KASPAR In Reflection

Director’s Note:

Kaspar awakens. On a stage that represents the stage. Inside the playhouse. Kaspar, the lucky owner of one sentence, begins and begins again to do something with his/her sentence. After the house has been opened, after the audience has grown sick of observing the stage or has come to want more of it.

Homeless Kaspar enters the house of language. “Language is the house of Being: in its home man dwells” (Martin Heidegger). Kaspar begins to dwell on his/her sentence, with his/her sentence.

Kaspar, by the Austrian playwright and one of the “makers of modern drama” (Robert Gilman) Peter Handke, is a poetic meditation on language, identity, homelessness, and theatre. Also called “a speech torture,” it is one of the essential pieces of Handke’s innovative theatre of awareness and of language.
Keeping to the letter of Handke’s text, this production of Kaspar does not show how it really is or how it really was with the historical figure of Kaspar Houser, who incontestably inspired Handke’s Kaspar/Kasper (“Kasper” means clown in German). Instead, it shows what is possible with someone who begins to see, engage with, and experience the world by means of one sentence. It shows Kaspar’s journey to a sonorous land inhabited by prompters, technicians, running crew, and spectators – a journey that, true to the spirit of Handke’s text, finds its beginning in the end.

The story of Peter Handke’s Kaspar is tragi-comic. It challenges us to bear witness to and participate in the reconstruction of Kaspar as a person – as a bundle of multiple social masks (etymologically, “person” means “mask”). It challenges us to see Kaspar being cracked open by and with language at a point in time when our concept of language has been expanded to include the countless computer programming languages as well as “the language of new media” (to extrapolate the formulation of media theorist Lev Manovich) that have proliferated in the past few decades. And then, when we see Kaspar being “cracked open” in front of our eyes, we are possibly challenged to think:

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Ioana Jucan ‘11

Literary Advisor’s Note:

Peter Handke’s Kaspar
Some call him incomprehensible, others call him misunderstood and count him as one of the most important postmodern writers since Beckett. For over thirty years, the Austrian-born Peter Handke has challenged readers with his explorations of language, perception, and the restrictions of expression.
Handke confronts the role and influence that language plays in creating human identity, while at the same time questioning the importance of language and the barriers it creates.
Kaspar (1968), the last of Handke's Sprechstücke (“speak-ins”) has been cited as being one of the most significant works of post-World War II German literature. While it refers to the story of the sixteen year-old Kaspar Hauser, who was found in 1828 in Nürnberg, Germany without the ability to properly speak and walk, Handke’s play goes beyond the historical depiction of an unusual character. Kaspar’s central idea claims that socialization through the construct of language inhibits individuality, suggesting that language has less to do with the comforts of communication than with a subtle coercion into conformity. How can a play that addresses these comforts make us feel so uncomfortable?
In Kaspar, we watch how a human being is molded in society's image and forced into conformity, thereby suffering alienation from his true self. Handke’s text subjects our ideas of individuality to sharp analysis. Not autonomy and independence, but living in pre-formed molds is rewarded by society. What Kaspar experiences on stage can happen daily: The need or desire to conform, to observe and imitate someone else’s words and actions, to assert oneself and at the same time, negate oneself. While language is celebrated as an instrument of liberation in Truffaut’s film, The Wild Child, Handke asks us to distrust language and become aware of the processes that can entrap us.
Aminia Brueggemann, Brown German Studies