Bremen Freedom
at the Athenaeum Theatre
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Fassbinder’s comedy comes as a shock, however, especially to those who know him mostly through his films, which examine the wounded soul of post-World War II Germany. Then again, as Samuel Beckett proved, a bleak landscape is a perfectly fine setting for a comedy.
The 1971 Bremen Freedom is based on the life of a real woman in the early 1800s. A respectable Bremen hausfrau, Geesche Gottfried was pushed to the limit by the misogynistic mores of her time but found her freedom in a sugar bowl filled with poison. The play’s first ten minutes consist entirely of her husband’s barked orders and her efforts to comply with his demands: meek, compliant, she’s the very model of middle-class womanhood circa 1814.
The script for Bremen Freedom contains little in the way of conventional dramatic tension: you can see the poisoning a mile off. But Martinovich finds the strengths in Fassbinder’s writing–character development and the opportunities he gives actors for finely nuanced performances–and heightens them to the point that Gottfried would be fascinating even if she weren’t offing people right and left. It’s part of Fassbinder’s point that the drama lies in her struggle.
Finally the villains are all punished but their punishments wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying if Pieper and his cast, Trap Door members and others, hadn’t worked so hard to make their characters as believably awful–or, in the case of Charlie, as sweetly good–as possible. Bob Rusch’s Augustus Gloop is every inch and ounce a pig. Georgina Stoyles’s Veruca Salt is so stridently selfish and spoiled she always seems just a word or two away from a full-blown tantrum.
