Review: The Life of Galileo by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
A lot is going on in Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and not just onstage. The program notes at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre will help you some, with a tidy summary of the historical figures, the heliocentric Ptolemaic model of the universe, and the heretical but accurate Copernican revision of it, and some of the elements of the plot.
With that crib sheet you can comfortably follow the depiction of that impatient and skeptical scientist's lifetime tussle with the Catholic Church. Director Michelle Polgar, three Actors' Equity members and the student cast and crew will give you the story, unrolling it much of the time in a design of curiously reduced lighting, as if the dark ages were lingering, literally, in the period 1610 - 1634.
You will not get much of a sense of the intensely brainy Bertolt Brecht or his reasons for fastening upon those 400-year-old events. Study of any of the several texts that Brecht crafted between 1938 and 1955 would show you that ideas and apprehension -- Angst -- are fundamental to the work.
Brecht wrote it rapidly in Denmark after fleeing the Nazis. The Zurich Theatre staged it in 1943 without Brecht's participation, a moderately successful production dismissed by one critic as a "Lehrstuck" -- "a didactic piece."
After landing in Los Angeles from 1941, thanks to mutual acquaintances he worked on the script for almost two years with English-American actor Charles Laughton, a huge personality consigned at that time mostly to roles in B movies. Laughton spoke no German; Brecht's English was only fair. They used a rough translation, lots of mime and Laughton's immense talents of stage interpretation to elaborate the text that eventually premiered in English in Beverley Hills in mid-1947 and then in New York. Laughton's huge personality -- both as a vivid actor and as a bon vivant -- directly shaped that Galileo.
By that time Brecht had left for Switzerland. He was soon to accept the offer of the East German authorities to found the Berlin company that became the acclaimed Berliner Ensemble. He extensively rewrote and extended his Galileo play for them. It premiered in the West, in Cologne, and was in preparation for a Berlin production in 1955 when Brecht died.
The play explores themes of dogma, orthodoxy, science, and doubt. Brecht looks at the intellectual and scientist living in a dark age, where discoveries are appropriated for commerce or war. He looks at the misery of the masses whose faith is exploited by authorities. This is a work created on the eve of war, reworked in reaction to the suffering of the world war and to remorseless state control all across the map, and further elaborated in reaction to the development and use of atomic weapons.
In Galileo, Brecht creates an intellectual eventually cowed by the mere sight of instruments of torture and a sensualist whose love of food, drink and comfort proves him as fallible as any other man. David Stahl inhabits that personality with the tidy self congratulation of Bilbo Baggins. He is impish rather than arrogant, and he's querulous about the tedious need to take students and to devise practical applications. We feel sympathy for him but don't see the genial Stahl as particularly courageous.
That impression takes the tension out of a key scene late in the play. Galileo's students are nervously awaiting the public announcement of outcome of the 1633 trial by the Inquisition. They celebrate, too quickly, the silence that suggests the man has chosen like Giordano Bruno to face the pyre rather than to recant.
In contrast, David Stokey as the stern and scarlet robed Chief Inquisitor is entirely credible, as is Michael Miller playing the church intellectual, later Pope, who is intrigued by Galileo's results and annoyed by the political necessity to suppress them.
In this work Brecht makes little use of the famous "alienating" effects with which he experimented in the 1920s and early 1930s. Translator/interpreter David Hare -- or perhaps director Michelle Polgar -- has minimized the explanatory legends and verse that introduce each scene. Four discreet screens high in the corners glimmer with a short legend usually identifying only place and year.
One cheerful interruption is the carnival scene of 1632. With immense, colorful marching puppets and accompanying song and music the people mock the authorities in Mardi Gras style, showing the popular anticlerical embrace of Galileo's ideas and Copernican cosmology. This short interlude immediately perked up the audience.
St Ed familiars inhabit the boards. Steffanie Ngo-Hatchie does yet another ingenue as Galileo's daughter Virginia, then with the passage of time becomes convincingly hollow-faced and downcast. The role of Galileo's star pupil Andrea is split into a cute 11-year-old at the opening, done capably by Ben Roberts, and a 33-year-old done by Christopher Smith. It's more the fault of the text than of the actor that we fail to understand why this Andrea is so absolute for truth. Jarret King is earnest as the "little monk" captivated by Galileo and Austin Rausch as the lens-maker embodies the simpler folk who looked to the theoretician for an antithesis to church dogma. Nathan Brockett covers seven roles -- applying his acerbic tongue effectively as one of two doubting cardinals and his acerbic mien as the border official in the final scene.
Review by Olin Meadows at AustinOnStage.com, November 19
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com/Austin, November 19
Review by Kelsey K published in austinist.com, December 3
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The Life of Galileo
by Bertold Brecht
Mary Moody Northen Theatre
