’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house….some very nasty things were taking place. German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig doesn’t offer much Yuletide cheer in Winter Solstice, now in an American premiere at City Garage. The play, a subtle political allegory, is set in Germany and centers on Albert (Taylor Lee Marr) and his wife Bettina (Natasha St. Clair-Johnson), an upscale couple. He is a writer, she a producer of arty movies. They have an unseen daughter, Marie, whose birthday will be celebrated in twenty-four hours, along with the visit of Father Christmas. The action takes place on the eve of the winter solstice, when the sun is furthest south of the celestial equator. No sun means cold, dark and snow…and much dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Albert and Bettina, you see, hate each other and spend most of their time trading insults and accusations. What makes things worse is the impending visit of Bettina’s mother, Corinna (Geraldine Fuentes), a motor-mouthed widow who drives Albert nuts. You can imagine his reaction when she arrives with a man in tow whom she has just met on the train. Rudolph (Troy Dunn) is tall, elegant, urbane…and an unregenerate Nazi. Not that he wears a brown shirt or swears allegiance to Hitler; he’s too subtle and sophisticated for that. But even as Rudolph kisses hands, plays Chopin on the piano, and praises his hosts’ taste in modern art, Albert’s skin begins to crawl His suspicions deepen when Rudolph lets it drop that he lives in Paraguay and is a doctor. Albert also has a visceral reaction when Rudolph talks portentously about the need for Germany to return to some mythic past of national greatness. There is “a song of the cosmos we should all sing,” he believes, adding later that it is “the duty of the lower orders to serve the higher orders.” When Rudolph begins to flirt not only with Corinna but Bettina. Albert finally begins to lose his temper. But instead of confronting Rudolph and giving him the boot, he simply gets drunk and begins to pop tranquilizers. This leaves Rudolph free to keep spewing his xenophobic ideas and to do damage to the entire household. ”The idea that we show hospitality to our destroyers is as old as drama itself,” said one British critic after the 2017 London premiere of Winter Solstice. He charged Albert with being a typical modern-day liberal, too wishy-washy and ineffectual to stand up to a ruthless enemy who has no use for ethics or fair play. There is truth in that: Albert certainly does cave in to Rudolph and fails to use force against him. But in my opinion, the playwright betrays Albert by making him such a drunken, despicable shnook that he can’t possibly compete against his antagonist. It’s like putting a flyweight into the ring to take on Mike Tyson. No contest makes for a bad boxing match—and a bad drama.. The playwright has also told his story in an odd, sometimes off-putting way. He puts two narrators, Him (David E. Frank) and Her (Kat Johnston) on stage, where they read from the text and comment on the action as it unfolds before us. This Brechtian alienation device proves more distracting than clarifying.. There are, I should point out, many positive things to say about this production of Winter Solstice, especially the superb acting of the cast, which also included a seventh character, Konrad (Rob Nolan), a painter and Corinna’s secret lover. Frederique Michel’s clockwork-like direction of Schimmelpfennig’s tricky, provocative play and Charles Duncombe’s atmospheric stage design also deserve the highest praise possible.
