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| About the Play The Visit was a success first in Europe, with productions in Zurich in 1956 and London the same year. The play arrived on Broadway in 1958, when it was directed by a young Peter Brook as a showcase for late-career triumphs by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine. In fact, The Visit was the first production in the newly christened Lunt-Fontaine Theatre. In 1964, Hollywood made a movie version of The Visit. It starred Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn, and it featured a happy ending. In 1971, Gottfried von Einem composed an opera based on The Visit; it has enjoyed significant subsequent productions—rare for contemporary operatic works. A San Francisco production was staged by Francis Ford Coppola. A musical version of The Visit is currently slated for Broadway next year; it features a score by Kander and Ebb, who created Cabaret and Chicago, and it is set to star Angela Lansbury. |
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| Director’s Note I must be sick. Maybe I bumped my head as a small child. It was my last year of graduate school when I first read The Visit. I was in a quiet nook in a library surrounded by people intently studying or snoozing. I found myself laughing so loudly that I eventually had to leave the room for fear of being kicked out. And yet, although I laughed at many places, I found the play deeply touchingand the character of Schill to be somewhat heroic and tragic. How could a play be both tragic and comic? One year later I found myself watching a production of The Visit at a local college where I was teaching. The production was decidedly unfunny (which I say even though my future wife starred in it as Claire). Inspired to do a bit more research, I discovered that most productions of the play are dour affairs, modeled after the Peter Brook production that starred Lunt and Fontaine. Peter Brook was, and still is, my personal hero. Had he failed? Or was I nuts—a crazy person with a perspective so bizarre that no one could relate to it? I wasn’t sure.As we started rehearsing this production I noticed many skeptical faces when I announced that I expected the play to get big laughs. We had staged the play at tws in 1969. (In fact, a few of the cast members from that production return in this one.) The 1969 production had not been funny. So as our rehearsals progressed, there was some surprise as we found ourselves laughing at the painful and uncomfortable situations. Perhaps my madness was catching. Now the play is open and you, our dear audience, are the litmus test we have anticipated for many weeks. Are we alone at laughing at the horrific possiblities inherent in being human? I don’t know exactly how you will react, but I hope that you will see in Schill and the Guelleners the foibles of which great events—both tragic and comedic—are made.If you don’t, I may have to seek some professional help. - Tony Vezner |
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| Why Are We Laughing? by Jeff Arena There is no responsibility in an ant heap. Perhaps that’s why The Visit is a comedy instead of a tragedy. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play suggests that in our automated, highly interrelated society, terrible crimes can happen without any distinct individual causing the tragedy. When personal accountability is no longer possible, misfortunes become pratfalls, not tragedies. In an essay about justice, Dürrenmatt has pointed out that “We are no longer threatened by God, Justice, Destiny...but by traffic accidents, a dam burst owing to faulty construction, explosions in atomic plants caused by an absent-minded apprentice.” Without an identifiable villain, the tragic narrative of The Visit becomes a feel-bad comedy. Friedrich Dürrenmatt began his career writing prose, issuing a series of mock-detective novels that stressed the outrageous coincidences underlying most detective-genre fiction. These early novels followed a format the author carried over to much of his theatrical writing as well. Each begins with a conflict exposing the utter randomness of a situation, then forces those initial facts through a series of logical, ever-more-disastrous consequences, ending in a sort of paralyzing philosophical paradox. The Visit fits this format. Through a series of seemingly inevitable events, Claire Zachanassian’s quest for justice provokes an entire town into perpetrating a vicious crime while disassociating themselves from their guilt and the riches it brings.Dürrenmatt’s interest in guilt and fate has clear roots in Greek myths. It is possible to synopsize the story of Oedipus so that it sounds like a fable from Dürrenmatt’s pen: A man receives an ominous, ridiculous warning that he will kill his father and marry his mother, and in taking every logical precaution against such a fate, he commits exactly the crime predicted. Like many of Dürrenmatt’s creations, he is a man who turns himself into a detective only to discover his own guilt. Dürrenmatt insisted that his plays were like great myths, concerned with philosophical ideas rather than specific moral or political stances. He warned against interpreting Claire Zachanassian as a representation of Justice, the Apocalypse, or the Marshall Plan. Such direct symbolism is too specific. Dürrenmatt considered his fictions parables, which are open to changing interpretation, rather than allegories, which are limited to a one-on-one substitution of created symbols for real-world events. He wrote “I believe that every explanation—even a psychoanalytical one—destroys the meaning of a parable, because that meaning is one with the parable itself.... Not one explanation is the meaning of the parable, but all its possible explanations put together.” He wants us to consider the juxtaposition of multi-meaning images, and to follow those contrasts into a philosophical discussion. Critic Kenneth Tynan has pointed out that in The Visit,“The verdict is at once monstrously unjust and entirely democratic.” This moral juxtaposition is the root of the black humor in the play. “Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility,” wrote Dürrenmatt. “In this Punch-and-Judy show of our century, there are neither guilty nor responsible individuals anymore....We are all collectively guilty, collectively bogged down in the sins of our fathers and of our forefathers. We are the children of our forebears. That is our misfortune, but not our guilt.” |
