"Threepenny Opera' at Brooklyn Academy of Music

What do you get when you combine two of the greatest forces in the contemporary theatre"“ playwright Bertolt Brecht and director/visual artist Robert Wilson? Answer: a theatrical tsunami.

The blast of icy air that blew through the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week took the form of The Threepenny Opera"“ or, more accurately, Die Dreigroschenoper, Brecht's 1928 classic, staged by Wilson, who also did the set design and lighting "concept," as he calls it. This production"“ all the more historic because it is performed by Brecht's own Berliner Ensemble, in German with subtitles"“ brought a cheering audience to a standing ovation but left me chilled, and, moreover, puzzled as to what I was supposed to think or feel, beyond being numbed by the production's brute force.

We're all familiar with the classic Threepenny Opera, an adaptation of John Gay's 1728 ballad-musical The Begggar's Opera. Brecht and composer Kurt Weill reset the story in the underworld of Victorian London, where the amoral protagonist Macheath wheels and deals his way through a maze of crime, corruption, and multiple marriages.

"Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?" the play asked a corrupt Weimar Republic of its day. By 1933, when Brecht went into exile with the rise of Hitler, The Threepenny Opera had already been performed throughout Europe and translated into 18 languages. Weill's jazz-inspired score (played in the original production by seven scruffy musicians with 23 instruments) includes familiar songs like "Mack the Knife," subsequently became a jazz classic favored by such vocalists as Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Darin.

Brecht's rough theater

Brecht, surely one of the giants of 20th-Century dramatic literature, is considered the father of modern political theater, dedicating his life's work to exposing society's ills with passion, unflagging purpose and great personal courage. His legacy includes dozens of plays, a new form known as "epic theater," numerous essays on dramatic theory, and of course, the Berliner Ensemble (founded in 1949).

Like The Threepenny Opera, Brecht's other great theater works— among them Mother Courage, The Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Szechwan and The Rise of Arturo Ui"“ are parables from other times, telling stories that illuminate the ills of contemporary society and calling for us to learn from them and correct them. Brecht's world is gritty, not pretty"“ a rough theater of the people, of the street, theater that can be performed in any number of spaces with only a tattered curtain and a few boards.

Macheath in drag

That's hardly the world of Robert Wilson's production. As he has done throughout his career since his breakthrough Einstein on the Beach (the large-scale opera with Philip Glass in 1976), this avant-garde artist offers an extravagant visual aesthetic, combining stark, stunning, sweeping stage images with ritualized actor movement and jarring sound effects.

Wilson's Threepenny is a world of light and steel"“ a stark black-and-white landscape with razor-sharp lines and controlled, carefully chosen, only occasional bursts of color. This is no underworld"“ it's more like a museum of Grand Guignol, Goth and grotesque, with Macheath in androgynous drag and his amours Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit in puppet-like movement.

"Mankind keeps alive because of its brilliance in keeping its humanity repressed," says Brecht's script. Wilson creates a frightening, dehumanized, sterile dreamscape that transforms Brecht's corrupt world too radically"“ by adding the elements of depravity, cynicism and mechanization.

Where is the humor and the irony that are so embedded in Brecht's work? In the end, the combination of Brecht and Wilson may be clashing, not complementary, aesthetics.

And the lesson is…

To be sure, Wilson's stage imagery is gorgeous and indeed memorable. But what lesson would Brecht want us to learn from this revival? If we're meant to draw similarities between Germany's corrupt, capitalist Weimar Republic and our own time, shouldn't the play's aesthetic be rough and gritty, rather than gorgeous and ghoulish?

After an endless two-hour first act and a 20-minute intermission, to go back into the theater and be blasted with that icy wind for another 40 minutes felt like cruel and unusual punishment. Like Brecht, I'm open to a theatrical experience that teaches as it entertains. But must I be overpowered and alienated in the process?

"Do not judge us harshly," says a character in Threepenny. In that case, suffice it to say that Brecht is like whiskey, taken neat and knocked back, and Wilson is like pure and beautiful ice water, swallowed in one gulp. Take them together and you feel cold and empty.

Chekhov, on the other hand, is like wine, sipped slowly, savored. I prefer wine.