New York Times, 19 november 2006
Angels who came to earth now come to the stage
By Donna Kornhaber and David Kornhaber

When the German film director Wim Wenders heard from his publishing agent that an international group of theater artists wanted to adapt his 1987 classic, “Wings of Desire,” for the stage, he didn’t object but he didn’t participate. “I know the worst thing you can do as the original author is to get involved,” he said.
And so the challenge was left to the American Repertory Theater, based here, and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the largest repertory company in the Netherlands.“There are many films that you can adapt to the stage,” said André Joosten, the set and lighting designer for the production, “and there is one film that you cannot adapt. And that film is ‘Wings of Desire.’” Known for its sweeping aerial shots of Berlin and innovative camera work, the film has achieved wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. It tells the story of an angel in war-ravaged Berlin who renounces eternal life to pursue a relationship with a lonely trapeze artist with whom he has fallen in love. It won Mr. Wenders the best director award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival and was named one of the 100 best films of all time by Time magazine in 2005. (It was remade in 1998 as “City of Angels,” a much less memorable version with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan that takes place in Los Angeles.)
The idea for the new production came from Ola Mafaalani, who is among the leading young directors of the Dutch theatrical avant-garde. For years Ms. Mafaalani, who was born in Syria and studied in Germany before settling in the Netherlands, had been adding angels to her revisionist productions of Shakespeare. (A 2001 production of “Macbeth” featured an angel who escorted victims off the stage, and in a 2002 production of “Romeo and Juliet” Ms. Mafaalani added to the cast amute angel who inadvertently assists in the deaths of the lovers.)
When Robert Woodruff, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, approached Ms. Mafaalani about developing her first American production, she suggested an adaptation of “Wings of Desire.” She had seen the film as a student and regarded it as the origin of her fascination with angels. “It had a very profound effect on her,” said Gideon Lester, the associate artistic director of the American Repertory Theater. “If she was ever going to stop using angels, she had to exorcise them by going back to the source.” Ms. Mafaalani was adamant that the piece be developed in association with Toneelgroep Amsterdam, widely considered the foremost theater company in the Netherlands, where she has been a permanent guest director since 2001. “I felt that it was very important to have two realities on the stage,” she explained by telephone. “Two languages, two different histories. This is what the play is about.”
Ivo van Hove, the artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, knew the co-production would present logistic difficulties, from housing actors to transporting sets. But he had faith in this up-and-coming director. “I knew her work back when she was making mainly small productions,” he said in a telephone interview from Amsterdam. “It was always clear to me that her theatrical vision would fit perfectly in the bigger theaters.”
Mr. Wenders, who co-wrote the script of the film, had faith too. “Looking at the credits of the people behind that theater production, I saw no reason to deny their demand,” he said about giving his permission.
After a year and a half of work the play had its premiere at Toneelgroep Amsterdam on Oct. 8; it will transfer to the American Repertory Theater for a three-week run beginning Saturday.
The formidable task of adapting the script went to Mr. Lester and the Dutch play wright Ko van den Bosch, who is also Ms. Mafaalani’s husband. “We had one version where we translated every single camera shot,” Mr. Lester recalled. “So we ended up with this enormous bilingual bible of a text that was about 400 pages long.” It soon became clear that the key to the adaptation would be to “wrestle it away from the source,” Mr. Woodruff said.
Mr. Lester added: “If Wenders’s film is about film, then this production is about theater. And that’s the biggest adaptation that’s taken place.”
From a design standpoint, that meant simplicity. “The theater is very bare,” Mr. Joosten said. “You can see the whole stage house as it is.” A canteen where the characters get refreshments and giant pillars of sand that resemble hourglasses would be the only set pieces. To capture the look of Mr. Wenders’s black-and-white film stock Mr. Joosten decided on powerful halogen lamps that “eliminate all colors,” he said. There still remained the question of how to translate the action of the film onto the stage. On screen the angels coexist with humans who cannot see them: they “observe us and they write details — for example, a passer-by who in the rain folded her umbrella and let herself be drenched,” Ms. Mafaalani said. To make these interactions believable, she said, she relied on an intense regimen of improvisation to find the right balance of the human and divine.
“We didn’t really know until three days before opening night how it was going to live on the stage,” Mr. Lester said. “Ola doesn’t really rehearse. She has the actors move through a series of structured and unstructured investigations. And she throws enormous changes at them every day.”
The American actress Mam Smith, an experienced aerialist who plays Marion, the trapeze artist, said: “I’ve never done improvisation on such a massive scale. It was a deconstruction as well as an adaptation.”
Ms. Smith is one of four Americans in the nine-member cast performing in Amsterdam. The Cambridge cast will be slightly different. Bernard White, who played the angel Cassiel in the Amsterdam production, is replacing the Dutch actor Fedja van Huet as the lead angel, Damiel. The thinking is that an American actor in the lead role will better connect with American audiences.
“One of the early things Ola said was that the angels should be more human than humans,” Mr. White said. Ms. Mafaalani expanded on that: “They want to be downstairs. They want to feel. They want to know what love is. They want to have baby teeth.” The heart of the theatrical transformation involved demystifying the angels. “Wenders uses cinematography to show us the world from an angel’s perspective,” Mr. Lester said. “It’s very different to have a 6-foot-2, 200-pound actor on the stage and have another cast member say, ‘I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.’ You’re asking the audience to buy into an impossible fiction. When you can get that right, it’s really satisfying.” Ms. Mafaalani’s angels do not have wings. To find a visual vocabulary for this secular notion, Regine Standfuss, the costume designer, turned to the men’s collection of the designer Gianni Versace. “What do angels look like?” she said. “They look like people in black suits.”
Ms. Mafaalani said: “There is no God in this play. It’s not religious, but it is very spiritual.” So far audiences have been receptive. “We received eight curtain calls last night,” Mr. Woodruff said about a performance in Amsterdam at the end of October. And the reviews have been favorable. A critic for De Groene Amsterdammer, a newsmagazine, wrote that the play “is a poetic and sentimental gift,” while the reviewer for the news service Geassocieerde Pers Diensten wrote that “ ‘Wings of Desire’ proves its legitimacy as a unique theater production.” Ms. Mafaalani, whose work has yet to appear in the United States, is confident Americans will be receptive: “In these times all over the world people are happy to see angels.”

Damiel and Cassiel are angels, assigned for eternity to observe and catalogue human behavior. Damiel has begun to yearn for more than his remote, spiritual existence; he yearns for human contact, for physical sensation, and for love. He encounters Marion, a lonely trapeze artist, and begins to fall in love with her. As the angels go about their daily business – helping those in distress, listening to the thoughts of the elderly and the dying, recording the diversity of human experience – Damiel grows increasingly restless. Eventually he decides to trade in his wings and his eternal life for human mortality, and to join Marion in the world. Based on Wim Wenders’ unforgettable film, Wings of Desire is about the borders, visible and invisible, that divide us – borders between East and West, between angels and people, between two human beings.

Foolishly, an Angel Falls in Love and Rushes In … and Up

New York Times
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: December 5, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 3 — There must be a Barneys in heaven.

Mam Smith as the trapeze artist and Bernard White as Damiel in a scene from the American Repertory Theater production of “Wings of Desire.”

That idle thought tugged at my mind on occasion during the alternately stimulating but unsatisfying 100 minutes of “Wings of Desire,” a new stage adaptation of the Wim Wenders movie here, a co-production of the American Repertory Theater and the leading Dutch theater company the Toneelgroep Amsterdam. (That company is run by Ivo van Hove, known to New Yorkers for his radical reinterpretations of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Hedda Gabler” for New York Theater Workshop.)

Cassiel and Damiel, the sad-eyed angels eavesdropping on the sorrowing soul of humanity, perform their ministering duties dressed in the sleekest pair of suits you’ll see outside Barneys or Bergdorf’s. These black, beautifully cut peak-lapel numbers repeatedly drew my eye during the cooler passages of this adventurous but diffuse production.

The suits were by no means the only handsome images onstage. In translating to three dimensions Mr. Wenders’s much-admired meditation on the transient but treasured wonders of life, the director, Ola Mafaalani, conjures a few stark, evocative images.

Columns of slowly falling sand, illuminated by golden spotlights, symbolize the steady drift of time through the lives of all the human characters. The angel Damiel (Bernard White) aches to join the flow of life, to know the taste of an apple and the touch of a woman’s skin, but these streams of flowing sand, which collect in pitiful-looking, uneven piles on the stage, wordlessly and movingly express the heavy weight of time’s inexorable passing.

Ms. Mafaalani and her collaborators wisely do not choose to match the somber visual poetry of the movie with elaborate feats of stagecraft. (They would fail in any case; there is no way of recreating onstage the moody caress of Mr. Wenders’s camera as it roams through and above the streets of Berlin, seeming to leave a trail of celluloid compassion in its wake.)

The presence of the trapeze artist, Marion (Mam Smith), among the characters is naturally a theatrical asset. Ms. Smith’s airborne dancing is enchanting, and the production’s conclusion, with Damiel joining Marion in the air for a kinetic celestial embrace, closes the production on a dazzling note.

For the most part, however, the set design, by André Joosten, is rigorously minimalist. There are no sets to speak of besides a humble food cart, which is put to witty use: the smell of sizzling onions would be enough to seduce an angel with any taste to give up the wings and take up a fork.

The adaptation by Gideon Lester (associate artistic director of the American Repertory Theater) and Dirkje Houtman is faithful to the collagelike screenplay (by Mr. Wenders, the playwright Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger), trimming and rearranging its densely patterned, elliptical and sometimes pretentious dialogue. But onstage the elements never cohere into a moving whole.

The stage version substitutes a sense of simultaneity for the more linear pull of the movie. The experiences of the characters are layered on one another, evoking the dizzying flux of city life, although Berlin is left behind in this version, which substitutes local references as needed. (The production had its premiere in October in Amsterdam and later toured the Netherlands.) It’s a canny choice in a way. Why not take advantage of the theater’s multiplicity? In movies the director’s autocratic eye tells you exactly where to look and what to absorb. At the theater you’re free to focus on what you choose. So Ms. Mafaalani allows the stories in the movie to overlap, the characters to wander the stage freely.

A little boy, Andris Freimanis, doesn’t have any dialogue proper, but he skateboards around the stage or punches away at a Game Boy in the food cart or in the audience, seemingly at his own discretion. Homer, played by Frieda Pittoors, moves to the lip of the stage to deliver her musings on the art of storytelling, then recedes to the fringes to observe the action. Stephen Payne plays the Peter Falk role: himself, in other words, and an ex-angel. A battle-scarred, salty type, he regularly breaks the fourth wall in his wry monologues: “Hey, buddy, do Bostonians make pasta?”

When Cassiel moves into the human sphere, the stage breaks out into a heady rock jamboree, with stagehands joining the party to sweep the sand around and Cassiel flinging the plastic chairs across the stage, presumably in an access of joy at his new physical being. Live music — mostly grinding electric rock — is provided by Jesse Lenat and Hadewych Minis, who remain onstage throughout, here and there taking a small role in the action.

This atomization eventually begins to be more distracting than engaging. (This is the only stage production I’ve seen in which the interruptions of audience cellphones seemed to be less an offense than another random element in the mix.) The crucial sequences from the movie are recreated, but too many of them lose their impact in the stage version, which comes to feel slack and shapeless. The use of extras made sense in the movie-within-the-movie, but it seems forced and confusing here.

Most significantly the movie made poetic use of voice-over dialogue that revealed the inner thoughts of the characters. As the camera trailed across a row of passengers in a subway car, their anguished or idle or bitter thoughts were heard on the soundtrack, a poignant commentary on the roiling inner life we all hide behind a placid public facade. Absent the intimacy of film, the device is ineffective and sometimes confusing.

While you can admire the ingenuity that Ms. Mafaalani and her associates have brought to what was clearly a challenging project, “Wings of Desire” onstage adds up to a lot less than the sum of its many parts. The gentle tug of Mr. Wenders’s camera was the binding ingredient necessary to turn this spiritual collage into a legible portrait of humanity struggling through life, surprised on occasion by a moment of hope or happiness that some might like to think of as the brush of an angel’s wing.