Lulu

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The Berkeley Repertory Theater produced Lulu in the autumn of 1989.  I had 
the pleasure of attending one of the performances.  The part of Lulu was 
played by Justine Bateman, a television actress best known for her role of 
Mallory Keaton in the sit-com Family Ties. The production was based on the 
first of two plays by Frank Wedekind, Earth Spirit, published in 1895.  In 
1904 he published his second Lulu play, Pandora's Box, which was the title of 
the G.W. Pabst film.  The second play got Wedekind in big trouble, charged 
with obscenity.  
During the years he was working on the Lulu material, Wedekind wrote a 
related theoretical work called "On Eroticism."  This essay declared that the 
dichotomy of body & soul was a flase imposition.  The body itself has a soul: 
 sexuality.  Sex is the cosmic urge that serves "the morality of beauty" & is 
therefore holy.  In its resistless force, the power of sex is mystical, 
transcendant.  Its deification by Wedekind might be said to follow a gestalt 
found in the Holy Scriptures.  Speaking to Job from out of the whirlwind, 
Jehovah did not justify his treatment of the stricken mortal.  He simply 
asserted his power.  "Canst thou deaw out the Leviathan?"  Job could not.  No 
more can mortals withstand the compulsion of sex.  Although he was unsure of 
whether its power, inhibited by social conventions, was benign or 
destructive, he was secure in his sense of its sovereignty.
It is interesting that in the Berkeley production, one performance was cut 
short by the presence of an obsessed fan of Miss Bateman, who objected to her 
being cast as the femme fatale.  He brandished a pistol, which later proved 
to be unloaded, & the audience was evacuated.  There was an extra sense of 
tension in the performance I attended about a week after the incident.
Several years later I had the opportunity to see the film Pandora's Box 
screened at the Castro Theater in San Francisco (The city where Wedekind was 
concieved!).  It was a newly restored print, with "neo-expressionist" music 
especially composed for the screening & performed by the Clubfoot Orchestra.  
Needless to say, it was a stunning evening.

jbf
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