No 'Harumphs'

LEE BREUER is directing a rehearsal for the American Repertory Theater production of Lulu. It is less than three hours before the audience will file in to view a preview performance. Floor-standing floodlights and mike cords vie with the actors for elbow room on the thrust stage, surrounded on three sides by technical staff who follow the action below like surgeons starting down on an operation from the balcony.

A pistol cracks-blanks, but as jolting as the real thing. It's the first murder scene, and Catherine Slade, the actress playing Lulu, calls out for champagne. Someone makes a popping noise with his index finger and mouth.

"Who did that?" asks Breuer, and a figure detaches itself from the offstage staff huddle. "Can you do that into the mike?" A few moments later, the pop of a champagne cork fills the Loeb. "Perfect-you do that into the mike at that point, and from then till the end of the act everyone should make the same noise." The rehearsal continues, punctuated with a soft, irregular popping rhythm filling the air.

BREUER, prominent in New York as a founder of the experimental Mabou Mines company that works out of Joseph Papp's Public Theater, has a simple answer for why he's directing Lulu, which opens this week: "It's my favorite play." Wedekind's Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandors's Box-a single epic of the rise and fall of a creature of sex-present directors with a simple problem of logistics: in Breuer's words, "how to put the two plays together without making it a six-hour evening and without losing the extravagance."

No one could suggest that Breuer's A.R.T. production risks that. With a live rock band, liberal use of the Loeb's well-endowed lighting system, and microphones everywhere, it promises to be arresting in its complexity. But behind the stage technology there lies a coherent vision of theater that Breuer is willing to define precisely.

"As you clip the scenes in Lulu down to make the thing manageable, you change the play from dramatic to narrative form-which, today, is film. The microphones let the actors be low-key. If you play the hysteria, you'll have one screaming, fucking mess for three hours."

The microphone is a constant companion to Breuer's stage work, and amplification figures centrally in much of the experimental work at Mabou Mines. Prelude to Death in Venice, a one-man show the company presented earlier this fall, used electronics to modify actor Bill Raymond's voice, metamorphosing its characteristics and its position. Far from undermining the effectiveness of dramatic performance, Breuer maintains that, properly directed, the amplifier can restore the theater: "The Loeb seats 550-plus. It's not that good acoustically, and the actors have to project like crazy. Do you know what happens to acting when it's projected?" It Loses truth. It hurts when you start to project Chekhov to a thousand-seat theater. I wanted something even more intimate than Chekhov, yet I wanted something gigantic too...I try to combine the radio-film soundtrack technique with realistic Brechtian staging, bridged by an element of cinematic imagery."

But the idea is not simply to mike the actors and jack up their volume; Breuer says that in wedding the aural techniques of radio and film to the visual images of a stage, he is using conventions the audience already understands but has never seen yoked together. The ancestor of this idea is the film director's voice-over: "It's theater about the way you think. When you think, there's about the way you think. When you think, there's a voice in your head, like someone speaking in your ear, and then there are abstract images." In a Breuer production, then, the actors, directors, scene designers and microphones conspire to transform the inside of the theater into the inside of a human head.

BREUER'S THEATER is undoubtedly "experimental"-it calls itself that, and unsympathetic audiences will probably label it "offbeat" at best, "crazy" at worst. Purists will argue that in manipulating an actor's voice electronically Breuer is betraying the idea of live performance. They should consider that lighting has been an acceptable directorial tool since the turn of the century; yet when a director shines different colored or powered lights on a performer from different directions, he is doing with vision essentially the same as Breuer is with hearing: manipulating the path a performance travels on its way from the actor to the audience's senses. Breuer's experiments of today may become tomorrow's bread-and-butter theater.

Any experimental theater in America is, financially, a leaky ship on a long trip; Breuer points out that his Mabou Mines company, formed in 1970, is probably the longest-lasting venture of its kind, but adds, "We're living on borrowed time." The equipment Breuer's sonic directing requires isn't cheap, either. But in the long run his ideas are eminently practical: they accept the loss in intimacy that follows from the financial need for large theaters, and seek to deploy technology intelligently to restore some kind of dramatic truth.

"In any theater seating over 200 people, for my style of acting, I would want to amplify," Breuer says. And in accepting the reality of large theaters, Breuer also seems to realize that only by keeping halls from being too small and tickets from being too expensive can he and other directors get the kind of audiences they want-not the homogeneously affluent subscribers who keep theaters like A.R.T. afloat yet paradoxically turn ther noses up at the word "experimental," but a younger, more diverse group of people that would approach productions like Lulu with open eyes and ears, and no harumphs."