Tuesday at CCES

FROM GUIDEWRITE.COM

Der Besuch der alten Dame ("THE VISIT of the Old Lady") premiered in Zurich in 1956, when Friedrich Durrenmatt was 35. It was such a success that productions sprang up in England and America over the next two years.

Durrenmatt called this story "A Tragic Comedy." More than any other of his plays, this story of an old lady who returns home to wreak an exact and merciless vengeance on her former lover intimately joins comedy and tragedy to support each other in nearly every scene.

The play really has three major characters: the old lady, Claire Zachanassian; her former lover and object of her ruthless justice, Alfred Schill; and the people of the town of Gullen, who make up a kind of composite representation of society itself. Through these characters, Durrenmatt is able to give the audience a darkly comic, breathless, and in the end, unanswerable debate about the nature of justice, redemption and community.

Claire is a hodgepodge of patched-together artificial limbs, held together only by her hate. Since her betrayal at the hands of Schill and the people of Gullen, she has spent her life in a single-minded vengeance. Her justice is god-like. Across all of Europe, she pursues the two men who lied about her in court like a fury; they are castrated and made her slaves. Durrenmatt compares her to an ancient idol. She is like the statue of Justice - eternal, something out of myth. When the townspeople first refuse her offer of a billion marks for the life of Alfred Schill, she says quietly, "I'll wait," and you can imagine her waiting centuries.

Amazingly, we find ourselves cheering her on; as the play begins, she is the only character who speaks the unadorned truth. In The Visit, characters use language to hide their real intentions. As Durrenmatt writes, "Today man lives in a world which he knows less than we assume. He has lost his image and has become a victim of images." In The Visit, he puts the preconceptions that get us through day-to-day life under the microscope.

Although Durrenmatt decried symbolism ("Misunderstandings creep in, because people desperately search the hen yard of my drama for the egg of explanation which I steadfastly refuse to lay."), it is hard not to see the poverty of Europe during the Depression and the slow growth of fascism in-between the lines in The Visit. With the ashes of World War II still in their mouths, the people of Europe in the 1950's faced the growing Cold War and the shadow of the atomic bomb. The question of how a man can hold on to his ideals in the face of grinding poverty was still a strong one. Many saw Claire Zachanassian as a symbol of that desperate fear, but Durrenmatt was steadfast: "Claire Zachanassian represents neither justice nor the Marshall Plan, nor the apocalypse; let her be just that which she is, namely the richest woman in the world who is enabled by her money to act like the heroine of a Greek tragedy, absolutely, cruelly, perhaps like Medea..."