Review: Love Me
by Michael Meigs

The title of Philip Kreyche's Love Me is deceptively simple. As playwright and principal actor he takes on German expressionism, focusing on the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka in the period 1918-1919, when the painter was known among his circle of bohemians in Dresden simply as "mad Kokoschka."

Renowned as an artist of dark and powerful brushwork and a writer of equally dark, sex-obsessed essays and narratives, in 1912 Kokoshka became involved with Alma Mahler, whose husband had just died. The painting at the left, Two Nudes (1913), is Oskar's vision of them together. The affair burned out by 1914, partly due to his possessiveness. Kokoschka enlisted in the cavalry, probably to escape her, and in Galicia suffered a gunshot wound to the head and a bayonet wound to the side. He convalesced and returned to his art, employed as an art instructor. In 1919 he commissioned an anatomically correct life-sized female dummy, a purchase that caused a scandal when he published his correspondence with the manufacturer.

 

Kreyche's hour-long drama gives us this Kokoschka. He appears rational but distracted in the early scenes of the play, patronizing his serving maid Hulda by giving her a romantic name, recounting his background of poverty to Andreas, his eager pupil in drawing, and speaking to his gruff manservant Jürgen. When Oskar's former comrade in arms Heinrich turns up, we learn of Oskar's wounds and narrow escape from being buried alive. Hulda is enamored of him but Oskar has no thought for her.

 

This is a courageous dish to set before an Austin audience. To some it might seem suspiciously erudite and obscure. Others will scoff at the emotion and vulnerability that constitute the principal elements of the action, not only for Kreyche as Oskar but also for Jayme Ramsay as the earnest servant Hulda and for Richard Dodwell as Jürgen, the grimly misogynistic servant. In the concluding scene Oskar's decadent acquaintances Ludovica (Nichole Palmietto), Heinrich (Lynn Crecelius) and the student Andreas (Randy Kelley) are engaged in a dream-like semi-orgy in the middle of the floor as landlord Dr. Posse (Benjamin Weaver) sings a melodious mocking song in fine German. 

 

Aisa Palomares is a disciplined, spooky disciplinarian for Oskar in her role as The Silent Woman.

Kreyche distills a good story from his elements and he tells it without anachronistic modern attitude. He probably captures those mad moments pretty accurately, and he renders them with a style that suggests Expressionism but stops short of the ravings of Kokoschka's own writings. (Just for comparison: Petri Liukkonen writes, "Kokoschka's 1908 Murderer, the Women's Hope was first performed in 1908 at the little open-air theatre of the Kunstschau, where it was set in darkness illuminated by torches. The actors' faces were painted, and their costumes had lightning patterns familiar from Kokoschka's paintings. In the story a nameless Man, in conflict with his basic animalistic drives, frees himself from enslavement in a sex nightmare. He throttles a nameless Woman and then kills all her female companions.")

The half-page flyer included in the program does not give the continuation of Oskar's story. He recovered and continued painting. The Nazis gave him the dubious honor of featuring his work in Goebbels' 1937 exhibition of Enartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art"). When Kokoschka fled to England shortly afterward, his name was on a Gestapo arrest warrant authorizing execution without trial. In exile he suffered privation but continued to work.

Well after the war, he settled in French-speaking Switzerland and lived there until his death in 1980. Hundreds of his works are preserved at the Oskar Kokoschka Foundation in Vevey, Switzerland.

 

Review by Cleve Wiese at Austinist.com, January 23

Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, January 29

ALT review of July, 2009 workshop production of Love Me at Austin Community College

 

EXTRAS
Review and images from Kokoschka show at Neue Gallerie New York, March 15 - June 10, 2002

Petri Liukkonen's on-line biography of Kokoschka

"Kokoschka: Knight Errant of 20th Century Painting," a memorial lecture given by Carol Hoorn Fraser in the Dalhousie Art Gallery on March 8, 1980

Program flyer for Love Me by Philip Kreyche

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Love Me
by Philip Kreyche
Philip Kreyche