Wallace Shawn's raw and ribald translation of The Threepenny Opera, running through mid-June at Studio 54, is as fresh as a slap in the face.

“Brecht would have the most unbelievable withering contempt for a person like me. A comfortable leftist would have repelled him, I imagine.”

There seems to be a strong contemporary sensibility in the script now. How deliberate is that?
The main quality that the original has is an almost incredible liveliness and spontaneity and excitement—a kind of outrageousness. And, uh, so obviously that was the assignment in my mind: to do something that I myself would find surprising and have some life, that would excite me. You know. There's very little slang, very little that screams out “America, New York, 2006.” Ninety-nine percent of it is not stuff that identifies itself as today. On the other hand, I was trying not to have anything that would be impossible today, New York, 2006.

Did you consider that there's a much more liberal attitude today toward what constitutes acceptable language?
Brecht was relatively rough and shocking. He couldn't, I mean, when Marc Blitzstein's version was done in New York in the 1950s in America, obviously it contained certain things that would be considered shocking, but I don't think anything was considered shocking in, you know, Berlin in 1928. Throughout the process I kind of hoped that Brecht would have enjoyed what I've done.

Bertolt Brecht

Have you always been a big Threepenny Opera fan?
Uh, no. I grew up with it. Every kid from my milieu listened to that record. I found it upsetting, disturbing. I didn't understand what I took to be the cynicism and the grimness of it. I didn't understand that, because I didn't know anything about life really. I lived in an upper-middle-class enclave and I thought life was great. So why would you be so bitter and nasty?

And now?
And now I've become bitter and nasty myself, because I've seen more.

In your work, you lean towards presenting protagonists who lack belief in themselves. In The Threepenny Opera, Macheath has absolute confidence.
Brecht did, too, I think. That's part of the incredible boldness of the piece. Every character is quite confident of his position, I suppose.

So did you have to make an adjustment in your writing?
Yes, in a way that was exciting. Obviously, translating is a lot of fun, because you pretend to be the other guy in a way. You feel you're writing his play. Of course, I could never write it. I don't think the way he does. It's all so evil. I mean it's too shocking for me to say what he says. So I wouldn't dare to write it. But he wrote it, and it's so amazing that it's kind of very fascinating to see, but you hope that no one will actually act on it, because what he's saying is too shocking.

Which is?
I'll put it this way. I would say the challenge to the members of the audience is to find in The Threepenny Opera a critique of the protagonist. In other words, there are many plays about characters something like Macheath, but usually a critique is presented in which you, in the end, realize that the author is drawing a very great distance between himself and that character and saying, you know, that this is not the way a person should be. So I think it's just a challenge for the Roundabout subscribers to find that critique in this play, because it's very hard to do that.

Is it accurate to say that in Brecht's work, he judges the world and in yours you judge yourself?
He would have no reason to judge himself, and he certainly would judge me. He would have the most unbelievable withering contempt for a person like me. Probably more than for almost anybody. I think he probably was not particularly friendly with people who came from a comfortable background, as I did. A comfortable leftist would have repelled him, I imagine. Although, of course, you know, he himself was treated very nicely by the East Germans and I'm sure had quite a pleasant life when he went there. But I'm soft, weak, cowardly, and sort of, you know, someone he would not have found congenial.

You did translate Brecht's lyrics as well.
That's what took two and a half years. The text I could have done quite quickly.

Kurt Weill

Was the crafting comfortable for you?
I was brought up to have high self-esteem. The schools I went to had as their goal to give the students high self-esteem. Dalton, I went to. In those days Dalton was what was called a progressive school not oriented to getting people into a good college or into good grades. We didn't even have grades. It was about self-esteem. And it worked. So I sort of thought, well, I can do this. I don't know why. It was ignorant on my part, and if people don't like my lyrics, they'll be able to find out that I have never really trained as a lyric writer. And you know, one should—before taking something like that on. I benefited from harsh criticism after we did a workshop.

You must have had the original translations in your ear, no?
Right, but I forgot them. And I wasn't listening to the version I was listening to when I was a kid. I was listening in German. And I had the score, obviously. I was looking at the music. And I do know enough about music. I played the violin for, like, 16 years—studied for about 16 years. I'm not completely ignorant.

At the moment you're working on another production—with your brother, Allen. Is it difficult shifting gears?
They're both with music. I would never plan it this way, because as a person I'm a wreck. I'm exhausted. But I'm sort of excited in a way. I'm very, very experienced now at writing words to music. When I had to do that at a certain moment in The Music Teacher, I was surprisingly good at it. We wrote The Music Teacher about 23 years ago, but there was one day recently when we made a dramatic change and I had to write new words to the preexisting music. I think I surprised my brother by how skilled I was at doing that, because I'd been doing the Brecht for two and a half years.

As you face the first previews, how do you regard the production?
I think it will be electrifying. I think it's going to be incredible. You can't tell, of course, until you're in the theatre and you've seen everybody in their costumes. Everything changes at each stage. So far it's electrifying. In the rehearsal room it's amazing. It's a fantastic cast. Just as Brecht has different worlds in his text, there are different worlds in the piece. There are people who come from completely different schools of acting. Nellie McKay is a pop singer and Jim Dale is English and comes from a totally different tradition than Nellie McKay. Yet it all fits. It's pretty thrilling. It's very suspenseful, because you honestly don't know what the thing is until all the elements are there. I'm just impatient for it all to happen.

David Finkle, who writes regularly about theatre and the arts for many publications, is the chief drama critic at TheaterMania.com.

CREATIVE LICENSE
	In the summer of 1928, Brecht's secretary, Elisabeth Hauptmann, procured a copy of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, one of the most popular theatre pieces in British history (and the first ballad opera when it was originally produced in 1728). It had been recently revived to acclaim in London, and she supplied Brecht with her own translation. He began fiddling with the script, rearranging scenes, and rewriting portions, attracted to its satiric attacks on middle class gentile morality. Brecht borrowed the central story concerning a romantically dashing thief and criminal, Macheath, who is ratted out to the police by a criminal colleague and fence, Mr. Peachum, in order to separate the dastard from his daughter Polly—and to collect a little reward. Gay's original played as great comedy and incorporated dozens of popular tunes, “borrowing” liberally from many sources, from folk airs to Handel melodies. After Brecht's version, with Kurt Weill's music, debuted in Germany, the script enjoyed a similar success. “From that day Berlin was swept by a Dreigroschenoper fever,” writes Lotta Lenya in Theatre Arts magazine in 1956. “In the streets no other tunes were whistled. A Dreigroshen bar opened, where no other music was played.” According to Peter Gutmann, “within the first year alone 50 theatres presented 4,000 performances, and record shops bulged with 40 recordings on 20 labels.” The good fortune followed the production to the U.S. after Marc Blitzstein adapted the score and retranslated the lyrics. It ran for six years off-Broadway. Most people know the work because of a song, “The Moritat,” written overnight by Weill and Brecht to satisfy the need of the vain actor playing Macheath for a splashy lead-up to his entrance. Known popularly as “Mack the Knife,” the tune became a huge hit for Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, and others. “Moritat” literally means “death deeds,” a street shanty song detailing the bloody exploits of some murderer or another (not unlike some of our present day rappers' riffs). Now the beat goes on. For Roundabout's production, Wallace Shawn's new translation (see accompanying samples), director Scott Elliott's staging, and a stellar cast will try to create the magic and menace, satire and savagery found in the “original” Brecht-Weill masterpiece. —John Istel Two Samples of Dialogue from Act I, Scene 3, wherein Mr. and Mrs. Peachum discover their daughter Polly has secretly married Macheath:
	Mrs. Peachum: Little Miss Exception, I'm going to pull down your exceptional panties and beat your exceptional ass! Polly: Yes, that's what all mothers do, but it doesn't work, because everyone knows that love only grows stronger when one's ass is being beaten. (translation: Wallace Shawn, 2006)		Mrs. Peachum: I'll beat your bottom, you exception. Polly: All mothers do that, but it's no use. Because love is greater than a beaten bottom. (translation: Desmond Vesey, 1960)

BACK