Bertolt Brecht wrote his one-act The Wedding in 1919, the same year he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party—the leading faction behind the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which lasted all of a month. Although Brecht’s infatuation with Bavarian-style communism was short-lived—and what reasonable person could support a regime that declared war on Switzerland?—his earliest plays twitch with the revolutionary spirit that filled the air in his homeland.
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In The Wedding Brecht deploys the iconic characters and satirical bite that made his cabaret songs such a scandalous sensation, taking aim at the affectations, fake morality, and herd mentality of the shopkeepers and low-level professionals who make up the petite bourgeoisie (the German title translates literally as “The Petit-Bourgeois Wedding”). The setting is the wedding feast of a wholly ordinary group of friends and relations—given generic names like the Bride, the Groom, the Bride’s Father, the Bridegroom’s Mother—who strive mightily against their baser instincts in the hope of achieving respectability. The Bride’s Father wants to impart pearls of wisdom to the assemblage, but can tell only stories of people dying from dropsy or throwing up all over a dinner table. The Bridegroom’s Friend makes exemplary displays of his fine manners, repeatedly covering smoothly for the others’ inappropriate remarks—but when he’s asked to perform a song, he responds with one about a man who forsakes his chaste lover to learn sex from a prostitute (“Spread her on the stairs and banged her / Laughing at propriety.”)
To a 21st-century Chicago audience, post-World War I Bavaria may as well be the moon, and director Zeljko Djukic doesn’t try to reconstruct the play’s political moment. His production for TUTA Theatre Chicago slips in enough anachronisms—one guest photographing an embarrassing moment with his cell phone, another singing an Elvis Presley tune to the wedding party—to wrest the proceedings from their original historical context. And in typical fashion, Djukic has assembled a smart, meticulous cast who find rich, subtle humor in the disasters that befall their characters.
Through 2/14: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 773-278-1500, tutato.com, $15-$25.
