The Lindbergh’s Flight Review

Lindbergh’s Flight

By Bertolt Brecht. Translated by John Willett. Contributing Artists (Zie Kollektief): Kate Attwell, Gabe Levey, Brenda Meaney, Mitchell Winter. Costume Designer: Martin Schnellinger. Lighting Designer: Joey Moro. Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer. Stage Manager: Carolynn Richer. Performed by Zie Kollektief (Scraps, Sass, Cowboy, Austria).

If this rare, often ridiculous, revision of Brecht’s lehrstück about the impact of flight, radio broadcasting and other airborne communication innovations of the early 20^th century, has anything to add to Brecht’s legacy, it’s this:

The formalization of corpsing.

For actors to freely acknowledge and regularly give in to the impulse to burst into laughter in the middle of a performance is disorienting. That they have connected these breakdowns to Brecht’s own desire to blend natural human reactions with stage artifice is brilliant.

When one of the four members of the “Kollektief” attempting to perform Lindbergh’s Flight—which, in this show, becomes a play-within-a-play in a larger, longer bout of social satire—loses it and starts giggling, they immediately turn to the upstage wall, place their head or hands against the wall, and let the other Kollektief members continue without them. The show becomes based around the rhythms and energies of the actors struggling to be actors and not convulsive laughers. The Kollektief are credible enough as performers that you can’t always divine when these intriguing interruptions are real or if they’re being sustained for their own comic qualities.

This hiccupy process consumes the entire show, which boldly takes apart Brecht’s Lindbergh’s Flight, which was originally staged in 1929, as an opera for radio, and puts it back together using clichés of movie melodrama that the audience can presumably relate to more handily than the operatic and epic-myth tropes of Brecht’s simple “learning play.” Brecht’s concept of an American hero colonizing the world’s imagination with his supposed goodness and majesty is metaphorically met here with a clip of one of the old ads where Sally Struthers pleaded for relief for starving orphans overseas.

The plot of Lindbergh’s Flight is simple: an aviator takes a momentous trip, which he both humanizes and technologizes by explaining at length the equipment he is taking with him. He makes the trip, which a chorus expands upon psychologically with lines such as “He has found his destination in us.”

The framing device of the self-important and naïve Kollectief leading us through this simple-seeming yet complex work (when not cracking each other up) is helpful when explaining that Brecht went back to this play several times and thoroughly rethought it. We’re given a sense of the script as a representative of the time in which it was written, as representative of the time in which it was rewritten, and as a living document which will never see its original form again, reinterpreted at will by successive generations of performers. For a piece about the pros and cons of mass communication, this is swell.

The Kollektief gamely deconstructs the play, and when they can’t do that, they mock it. The results will likely remind some people of the Austin-based theater troupe Rude Mechanicals, especially that audacious company’s performance-examining piece The Method Gun. Like the Kollectief here, Rude Mechs used hilarity, social embarrassment and other self-aware elements to probe the very concept of collective theater projects. The Method Gun transcended to a much higher plane of understanding than Lindbergh’s Flight does (or can); Rude Mechs can disarm you with humor, then mesmerize you with deeper meaning.

Lindbergh’s Flights plummets precariously to the dark notes which end this otherwise airy and amusing attempt to keep aloft a noble little Brecht work that’s been flying under the radar for 85 years. Unlike Method Gun (or an earlier “funny or what?” show of the current Yale Cabaret season, The Cat Club), Lindbergh’s Flight’s lurch into heaviosity is abrupt and expected. But given the looseness of the entire enterprise and the stop-start fun this Kollectief is having with it, it’s kind of a wonder that the piece lands at all.