Katie Farrell

Directorial Analysis of The Man Outside by Wolfgang Borchert

In November of 2016, I had the privilege to direct the show The Man Outside by Wolfgang Borchert at Trinity University. Borchert was a German playwright whose work focuses on his experience of dictatorship and his service in the Second World War. Described by its author as, “a play which no theatre will produce and no public will want to see,” The Man Outside is a bleak account of the German Everyman soldier following WWII. Disheartening from start to finish, the tragic play exposes the insurmountable odds that every soldier was trying to defeat upon their return to Germany at the end of the war. Expressionist in form, The Man Outside harkens back to the heyday of expressionism immediately following the First World War. Perhaps this choice speaks to the repetitive and circular nature of history on which Borchert frequently comments. One war, one form of theatre. Another war, the same form of theatre. Nothing is changed, nothing is new. Covering both internal and external struggles that soldiers were facing at the time, Borchert abstracts the oppression he witnessed into a story that represents the experience of many. The characters’ interactions act as the foundation for the thought of the play: society’s abandonment of and blind eye to returning soldiers. Written in 1946, Borchert addressed this issue while it was still relevant, believing that his play would not gain recognition due to its brutal honesty, which, fortunately, was not the case.           The Man Outside employs a plot of thought because of its manipulation of time, relevance to topical issues, symbolic characters, and resolution-less ending. Moreover, questions of what is happening and how it is happening are secondary in importance to why those events are happening. The play is episodic, like many expressionist “journey” plays, as it covers a broad swath of mental, emotional, and geographical ground. A linear plot is therefore impossible, as time skips around to cover the story. Causal links connect the play, but they are looser-- the action is spurred by emotional turmoil inside Beckmann’s head, and there is no sharp distinction between chronologically-ordered events and events that seem to occur outside of time in Beckmann’s dreamscape. However, it is clear that each event is spurred on by some sort of causal trigger that pushes Beckmann to evolve. The play is devoid of realism, and instead is built upon interactions that focus solely on the main character, Beckmann, and his hopeless mission. Even supernatural characters like God and Death weigh in on the events leading up to this common story during the prologue; God laments the widespread loss of faith which is fueling the Undertaker’s success, as Death, disguised as the Undertaker, enjoys this seemingly endless flow of death with quiet amusement.

The play’s portrait of the traumatized Beckmann raises sobering questions: What can we offer veterans returning to a changed world? If soldiers were ‘fortunate’ enough to have survived the war, the home they would return to was not the same and neither were they. In the context of post-WWII Germany, this paradox was especially difficult for returning German soldiers, who were systematically shunned, emasculated, and impoverished by a callous government and a populace too busy with rebuilding and making money to take care of their forgotten soldiers. The Man Outside focuses on the reality of the post-war period, but in an unrealistic way, so as to completely capture the scope of German denial and rejection. Beckmann stumbles from door to door, both literally and figuratively: seeking entry to homes and businesses, but also opportunity--and finding each time that he cannot cross the threshold into a new life. Rather, he – and by extension all soldiers – is stuck outside, with no options left but to finally relinquish hope, lie down, and die.

Katie Farrell

Doors as both physical and representational imagery for opportunity were prominent in my production concept. In keeping with the basic tenets of expressionism, set pieces were used minimally. Instead, I created a black and white geometric pattern, painted on the floor. Stylistically based on the quintessential German expressionist movie of 1920, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I painted three triangles, which formed a square with a pathway diagonally running through them, and placed a rectangle on top of this square of triangles, which represented the dream space and the Elbe River. As the play was produced in a seventy-seat black box theater with stadium seating, this gave the floor a level of dimensionality that the actors could use to illustrate different opportunities. Beckmann often wandered into the Elbe, or down the pathway on his journey, and his stepping into or paying attention to characters on different triangles allowed him to seem even more isolated and shut out than Borchert’s writing already conveys.

The characters Beckmann meets on his journey are, true to expressionist form, grotesque and cartoon-like. While Beckmann seems to vacillate between reality and a dream world, the other characters he meets are simultaneously grounded in reality and perhaps not real at all. God, One Leg, The Other One, and Death (in all his forms, including the Undertaker and the Roadsweeper) are all representations of emotions and ideas from the spiritual realm instead of the realistic one. The Other One, his constant companion, is a personification of hope and the positive side of his personality, which Beckmann’s PTSD has separated him from. In my production, I cast The Other One as a female, and she floated for the entirety of the play, just out of his reach, coaxing him to continue the journey. God and Death are significantly more terrifying to Beckmann, as each seem to taunt him with their power and opportunities. Death, no matter his form, took on a base, demonic, pig-like appearance to reflect his gluttony and greed, chasing after Beckmann throughout the play while leaning on some sort of support for his massive body and wheezing. One Leg, much like The Other One, personified survivor’s guilt, and took the face of a soldier in Beckmann’s charge, who had disappeared and haunts Beckmann-- constantly whispering his name and refusing to let him discard his identity. What makes One Leg all the more demoralizing is his constant presence on stage with the character Girl, perhaps the only truly hopeful person that Beckmann meets. She is so lonely after her husband’s death, that when she appears onstage to pull Beckmann from the Elbe, it seems for a moment that Beckmann will find rest and solace with her. However, her constant laughter, even at his outdated way of carrying himself politely and the presence of One Leg, her dead husband, rip this opportunity from Beckmann’s grasp. Beckmann also meets a family on his journey-- a stereotypical military family of the Colonel, his wife, daughter, and son-in-law. The Colonel refuses to accept the blame for the massacre of Beckmann’s soldiers, and the whole lot of them laugh hysterically at Beckmann as he describes the dreams that haunt him. The last two characters Beckmann meets, the Cabaret Producer and Frau Kramer, both represent more opportunities: work and home, respectively. Both doors are closed to him.

Each character required intensive vocal work to reflect their grotesque physicalities. Beckmann, who begins the play in the mindspace of a very young child and grows through experience to the maturity of a man in his twenties, narrates the majority of the play with massive, aria-like speeches displaying a range of expressionist techniques- repetition, “ecstatic” poetry and telegram-style fragments. Thus the lead actor had to use his voice in challenging, musical ways. We created a score for the entirety of the play to track the fluctuations in his voice that were necessary for the play to not become a two-hour lament. The actors playing God, Death, and the Elbe worked extensively to find vocally the most dangerous parts of their characters-- God’s anger, Death’s cynical gluttony, and the Elbe’s pitiless wisdom. The

Katie Farrell

Colonel’s family worked extensively to perfect a Simpsons-like, raucous, laughter-filled reaction to Beckmann’s gruesome dream. The Cabaret Producer was modeled after an American Idol host-- his voice and body reflected the art world’s indifference to the “truth” of the German soldier’s experience at the time. Finally, Frau Kramer was required to be jolly and dismissive, hiding her pity for Beckmann behind jokes, laughter, and general disinterest.

The entire direction of the play went into making the audience feel as if they were inside Beckmann’s mind and allowing them to see the post-war world through his eyes. That subjectivism is a hallmark of expressionist style. In a small, black box theater with a tennis-court seating arrangement, all of the design elements-- lighting, costumes, sound, vocal work, and staging went into alienating Beckmann, and thereby the audience, from the world he strongly sensed should be his own. With lighting, every choice was made to define the space, and where he could step. With sound, decisions were made to overwhelm him and push him down. With costumes, to restrict him and to remind him of his past. With staging, to illustrate the repetitive journey from door to door to door that he trudges. The literal translation of the play’s title, “Draussen vor der Tuer,” is “Outside the Door.” The purpose of the play, then, was to keep Beckmann outside the door of humanity.