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The Los Angeles Theatre is a bejeweled relic from a different age, when cinema houses were palaces with 60-foot ceilings, multiple chandeliers and complex faux-gold moldings. And that's just the lobby. The venue is such an important feature of the upcoming American debut of the European hit play "Alma" that director Paulus Manker calls it the drama's "17th character."

"It's a sleeping beauty and we're going to kiss it," Manker said, as he warmly surveys the gilded expanse. Manker's company seems to employ every nook and cranny of the building - including forgotten antechambers and marbled lavatories - as it leads audiences from room to room, telling the twisting, winding tale of the life and loves of Alma Mahler-Werfel.

After both bedeviling and serving as muse to the celebrated painter Gustav Klimt, Mahler-Werfel gave up her own budding musical career to marry the great composer Gustav Mahler. Her passionate entanglements with other prominent intellectuals mark the blazing swath she cut through the lives of several geniuses of the early 20th century. Yet Manker said Mahler-Werfel herself would have been forgotten if not for those with whom she associated. "She is a footnote, not a hero," he said. "She fertilized these geniuses."

As her entanglements with these figures of renown each demand attention, the play splits off into five separate narratives. The audience must choose which story to follow and from which angle to physically observe the action, making each person's experience truly unique. Audience members are invited to be "cameras" making a personal film - and they can exchange footage with their friends during breaks in the action (such as during the three-course meal that comes with admission), Manker said. "People are eager for truth; that explains the success of recent documentary features. Here you get the full portion of life ... It's a living film," he said.

Sobol estimated that the intertwining storylines over the course of the 3.5-hour evening, if laid end to end, would total more than 15 hours, in 50 scenes. Continued... In fact, as he does for each city on the voyage, Sobol has written new scenes for the Los Angeles run. On one dramatic path, the action leads viewers through the concrete bowels of the theatre's back pathways, to emerge suddenly in a gorgeous wood-paneled room littered with Franz Werfel's scribbled notes and manuscripts. In another, the audience leaves the theater and gets on a chartered bus with the honeymooning couple for a ride through downtown Los Angeles - or Palestine, 1926 in the characters' world. "The whole building is reverberating with life," Sobol said. "The best way I can describe (the structure of the show): it's like a human brain."

But the play doesn't deify its subject. Mahler-Werfel could be blisteringly cruel to her lovers. After being confronted by Mahler with her infidelity, she challenged her husband to "make love to me and make me forget him." And her sexual brutality wasn't her only unsavory trait. "Her anti-Semitism is a very strange thing," says Manker. "She married two Jewish men, her life was full of Jewish colleagues, but she saw herself as a redeemer, one who could purify the dark Jewish spirit. It's hard to understand, defining her entire life through Jews but criticizing them racially ... she was very open about it and controversial."

This well-heeled production ran for eight years in Europe, landing in Los Angeles for a cool $1 million price tag. Manker explains that this is the next logical stop in tracing the journey of Mahler-Werfel's life, with New York being the final destination. All of the props and set pieces are imported from Austria, including the crown jewel of the show's trappings: a newly discovered original Klimt painting of Mahler-Werfel herself.

Whether Southland audiences, notoriously unsupportive of theater in general and considered less-than-enthusiastic about history, much less European art history, will be drawn to this adventuresome project remains to be seen. But Manker points out, "It's a powerful play about love, passion, death - even if you don't know anything about history you can enjoy it. But as it is connected to the center of this city - this is your history."

"ALMA" runs Thursdays through Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m. from Sept. 30 through Dec. 5 at the Los Angeles Theatre.

All tickets are $125. For tickets call (323) 252-7112 or e-mail tickets@alma-mahler.com . For more information, visit http://www.alma-mahler.com .

About Joshua Sobol

JOSHUA SOBOL - Playwright, author and director. Wrote more than forty plays. Some of his plays have been translated into many languages, and performed worldwide. His play GHETTO has been performed in leading theatres throughout the world and won many awards, including The Evening Standard and The London Critics Theatre Award for Best Play of the Year. It also won three Best Play Awards in Japan. In Israel Sobol received five times the David's Harp Award for "Playwright of the Year". Sobol directed productions in Israel, Germany, Switzerland and the USA. He has been teaching and conducting Drama Workshops at the universities of Tel Aviv and Beer Shiva in Israel, and at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. His first novel "SILENCE" appeared in Israel in 2000, in Germany in 2001 and in Holland in 2002. Mr. Sobol is Member of All About Jewish Theatre Editorial Board  Email Address: josobol@netvision.net.il   

Source: Daily Trojan online

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