A Word In Edgewise: Learning on the Brink

Dad took me to see “I Am a Camera” when I was 14. I don’t know why; we weren’t a movie-going family, never went en famille. Though on Saturdays, I biked the mile to West Hartford’s Central Theater, paying my quarter for the feature, newsreels and cartoons (and a tad more for popcorn and soda).

But this was a theater in downtown Hartford, and was a matinée feature. Still, I never said no to a movie. I wondered then, and know now for sure, that I didn’t understand the full import of what was playing out before me on the screen, and my dad explained neither the whys nor wherefores of the meaning of the film nor the reason for our attendance. There were things the audience found funny within an atmosphere I remember mostly as gloomy and foreboding. That was in 1955.

Of course, “I Am a Camera” — adapted from John van Druten’s play of that name, based on Christopher Isherwood’s “The Berlin Stories” — was in black and white and more confined in scope than the “Cabaret” musical that sprung from those same roots, swelling and flowering like a century plant in 1972. Even so, the film I saw back then left an uneasy feeling; something was wrong, was about to happen, was hanging fire. It wasn’t just ditzy Sally Bowles (Julie Harris) or the writer fellow (Laurence Harvey), who allowed as how all he did was act as a camera, standing still, lens open to record whatever happened without interfering in any manner.

I didn’t know a scintilla about the Weimar Republic, but I did know if you left a camera lens open without advancing, the film inside would over-expose, and all you’d be left with was ruin. Well, there was ruin, inert observer or not, but the play and film and “Cabaret” musicals have all danced about the abyss uniquely.

The original play, presented as a comedy-drama, was first reviewed in The New York Times by Brooks Atkinson. He raved about Julie Harris’s “trollop” Sally Bowles, (winning a Tony only two years after playing “innocent adolescent” in “Member of the Wedding”) but added, almost with misgiving, that while the political climate might have been overlooked in the 1930s, it was “impossible for the rest of us to be that detached now … Being funny is not enough; the need is for irony.”

That was in 1951. The musicals since have drawn their dancing closer to the abyss, Director Joseph Haj now knitting lines of tension more tightly about the actors as the show progresses. The railways (I loved the sounds of train whistles in the night) now background here in ways that foreshadow their uses by the Nazis-to-come; looting natural treasures, sowing terror, bearing human cargoes away to torture and incineration in camps and crematories.

Within the Guthrie’s Kit Kat Klub at night, there is still hope, humor, mirth and the illusion that all the senses may be pleasured — “We’re safe in here!” the Emcee assures the throng, as lights, music and sensuality prevail but inwardly, they’re not so sure. Like their gender, their fate is a coin toss. Many regulars will be unwilling passengers on those oncoming trains. Haj and co-creators, by the very fashioning of the sets, costumes, dances and music, have assured us that they are not detached from the past. But what about detachment among today’s viewers? Where will that lead tomorrow?

If high school history books presented the past’s dark periods with the snap and dazzle currently exploding across the Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust Stage in their riveting “Cabaret,”perhaps following generations would retain enough knowledge and understanding to avoid future re-plays. As it is, our class is nearing the end of the semester; final exams are coming up, and we’d better get studying.

At the Guthrie through August 24.