Change and Other Plays

by Wolfgang Bauer

Book by Wolfgang Bauer

Genres: Plays

235 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Bauer was born in Graz, Styria. His breakthrough play was Magic Afternoon in 1967, in which he portrays four youths who interrupt their lazy and boring afternoon by unmotivated outbreaks of violence and aggression (Magic Afternoon was adapted for the screen most recently by Catherine Jelski in 2000 as The Young Unknowns). After two more successes, Change (1969) and Gespenster (Ghosts, 1973), Bauer's plays became increasingly surreal and experimental. Bauer though resisted any labelling by academia and critics alike until his death. Most of his plays during 1967 and 1990 were translated into English by Martin Esslin, remembered for coining the term Theatre of the Absurd. In the late 1970's and early 1980's San Francisco's Magic Theatre performed almost each season a play of Bauer, 1993 his play Tadpoletigermosquitos at Mulligan's was premiered at New York's Ohio Theatre. In 2015, Bauer's lost first drama Der Rüssel (The Trunk) was rediscovered and premiered at the Wiener Akademietheater in 2018.

Wolfgang Bauer was a heavy smoker and drinker. After a series of cardiac operations, he died in his native Graz of heart failure.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kind of a wash-out for me, sorry to say. But first, a little history.

I bought this hardcover years ago at a time when I was just starting to realize that I had a broader interest in avant garde movements. Seeing the cover, I snatched it from the floor of some dusty used bookstore somewhere and added it to the pile. I'd pack and unpack it over the years as I moved, always thinking "yeah, gotta get to this at some point" and while I was formalizing my "insane reading list" (a project I've been working on for over a decade - not the readings, the actual annotated, coded, multi-use list that exists as a spreadsheet document) I decided to throw it into an upcoming slot.

Now, this is a collection of 3 plays: "Change", "Magic Afternoon" and "Party For Six" and "reading" plays is, for me, not experiencing them optimally. Maybe I'll get better at it over time, but in my mind, plays should be experienced as productions - but requiring that as a way of experiencing them would mean living in a large city with a thriving stage culture...not gonna happen for me. I'd hoped I might find productions on youtube but no such luck (here's a trailer for a production of "Magic Afternoon", though - why is that girl's nose bloodied -well, you'd have to read/see the play). So, in I plunged in regardless.

And, honestly, I wasn't that impressed. Partly, this no doubt has to do with reading these instead of "experiencing as intended." And I'm not saying there weren't things to enjoy in these or that I hated them, if for nothing else given their ratings by others here (which I'll take to mean that they mean something to someone). But I think the problem is simply this: long ago, in my personal thinking on the arts and literature, I came to a realization that while the "speaks to broad human experience" critical approach was a valid one, it wasn't the whole of the story ("Universality" and "broad human experience" tend to be invisibly coded as "Western Civilization"-centric but that wasn't even my specific problem). I had, at the time, begun playing in my thinking with the idea that almost everything held up as a critical standard for the arts should actually be looked at as a duality (or even atomized further, as it turned out) and so asked myself what was a valid approach to looking at/judging artistic work that might stand equally with the "broad human experience" approach. And the answer I developed was "the specific" - the capturing of a time, a place, a culture, a mood, a zeitgeist, etc. And with our dizzying advances in technology and swift cultural changes of the 20th Century, this has proven to be a valuable approach. The Beat writers and poets, for example, to me seemed like a perfect example of this - a capturing of a certain generation and nationality's reaction to atom age dread combined with the economic freedom of the post-war boom, and an urge to discover truth and beauty in an increasingly plastic, mechanized, stratified America. There's lots more I could say here but I'll spare you...

These plays strike me as capturing "the specific" of certain aspects of Austrian youth and arts culture in the 60s ("Change" and "Magic Afternoon" are from the late 60s, while "Party For Six" is from 1964). But the problem for me is that they are almost inescapably also caught up in the specifics of Austrian dramatic stage culture of those times - in the sense that Bauer was seen as Austria's Absurdist "enfant terrible" of the theater, putting things on stage never before seen in those stuffy, formalized environs (I presume). And even more than that, Bauer's form of "absurdism" was not (as the introduction points out) the stripped down stark absurdity of Beckett, or the fantasies of Ionesco, but instead a form of nihilistic realism - like putting the sour worlds of Ferdinand Céline or the grottiness of Charles Bukowski on stage.

So what Bauer is attempting to capture here is the ennui, anomie and blase savagery of Austria's youth, artistic classes and bourgeoisie at the time. And maybe he succeeds at that ("Magic Afternoon" certainly seems to) and maybe audiences were shocked at the time - but the flaw of the "specific" approach to criticism is that it requires the now-much-removed critic to ask themselves "did I feel like I learned something about FILL-IN-THE-BLANK - here read 'Austria in the 60s' - or that I experienced something that was attempting to come across?" and I honestly felt like this question was muddled by the fact that these were stage plays. If they were novels, there would have been more detail, more grit, more "there" there - but instead I kept thinking "I guess this was shocking to Austrian theater audiences of the time." In other words, I felt as if the plays' reputation as "shocking absurdism" were more tied up in their specific place, time and especially FORMAT than in their actual content.

"Change" (1968) is the longest piece here and has the most straight-ahead "story" as we follow two men in their attempt to turn a naive, moderately skilled regional painter into an overnight, avant garde sensation, after which they plan on psychologically maneuvering him into committing suicide (thus raising his cache, and their financial investment, even higher). But the plan goes awry as their chosen sucker proves to have hidden depths of scheming at his disposal as well. Oddly, this exact plot is "floated", in passing, by bored teenagers in "Magic Afternoon" from the year before. It was certainly engaging, blackly comic at times and probably would have made for an okay night out at the playhouse.

"Magic Afternoon" (1967) seems to be one of Bauer's most famous/infamous works. It is essentially a four-hander in which bored young adults, fully ensconced in the 60s counter-culture haze of music, ennui and drugs, turn on each other in startling and ugly ways while hanging out one afternoon when cooped in by a thunderstorm. Certainly would have been surprising to see this on the stage at the time, no doubt (nudity, drug use, etc.) but it also felt really thin to me and possibly comes across more strongly when performed.

"Party For Six" (1964) was the least of the work here - a play in which the titular event occurs "off stage" and is only experienced through a door left ajar while the audience stares at the empty main room. Perhaps I missed the point, or it was only an experiment in formalistic variation ("hey, howabout a play with no one on stage except for a few seconds at a time? Has anyone done that yet?"), but I was left shrugging and moving on.

I didn't feel like I wasted my time with this - there were some interesting cultural details (lots of popular and avant garde jazz artists of the time called out, and an impressive quoting of American Underground Comix titles in "Magic Afternoon") after all. But neither did I feel as if they had the PUNCH that was intended - perhaps they no longer could? I still have Bauer's The Feverhead to dig into at some point, and as that's a text piece I'll likely enjoy it more. But, in truth, this mostly left me cold.

[kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fucking diabolical. Didn’t think something from the early 1970s could be this cynical and antisocial. I think this was very ahead of its time.