As part of my recent Wired News piece on Silent Film Revivalism, I interviewed a number of artists about the projects they were doing that were inspired by vintage silent film. One of the more interesting projects I discovered doing the piece was Lulu, an all silent, black-and-white stage play based upon Louise Brooks' sensuous masterpiece, Pandora's Box.
I talked to Tonnika Todorova, the director of Lulu by the Silent Theatre in Chicago. We ended up speaking for about an hour and because I knew I was going to boil that all down to a couple choice quotes for a 1200 word piece, I promised her that I would transcribe our full interview on ToM:
JB: Can you describe your role in Lulu a bit to me?
TT: The two Frank Wedekind plays — Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora — both read at about three and a half hours each. Doing them together — as operas, operattas and librettos — tended to run really long, not to mention that the translation from German to English tend not to be very good: they are filled with stilted, unnatural language. So when I came across the plays in college, I was very interested in the plot and the story, but I didn't feel that I could handle the text, or find actors who could handle the text.
So I started doing some research. I came across Eric Bentley's adaptation that was rather good, and then I looked up Pabst's films, including Pandora's Box, the Louise Brooks film. And then I thought, 'Why not tape the two plays together, using Pabst as a template, and we just do it without words... just do it as a black-and-white silent film onstage?'
So we ended up doing the whole nine yards. Instead of having dialogue, we had words projected on the walls with blackouts and black-ins. We had a piano player who composed original music and performed it throughout the piece. The actors used a lot of the same histrionics that you'd see in a black and white silent film. And then adding that vaudevillian type acting... we included a lot of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin references. We set our play just a little bit later, in post World War I.
JB: So Lulu's a bright young thing?
TT: She is and she isn't! Wedekind's story ends with Jack the Ripper killing her. But we kept on not being sure how we were going to pull this off, since Jack the Ripper wasn't around in the time period. But then we realized that Jack the Ripper was never caught, so we set our story in the flapper era and hoped no one would come down on us too much. Some dramatic license!
JB: So when you're performing it as an 'all black and white silent play', does that mean you're all made up?
TT: Yeah, we have make-up for all the actors. This is actually funny: we have one black guy playing Rodigro — the dancer, the acrobat — and we went through a huge nightmare trying to find the right make-up for him because black on his skin wasn't looking right at all. It looked like blackface! And then we came across this gray make-up that was oil based rather than water-based, just like my white actors, which was actually a nightmare, because you couldn't touch it up at all through the show. When he sweat, it would get everyone else, like all the kissing that has to happen with Lulu his make-up would be all over her face. But then we found a beautiful sealing spray that took care of it.
But yeah, the make-up was a huge deal. The costumes were all black, white, gray and silver. People keep saying how great the costumes were, but really they weren't even period. They were all things we picked up second hand. But because we picked them all out in a monochromatic palette, they ended up looking period. We just tried to make everything as close to the look of a silent film as possible without making the moments that are true and real in any way farcical... which is what happens sometimes in silent films because everything is fast forwarded.
JB: Right. That's something I was going to ask you. Part of the energy of silent film comes from the lack of set standards in how fast to crank a camera. So they would tend to speed up the action in more frenetic scenes by cranking slower, and then maybe crank faster during more ponderous, dramatic scenes. Sound was what standardized the number of frames per seconds in Hollywood. Did the actors try to emulate that quality... for example, moving faster and more violently during a murder scene?
TT: Absolutely! Every scene had a formula to it. For example, there is a court room scene in Lulu. When I did it in college, I tried to do it as a full-blown scene, with lots of dialogue and objections, but when you have a silent film (or a silent film play), text is boring. Watching people mouth words is boring. How can you have subtext when you have no text?
In Lulu's courtroom scene, we made it look like it was just a bunch of newspaper clippings. All of the action would freeze as if someone had taken a picture of them. Then we'd black it out, get something else behind them, unfreeze. In this way we showed what was actually happening in the courtroom... by using newspaper clippings and going back and forth between them and the actors very quickly.
As far as fast forwarding the action is concerned, or all the rest of the vaudevillian stuff, it was done whenever possible in live action. Other scenes might have been slowed down. We always tried to make it seem like a camera was projecting the action on stage.
JB: What about dialogue cards? Did you use those?
TT: The projections on the wall were limited unless we needed to use them for exposition in between scenes to show us where we are. For example, Dr. Schoen's Study Room, or Court Room, or whatever. The rest of them were done in two ways: either for humor or for style. For example, sometimes in silent films what's said in the film is completely different...
JB: Yeah! I was actually going to ask you about that: one of the great delights for viewers of silent film in the era (and for silent film historians) is watching and catching all of the silent obscenity. Back in the day, after all, they were very good lip readers. I was wondering how that was handled: are they actually mouthing any dialogue?
TT: Quite the opposite. I asked them to hardly ever mouth their words. We didn't deal with the dialogue at all. Entire thoughts or emotions would be conveyed in only a single smile, shrug or gesture. When actors mouthed a word, we often did it for comedy effect... we played around with the fact that the audience can understand even if they can't hear. There were a bunch of times when someone would mouth a profanity and everyone would laugh...
JB: Because everyone knows what fuck looks like.
TT: Right. As far as the dialogue is concerned, the projections on the wall were often used comedically because they stated the obvious. Kind of like how in silent films a dialogue card will say 'The Wind Is Coming.' and then they cut to a hurricane. We went for the same effect. We just wanted to emphasize to people over and over again, 'This is just like watching a silent film.' And by halfway through the play, we pretty much had stopped using them, because the audience had gotten used to it and it was distracting them.
JB: Why did you go easier on the projected dialogue halfway through the play?
TT: Because it took a lot of time and slowed down the momentum. Lulu was very fast paced, high energy and an action packed production. I mean... the film... to watch Pandora's Box, and I've watched it so many times, is enthralling, but you have to dedicate two and a half hours of your time. It's beautiful to watch, but we couldn't do that to a live audience. You aren't watching it in the comfort of your own home; the theatre experience is much different.
JB: The big thing about Pandora's Box is that it is a bit overlong, but Louise Brooks' body language is just so captivating, her facial expressions are so full of wit and life... she's just a charm to watch. The film feels compressed through the lens of her personality and beauty. I think if you had to compress the film you could, but then you'd miss out on exploring the beauty and unconscious gravity of this girl, who is like her own little universe.
TT: I agree. I think that the film owes so much to Louise Brooks: she's why it works. She just charms the pants off of you where as our production really needed to get through the plot as quickly as possible.
JB: On that note, who did you get to play Lulu? What were you looking for there? Were you looking for someone who could stand-in for Louise Brooks?
TT: When I cast the production in college, I found this girl who was very sexually charged. She could walk into a room and every guy (every girl and guy) would twist their necks to look at her.
JB: Nice...
TT: Yes. When I wanted to do it out of college, she turned it down for personal reasons because she had problems with some of the other members in the cast. But there was a girl I'd used in a play about a year before then. Tomboyish is the best way I can describe her. The reason I decided to use her to play Lulu is that a lot of people were interested in her and attracted to her but she became very approachable but very unattainable. It was a very interesting experience to watch her try to play this role, someone she could never be in real life. She didn't know what it was to be addicted to people being attracted to you and into you. She had no idea what that was like. She played it with such blase nonchalantness, people suddenly found they were even more interested in her.
JB: What's her name?
TT: Kyla Louise Webb. Which is funny: there's a good deal of syncronicity between Louise Brooks and Kyla. They were both 21 when they played Lulu and there were a lot of other similarities. Kyla, though, had long blonde hair, and we ended up having to chop it all off to give her Louise Brooks' bob.
JB: The black helmet!
TT: Yes, and it had such an effect! From the moment we had her hair done and put her in that slinky dress, she started smoking her cigarettes differently. She had a little seductive pout going all the time. Kyla was great. She was great.
JB: And what are the challenges of acting silently?
TT: There's no guidelines in directing or acting this kind of thing. Even in silent films, they talked, you just couldn't hear them. So there was a lot of improvisation. There were a couple of rules to follow. One was, "If you've already done something once, unless you're going to make a theme out of it, making it bigger and bigger each time, don't do it again." Don't repeat something you've done before. The actors were really the playwrights of their own characters. Most of it was theirs. We compressed everything about the story to its essence, to the most clear and symbolic gestures or movements... are you familiar with miming? The guys who paint their face and pretend to be a wall?
JB: I was going to ask you if there was any similarities there.
TT: No, we didn't go into that. I think the difference is that mimes try to convince you that they have an object and they are in a world that they actually aren't in. For example, they have an orange and they are eating it. We, on the other hand, had the props and the setting. We supplied a world on stage. So it was up to the actors to perform as naturally as possible within that world. Think of it this way: it was performed in the vacuum of space. If you could hear them talk, they'd talk, but you can't. However, they realize that too, and so they don't mouth their words... which helps not make it boring for the audience.
JB: Going back to the more technical aspects, let me ask you about lighting. It's incorrect to say silent films were black and white: they were often tinted in post-production for dramatic effect. So a fire might be tinted red and so on. Did you attempt to capture any of that with lighting?
TT: If we were going to exploit all the histrionics of the era, we needed to be as consistent as possible. We didn't want people thinking we were trying to do something like Schindler's List. You know, necessity became our greatest friend. We realized that by just sticking to the limitations we'd already imposed upon ourselves, we would have a much more consistent and tight play. If we were going to add color to it, we'd have had to make people understand why we were doing it. It would have distracted from what we were trying to convey, even though it may have been more loyal to silent film
JB: Lulu is the first production of the Silent Theatre. What's coming next?
TT: We're workshopping a play right now called Noir: a hybrid of old film noir movies and 70's graphic novels, like Sin City but not as modern. And we're booked at a theater here in Chicago to do a Chaplin piece and I'm trying to do that without projected dialogue, just as physical theater: Chaplinesque, vaudevillian, black and white, silent, but no words. Noir will go up sometime in early summer and Chaplin is slated for sometime in December or January. Right now, we're just hoping against hope that these grants will go through and we can take Lulu on tour to Europe.
JB: Do you know anyone doing anything similar to Lulu, where a silent film is interpreted into a different medium like a play?
TT: I met a gal in San Francisco who came to the play and the reason she had come to see it was because she'd done something similar called Silent Play. The name of her theater company was called the Kinetic Theater Company. When we were going from coast to coast, people kept saying it was like nothing they'd seen before. I mean, we're not the most innovative people on the planet, so I'm sure some people have done something similar but I'm not sure anyone has ever taken silent film and just tried to capture its whole essence live, on stage. There have been vaudeville shows, there have been shows that are silent, there have been shows that are in black and white... but I haven't heard of anyone putting all of those qualities together.
JB: Are there any other silent films you'd like to do as plays for the Silent Theatre?
TT: I just got a very rare copy of a silent version of Chicago. It might be a little too soon, especially with the movie coming out just a couple years ago, but it might be something in a year or two we'd try to put up.
JB: Silent film is viewed as an anachronism, but there's actually a lot of new silent film productions coming off the ground. Do you think there's a future for silent film at all, either as a niche production like your own, or even larger than that?
TT: My greatest pleasure from watching a silent film is watching the interchange of body language and emotion between the performers. I think that's a unique quality of silent film that many people get pleasure from watching. I hope it comes back.
It's hard for me to talk about how I feel about silent film because I think I've bastardized silent film for this one production that I've done for so long. I don't know, I think I'm just self-consciouys: I've done it for so long, through so many manifestations and permutations, that I think Pabst and Wedekind would roll over in their grave if they saw Lulu.
I love watching silent films. I don't think they'd all work on stage. I think we got lucky with Lulu because it was so action packed and there was so much intrigue and adultery and murder. Not all films are like that. If you tried to put a more subdued silent film on stage like that, people would be yawning.
But I still think silent film should come back. Silent film is such a manipulative art form. You can command the eye of the viewer with a close-up to watch that tear fall and nothing else. You can't do that on stage, no matter how much you try. You can always see the lights; you can always see the sweat.
JB: There's a mood intensification that can be accomplished in silent film that can't be achieved in the tenth row, watching a play?
TT: Absolutely. It doesn't transfer that way. The manipulation techniques you use on stage are much different than in film, so you have to choose your subject matter specifically. There are ways you can do it with lights and sound, but it's a crap shoot. So whether or not another silent film will work in translation, I don't know.
