loud in Thai. I always hypothesized that something about writing in English freed them to say things they normally would never discuss. As though English wasn't quite real. Certainly, when you learn profanity in another language, it doesn't have the same emotional impact as the equivalents in your mother language.

When I talked about this with friends, a married couple - he's from Romania and she's from France - they started exploring this idea. She immediately said that she is a very different person in French than in English; she's much more sarcastic in French. He said he was glad they met in English. He recounted an incident in Paris recently where he was dropping off the family in the middle of traffic and they were taking their time getting out of the car and he was feeling pressure from the other drivers. He finally shouted "Get Out" in English. He said he would never have said anything like that to his parents in Romanian. (In another cultural insight, his wife said Paris drivers don't worry about the horns of other drivers at all.) I'm convinced that language is important to who we are and how we behave.

If anyone is still with me, I'm ready to get back to the play.

When you are putting on a play in which the characters speak a language (here German) different from the audience (in this case English,) you don't have a lot of choices. Putting on this play in German wasn't an option. The play itself was written in English. The audience would miss too much if it were all in German. You can't use subtitles, and opera's LED surtitles were certainly too expensive for this little theater. I did find one post on surtitles for traveling productions of plays. Of course subtitles and surtitles distract the audiences from watching the actors closely. One solution - at times with dreadful results - is to have the actors use German accents. Or you can just go with English (in this case). So, with all this background, I can explain the problem I had with this play.

The actor who played the Nazi husband had a strong American twang in his voice. It just did not work for me at all. The only time I thought he was right was the 30 seconds or so when he played the role of an American military officer - then he fit perfectly. It wasn't just the voice. Americans talk and walk and move with a freedom that is very different from how Germans - especially at the end of WW II hiding a Jew in their attic - talk, walk, and move. (My parents were refugees from Germany and I spent the school year of 1964-65 in Germany.)

The other actors also spoke English, but with much more neutral accents. And their body language was much more subdued so I could believe their parts - particularly the wife who looked hungry and timid. The man in the attic looked a little too well fed for his part, but otherwise carried his part off well as did the neighbor.

I do thank Out North for making plays like this available in Anchorage, for taking risks, and for challenging our local actors to higher levels. I'm sure the director, Dick Reichman, had a lot to do with this.