Visiting Director Uses Fairy-Tale Kingdom to Impart the Necessity of Art

Visiting artist in theatre arts Holger Teschke knows something about the division of nations. He grew up in East Germany, where art, drama, and literature were often the only vehicles for discussing political and social realities. Appropriately enough, the play he is directing--Leonce and Lena--takes the divisions of his land as its context.

<<< Visiting artist Holger Teschke directs Elizabeth Standal '97 in Leonce and Lena. Standal plays Prince Leonce, who in this scene decides to leave his father's palace to escape the boredom of the royal court for a more thrilling life on the road to Italy.

In 1836, the land we currently think of as Germany was divided into 347 dukedoms, often ruled by petty aristocrats. They form the setting for this parody of a romantic comedy being performed in Rooke Theatre through December 8. The play's author, Georg Büchner, was one of the earliest and most forceful voices for democracy in German theater, according to Teschke.

Büchner's play involves a prince who flees his father's land to avoid becoming king and marrying a princess he does not know. Despite the king's cheery declaration that his is a "happy kingdom," it is burdened by apathy, ennui, and bureaucracy. Through many twists of fate, the young prince Leonce falls in love with the princess he'd been avoiding (Lena) and becomes king. "Both Leonce and Lena want to change the world, to counter the boredom of their parents' generation," says the director. "Now they are in a position to do so and they find that it is very difficult."

Teschke brings a wealth of experience to campus this fall. He is director, dramaturg, and author at the Berliner Ensemble, an internationally renowned Berlin theater company. The award-winning artist has written essays, plays, and poems in addition to a long career of directing and teaching.

Teschke wants Leonce and Lena to bridge the gap of the 170 years since it was conceived. "It's always very important not to keep a play just in the time it was written, but to transform it into our time."

But Teschke also has a more pressing concern. He has seen the relevance of drama and art transformed and diminished among former East German audiences since the fall of communism. "The phenomenon is that for many people, the only source of information was the arts," he explains. "Now, the arts are becoming just entertainment." A key to appreciating Leonce and Lena, then, will be how far it can transcend entertainment and impart the often uncomfortable, though always relevant, contradictions of reality.