On The Verge of Yearning
By Richard Campbell
“Wings of Desire”
at The American Repertory Theatre
Special to The Epoch Times International

If you saw Wim Wender’s 1987 film “Wings of Desire” I can assure you that the American Repertory Theatre production is not so much an adaptation but an edgy poetic ode to the movie. Often times spell binding, some times mystifying, this product of a two year collaboration between ART and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, brings the audience to the psychic edge of their seats. With a running commentary on the relative advantages that can be had by two Angels visiting earth interspersed with intense voice over dialogues, it is a play for the philosophically inclined. One Angel desiring to become human, Damiel, played with elegiac rhapsodizing by Bernard White, and one not desiring at all, Cassiel, portrayed by Mark Rosenthal with introspective indifference, witness in confused awe, the plights of humans. Angels can hear the thoughts of the humans, and it just so happens, so can we. The inner and outer dialogues clash in a giant cacophony of sound and soul. But wait, there’s more.

Angels, people wanting humans to be angels, former angels, and prophets of peace, delve into the subject of death and psychic rebirth, which runs dark and deep through No Man’s Land. You are there, and it is not necessarily Berlin. Are you alive or dead? That depends upon more than your perspective. Someone beside you may have already declared you dead, tugging at your sleeve, grinning with cool superiority. I have a feeling the male audience may be particularly distracted from the meaning of it all, when the glimmering, fleshy visage of Marion the Trapeze Artist, Mam Smith, appears staging death defying acts with contortionist control of our minds and desires. Suspended high in the sky at once like a dove, then chrysalis, free falling gyrating gymnast, rising Athena, now bat, and aerial object of the Angel’s new found desire: Ms. Smith does not steal the show, she owns it.

Quite suddenly hard rock from Jesse Lenat and Hadewych Minis may send your pacemaker into reverse. She haunting, he scathing, tear into music while the cast does mild improvisations. Was that WBUR’s Robin Young, reading today’s headlines from her show podium of “Here And Now”? Perhaps thou art distracted by the smell hot dogs being roasted in the white metal circus trailer café- the top of which is where angels congregate and humans are inexplicably launched to the heavens. Or maybe you just imagined perfect pillars of sand falling from the heavens that formed a beam me up moment during the hot, white heat of an onstage cremation. So what if the stage is surrounded by empty plastic lawn chairs where sometimes dead people return to stare- you just wish they wouldn’t stare so. In case you haven’t guessed, this is not your aunt Julia’s idea of an evening at the theatre.

On the other hand, there are some enchanting Angelic moments, and ghostly humor beyond the existential angst. The principal Angel Damiel is rather in love with the idea of temporality and physicality. To know the passage of time, to feel the heart beating blood, and the brush of some material against the skin. Bernard White plays a perfectly calculated distance to his human subjects, until he finally becomes one, absorbed in passion. To know love and death, you cannot be an Angel. Frieda Pittors who plays Homer, is a convincing conscience, attempting to persuade humans in a halting accented voice to be more like children, to understand the value of peace and kindness. She need not waster her breath, because before she can bring us onto an even keel mankind’s murderous history rears its head, or someone just plain commits suicide. Don’t worry, it’s an extra person, someone who does not matter.

There is a semblance of story to this production, and having seen the original film, I was just able to keep my wits about me, but I wonder, should the audience have been required to have seen the film to understand? The dual cast of members from the Netherlands and the USA work in surprising harmony. The poetry is haunting, and the sound design runs a dialogue that invades the head-sometimes refusing to leave. One might criticize director Ola Mafaalani for desiring the audience to be in too many psychic places at once, seeking to create the unease of being, on the verge of chaos. However, there is little to criticize in the almost Greek drama like adaptation by Gideon Lester and Dirkje Houtman. The material allows the company multiple opportunities to rise to the edgy occasion, that once taken, shrinks back, like a man on a precipice before falling.