”I hate art history,” declares one student in a remedial program at a fictional art school reminiscent of our own Art Center in Pasadena. In Tom Jacobson’s encyclopedic The Bauhaus Project, onstage now at Open Fist at the Atwater Theatre Complex, we meet six remedial art students who have been assigned this history project in order to stay enrolled in the program. Each talented in different ways, they come together to create a unified art piece that will explicate the remarkable rise and fall of the 20th Century’s most remarkable artistic powerhouse.
Judging from the opening comment above, we’re in for a long slog. But, luckily, the students’ creativity kicks in as they (and we) delve into the birth and death of the German art school that helped to define Modernism. Each student contributes in his or her own way: Owen (Jack Goldwait), an architecture student, brings organizational skills to the group and also plays the Bauhaus’ original head Walter Gropiius, while Brec, aka Choe Madriaga, becomes the director of the vignettes that each student contributes. Duck (Sang Kim), although a student musician, will play a number of influential artists in the short scenes, while Ellis (Katarina Joy Lopez) flits in and out as the femme fatale Alma Mahler Gropius and oh, yes: Maria Kipp as well.
Perhaps the most fascinating set of characters fall to Kai (John C. Sweet), who ends up playing the villain of the piece, the enigmatic Johannes Itten, who nearly brought down the school with his mystical practice called Mazdaznan. Only incidentally do we learn that Duck will also play Fritz Ertl, who went on to build the prison dent construct the camp at Auschwitz.
The students construct the historical trajectory of Bauhaus through the interactions of the contemporary characters. They move mercurially in and out of scenes as different artists. Using the setting designed as a series of white board classroom structures (by Richard Hoover), however, even though illuminated with projections by Gabriel Griego, the scenes often become unnecessarily ill defined under Gavin Wyrick’s overworked lighting. Open Fist’s artistic director Martha Demson uses interesting acting techniques to create variety, often to good effect, as when Brec plays both characters, using only a coast and sweater to differentiate the two.
As artistic events collide with increasingly dictatorial politics permeating Europe by the ideas of the third Reich, the school’s departure from Weimar seems the only recourse. Tellingly, Ellis, who has been begging to play a Nazi in the students’ production, goes rogue and outfits herself to end Part 1. It is a fitting, if ominous forshadowing.
The period costumes, by the way, are well done by Michael Mullen, and Open Fist’s skillful assemblage of the other talented designers and technicians are instrumental in bringing the play-within-a-play, within an historical moment, to fruition. If the distant past is prologue, then Part 1 has set up the tug of war that will test and then scatter the ground-breaking Art Academy in Part 2 of The Bauhaus Project.
Part One of the Bauhaus Project continues at the Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles CA 90039 on select days and times through August 25th. Tickets for one performance ar $35; while the two-part production runs at a discounted rate of $50. For reservations & more information, call (323) 882-6912 or online at www.openfist.org.
