Playwright: adapted from the screenplay by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
At: The Side Project, 1439 W. Jarvis
Phone: 773-973-2150; $15
Runs through: April 1
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
A cursory look at the history of xenophobia will reveal significant similarities in the accusations aimed by hostile bigots at the strangers in their midst, one of which is typically the amoral licentiousness of the latter's menfolk—a perception invariably coupled with myths of superior sexual prowess. A 'katzelmacher' is, literally, a 'cat-maker' ( cf. 'trying to make some girl' in the Rolling Stones song ) , a diatribe connoting the libidinous proclivities of a tomcat.
Closer study, however, frequently reveals envy, as well as fear, at the foundation of such speculations. The German citizens in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's story, adapted by the author from his 1968 screenplay, are a band of blue-collar malcontents, their resentment at their own squalid lives expressed in mean-spirited remarks directed at the owner of the candy factory providing them their livelihood—a CEO doubly reviled for being female and for having risen above her former station in the community. But when the boss lady introduces a 'guest worker' from another country into the labor force, a new target for their spleen emerges.
And we're right in the middle of it, under Jesse Weaver's direction for this side project production. A few audience members can seat themselves on wooden benches against the walls of the tiny performance space, but most will be relegated to perching on crates and upended oil drums in the center of the room, side-by-side and face-to-face with the townspeople bent on calumny, for the brief 40 minutes of the play's duration. In so intimate a setting, we cannot help but note the progress of the local citizenry's insecurity or its catalyst's inadvertent complicity in behavior first drawing, and then affirming, the wrath of his fellow employees.
Fassbinder paints a sympathetic picture of immigrant minorities, but he does not sentimentalize them, as the ironic ending reveals. And while the pervasive nature of destructive prejudice may be less shocking to us in 2007, rarely will we find it distilled as potently as in this exemplary demonstration of ensemble playing at its most intricate, with actors crossing within inches of one another ( us, too ) and physical confrontations both violent and passionate erupting barely arm's-length away. Scheduled in repertory with Thief River, Lee Blessing's study of marginalized individuals of another kind, Katzelmacher wants only a change in the weather to justify the trek north to Jarvis Avenue.