Homburg—Dramaturg’s Journal—The Biography of a Production
Homburg—Dramaturg’s Journal—The Biography of a Production

Summary/Abstract: This Journal was born digital, and is a work in progress, as well as a work in (and about) process. It was inspired by the request of director Jorge Cacheiro that I serve as dramaturg for Homburg, JC’s new adaptation of The Prince of Homburg by the German author Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). I decided to keep track of the show from the moment it entered my life as a responsibility and challenge on October 8, 2008, through its world premiere opening and run at the MSU Kasser Theater, March 10-15, 2009. The Journal speaks for itself. But I will say that part of its “charm” seems to derive from the gradual unfolding of my awareness of exactly I was being drawn into—a separate (un)reality, another world—the intricate methodology of theatrical production. Heinrich von Kleist—dramatist, essayist, erstwhile journalist—was a quintessential Romantic figure. Born into an aristocratic Prussian family with a tradition of military service, he lost both his parents by the age of fifteen. Through Kleist’s mercurial, unhappy career, he fervently yearned for a Lebensplan (“life plan”) but instead became a hectic and inveterate wanderer and oft-thwarted author, given to debilitating anxieties and serially-destructive quarrels with friends. His literary pretensions were openly scorned by his idol, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Kleist engaged in several ill-fated and unconsummated epistolary love affairs until, at thirty-four, less than five months after completing his final work, The Prince of Homburg, he finally found a woman devoted enough to commit suicide with him on the banks of the Wannsee River outside Berlin. The Prince of Homburg—unpublished at the author’s death—serves as the basis for Cacheiro’s Homburg. It is the story of an impetuous, Hamlet-like Prussian cavalry officer who has chronic difficulty choosing between the rigors of service and the allure of dreams—his own and others’. As the play opens, Prince Friedrich “awakens” under a tree away from the battlefield, into a setting that may or may not be a dream. The drama itself often reads as an overheated manifestation of Kleist’s imagination rather than a version of the historical account upon which it was based, the June 18, 1675, battle of Fehrbellin. The Prince is set adrift into a complex of relationships that test his mettle: with Hohenzollern, his duplicitous and manipulative friend; the Elector of Brandenburg, imperious monarch and commander, and his empathic wife, the Electress; and the willowy, passionate Princess Natalie, Homburg’s cousin. Conflicts of the head and heart arise from the first moments of the play and persist until the ambiguous conclusion. Does the Prince serve the state, or is his legitimate allegiance to his love? Is he guilty of the crime to which he has been condemned to death, or a victim of circumstance? Is he a dilatory scribbler with his head in the clouds, or a martyred, conscience-wracked,

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