Editor's Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Protocol, the journal of ESTA, the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. The article originally ran in late 2010. For more information on ESTA and their recent merger with PLASA, please visit www.plasa.org.
Dear Reader,
Marti and I have been back from Germany for a month, and we're still talking about our visit to Oberammergau. My wife, Marti LoMonaco, is a theatre historian, so she had a professional interest in seeing the Oberammergau Passion Play, which has been performed in the Bavarian village every ten years, with few exceptions, since 1634. I wanted to see it too, but my professional interest was in how a show that is revived every ten years is technically supported. What's bought, what's rented, where does it come from? I wanted to know, and I thought you, the readers of Protocol, would be interested too. So, I wrote to Frederick Mayet, the press officer for the Passion Play (who also plays Jesus in alternate performances) and proposed a Protocol story. The result was seats at the August 3 show and a backstage tour, during the dinner break between the first and second halves, conducted by master carpenter Carsten Lück, who played Judas Iscariot in that day's performance.
What an enlightening tour it was! I had read that the show is done only by the people who had been born in Oberammergau or lived there for at least 20 years, and involves about 40% of the population of 5,000. However, I didn't understand the extent to which this is a community production until we had the tour—and I am sure I still don't fully understand because I'm not from Oberammergau. My notion that this was a show that was hauled out of the warehouse once a decade was wrong, as was my idea that all the equipment would be rented from Munich and then returned at the end of the season. While the Passion Play itself might be performed only every ten years, the years in between are spent preparing for the next one and in doing smaller scale related productions—but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you what I saw on stage and then a few highlights of the tour.
The stage is immense. The main playing space is 40 meters wide and 10 meters deep, with a permanent architectural setting offering actor entrances and stairs to the right and left and a second stage, referred to by the company as “the middle stage,” as a large enter-below upstage center. The middle stage is a proscenium stage with an opening 12 meters by 6.30 meters, a playing space of 22 meters by 17, with an additional backstage storage space of 17 meters by 15. The middle stage has no fly loft. The main stage is open to the outdoors, but a movable roof can protect the main playing space and the orchestra in the pit from rain. The auditorium is a simple shed with continental seating for 4,750 on one floor. It has a back wall, side walls, and roof, but most of the audience can see the Alps over the architectural setting. The movable roof partially blocks this view, but in good weather it can be rolled out of sight behind the stage house.
The show has three dramatic elements. The main action, which is a dramatization of the last week of the life of Jesus, is played mostly in the main playing space, with a few scenes in the middle stage. The generic architectural setting for these scenes and the costuming have a very restricted color palette. The lighting is basic illumination, being a mixture of daylight during the afternoon performance, supplemented by about half a dozen large HMI fresnels. At night, about four dozen PAR cans provide additional lumens. This main action is broken up by scenes in which 48-person chorus and narrator take the stage and provide musical commentary. The action also is broken up by tableaux vivants presented on the middle stage. These are intensely colored “living pictures” of scenes from the Old Testament that thematically relate to the New Testament events that are part of the main story. It's all visually interesting—the crowd scenes with up to 800 people are exciting—but the tableaux vivants are the real scenic and lighting eye-candy. The only constant element in them was a forced perspective raked platform; all the rest of the scenes, including the rake's ground cloth and the surrounds, were different and were intensely colorful.
During our tour between the first and second halves, the afternoon and evening performances, I was most interested in seeing how the scene changes were done for the tableaux vivants. Our tour started on the middle stage.
“These are all the sets we have,” said Lück, pointing to a colorful pack of flats and overhead rollers. Set and costume designer Stefan Hageneier “wanted a real difference between the acting and the standing pictures. That is why the standing pictures are so heavily colored.” The scene shifts are accomplished by 40 men who carry nearly everything. “This is different from a big theatre,” explained Lück, “where everything comes down from the roof, but we need a very low roof because you want to see the mountains in the background, so the big backgrounds roll down. We have had these rolls for ten years. Before, the only rolls were in the cellar. Right now we have them on the top (five) and in the cellar (eight).” The crew learns the shifts in rehearsals that start four weeks before the first performance, four times a week, running up to six hours. Three crew chiefs supervise them, and they have a lot of experience, as does the crew. The man who opens and closes the middle stage's main curtain and who moves the teaser and tormenters is 77.
Lück showed us several scenery items with particular pride: the caster lift system for the raked platform and an olive tree used in the Mount Olive scene and Judas's suicide. The platform sits firmly on the deck with retracted casters. Compressed air, which is stored in canisters under the high back of the platform, fill small bladders made from fire hose sections, which lift the platform off its feet. “Then these turtles let it move to any position. It's a German word: ‘turtles',” said Lück with a laugh. The tanks hold enough air for 20 movements.
“We have a special thing for this year, this big olive tree,” said Lück, showing us what looks like a full-sized tree, but made of metal and foam, and weighing 1,000 kg. “We only have to fix it to the floor, and when Judas goes to his end it stands strong.” Very little dialog is spoken on the middle stage because the sound doesn't get out to the auditorium, so a microphone is hidden in the tree to pick up Judas's last speech.
“It's the first time in the Passion Play that we are using microphones,” said Lück. In the intervening years they did some productions in smaller theatres with audio support from the equipment and event services provider Neumann & Müller, and learned that a little amplification helps the audience. “It is hard for the audience to listen for six hours, not hearing everything,” explained Lück. “So we tried it in the years between and we found that it is better.” The orchestra and the soloists in the chorus are mic'ed. The reinforcement for the rest of the cast is done by foot mics along the apron edge. A program running on a small laptop controls the faders on a Yamaha sound mixing desk in the house so that the sound from the speaker arrays, hung over the audience and hidden in the scenery, tracks whoever is speaking. The reinforcement is subtle, but not much is needed because the theatre and village are quiet. There is no automotive traffic allowed within several blocks of the theatre during the show.
The sound equipment, being new to the show, is rented, but the lighting equipment is owned by the company, and a lot was bought new for this year with the idea that it would be used for performances between Passion Play seasons. “In summer times in the last five years, we did Bible-clothed stage performances,” explained Lück, “mostly with Christian Stückl [the director at Munich's Volkstheater, and the director of the Passion Play since 1990].” Classical music concerts also fill the theatre, but only for a few warm summer months. “In May and June it was crazy cold, like 5 degrees (celsius)!” said Lück, commenting on this year's weather.
Most of the lighting system is over the middle stage in support of the tableaux vivants, and is made up of large fresnels and banks of incandescent asymmetrical cyc lights. Many of the fresnels are accessible from a lighting bridge and ladders, so they are refocused and regelled as needed during the show by a six-man electric crew. Some remotely ballasted 4 kW HMI fresnels over the middle of the stage are fully automated. The over-stage equipment is hung on aluminum box trusses supported by chain motors. Some of the new equipment includes half a dozen automated lights on the FOH lighting truss in the auditorium. These provided lightning flashes at the end of the crucifixion scene.
The olive tree started a conversation about who built the scenery. “Me and a lot of other people. It's a big part of my job for ten years,” explained Lück, who has a degree in scenery construction and experience in the building construction trades. The show program lists the set construction crew, the welders, the sculptors, and others who built the show, and many of the names are also those of cast members or close relatives. So much for my idea that a big Munich scenic shop built everything!
Lück lead us down into the cellar to see the stage machinery there, the hoses that fed isopropyl alcohol to a bonfire effect used in the second half, and screw-driven wagon in the orchestra pit that moves the orchestra upstage far under the apron edge if a severe rain storm comes. It's also the storage position for the dinner break, during which the stage crew hoses the animal manure from the big market scenes off the stage.
There in the orchestra pit, we discussed the rehearsal process and how the actors literally grow into their roles. The twenty lead roles are double-cast, so they alternate performances, partially to give the performers' unamplified voices a rest, but also because almost all of them have full-time work that can't be abandoned for the season. The actors playing a part rehearse together, one doing the role and the other watching, and then switching. “We rehearsed at first about two and a half months inside a room,” explained Lück, “because it was winter. Then we went outside, and it also was cold. We had to sit and wait. We try to have everybody do the scene, but it is often not very easy.”
Actors may play the big parts for more than one season, and move from one part to another. Lück is playing Judas Iscariot for the second time this season, having performed it also in 2000. In 1990 he had the role of Prologue. In 1980 and 1984 (a special 350th year production) he was a member of the crowd. Anton Burhart, one of the actors playing Caiaphas, played Jesus in 2000, Nathanael in 1990, and a member of the people of Jerusalem before that. People start as children in the crowd scenes, and if they stay in the area, grow into older roles. Would Lück still be playing Judas in ten years, or would he be too old? “In ten years . . . I don't know. The director decides; we will see.” The director, Christian Stückl, is a native of the village. “We also are friends,” said Lück. “This makes it much easier.”
Our tour then took us to the top of the permanent setting walls, where during the show Roman soldiers stand watch over the Jerusalem crowd, but we went there to see the base of the moving roof. “We started building the roof I think seven years ago,” said Lück, “but it was ready one year ago.” The roof is made of a translucent plastic, but above the plastic is a stainless steel screen. “When rain hits the Edelstahl [stainless steel] it goes tshooos,” said Lück, making a spreading motion with his arms, “so it is very quiet.” The roof moves back on what looks like cogged railway track out of sight, when the weather warrants this. The motors on the roof have position encoders so the two ends of the roof move together at the same speed.
There was much more to our tour and the show, but there is limited space in Protocol, so I will stop here, but you might be wondering if the show is worth seeing? Absolutely! While most of the people on stage are not professional performers (e.g., Anton Burhart, playing Caiaphus, is a forester by trade; the other Caiaphas, Anton Preisinger, is a hotelier), the performances, including the music and singing, are quite good. Work on the script since WW II to purge it of any hint of anti-Semitism has made it a more complex tale than I was taught as a child. It still is essentially the story told in the Gospels, and I doubt that Christian believers would have a problem with it, but the conflicting motivations of the individual characters and the greater societal forces are clarified, making it much more interesting for a non-Christian audience. Besides, where else can you see tableaux vivants today? However, if you plan to go, plan to buy your tickets well in advance—years in advance, if possible. As one woman in the audience put it, it is easier to get tickets to the Bayreuth Festival than it is to the Oberammergau Passion Play—and if you miss one Passion Play season, you have to wait ten years for the next!
Cheers,
Karl
www.oberammergau-passion.com/
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