Hoppla, We're Alive

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In 2018, I completed a Doctorate of Fine Arts at Yale School of Drama. This involved a historical reconstruction and critical evaluation of the production texts used for the 1927-28 season of the Piscatorbühne, the theater company established in the Weimar Republic by the influential director Erwin Piscator. His collaborators, including Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Edmund Meisel, Walter Gropius, and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, made up a who's who of the Weimar avant-garde. In 2019, I worked on a staging of my translation of the first play in that season, Erwin Toller's Hoppla, wir leben! at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. This workshop production, directed by Zishan Ugurlu and using students from Eugene Lang College at the New School, was the New York premiere of the play as we could find no prior record of its performance. For this edition, I produced a readable and actable version of the play, reflecting both Toller's and Piscator's work on the text, as well as our solutions to staging them at La Mama. There are many versions of Hoppla, as Toller and Piscator's collaboration was troubled. I consulted the four-act typewritten manuscript of 1926 and four-act "Lotz Manuscript" of 1927 held at the Toller Archiv at the University of Innsbruck, as well as the five-act version published in September of 1927 by Kiepenheuer Verlag and Piscator's director's promptbook (Regiebuch), with the director's extensive cuts and revisions.