THE BERLINER’S ‘THREEPENNY’ DOUBLE-TAKE

“I’ll tell you who I’d like to see play the Ballad Singer in ‘Threepenny Ope” said Barbara Brecht. “Dolly Parton.”

This is not a remark that one would expect to hear at a press conference for the Berliner Ensemble. It is, after all, one of the world’s most august acting companies, solemnly dedicated to the plays of its and Barbara’s father, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). It is also headquartered in East Berlin, where Dolly Parton doubtless symbolizes the voluptuous distractions of capitalism.

But Barbara Brecht is no purist. Nor, as it turns out, is the Berliner Ensemble.

Toronto didn’t quite know what to expect when the company brought “Threepenny Opera” and “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” to the Royal Alexandra Theatre two weeks ago, its first visit to North America. Without question, the performances would reflect the philosophy and stage practice of Brecht of 1956. But that was 30 years ago.

However, they have calendars in East Berlin too. Here’s how “Threepenny Opera” opened at the Royal Alex: A punk singer with pink hair bops through a chorus of “Mack the Knife” for a crowd of fans. There’s an odd catching noise in his throat and he topples forward, a shiv in his back.

The actor playing the punk then stands up, peels off his leather jacket (shiv and all) and is revealed as Brecht’s Street Singer. “This is Mack the Knife’s revenge,” he says in English--the play’s sole English line. And then he really sings the song.

“It was Dario Fo’s idea,” explained the Ensemble’s artistic director, Manfred Wekwerth. The Italian playwright had suggested that the company capitalize on the idea that pop culture can trivialize even material with real teeth in it, “Mack the Knife” being the perfect example.

But changing political conditions and the dead hand of habit can also blunt good material. To find out what Brecht wants to say now is the challenge for the Berliner Ensemble, Wekwerth said. To do that, you have to forget everything you did the last time. Not really forget, but put in your back pocket.

Ekkehard Schall, the company’s leading actor and Brecht’s son-in-law (through Barbara), put the matter even more boldly. After all these years, he figures, Brecht is in his blood. “By now, my question isn’t, ‘What would Brecht want?’ It’s ‘What do I want?’ ”

So the Berliner Ensemble hasn’t turned into the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, in thrall to the master’s promptbooks. Both “Threepenny Opera” and “Caucasian Chalk Circle” were living productions, with the former a particular surprise for those who thought they knew what Brechtian acting was all about.

Distance. Anger. “Alienation.” The company’s leadership groaned when the last phrase came up at the press conference, like a group of Actors Studio members asked to defend the Method for the millionth time.

“ This is alienation,” said Schall impatiently. He got up and acted out a little vignette in which a man absent-mindedly shakes hands with a skeleton, walks three steps and suddenly realizes (you could see the light bulb go on) what he’s done.

In other words, alienation is a double-take, a sudden realization that something funny is going on here. Brecht simply wanted his viewers to stop taking wooden nickels. Nothing mysterious about it.

The double-take in the new “Threepenny Opera” production, dated 1985, is that Mack the Knife can slip through his prison bars whenever he needs to approach the footlights for a song-and-dance number. This reminds the viewer that “Threepenny Opera” is a spoof, something that earnest English-language productions don’t always remember. What a surprise to find that the Berliner Ensemble plays it so genially!

Where other stagings rub our noses in man’s inhumanity to man, this one says: So, what else is new? The mood is sly rather than angry, and there’s real fun in the central performances. Some “Threepenny Operas” suggest the world of George Grosz. This is more like Damon Runyon’s. Not that lighthearted; these are German actors. But close.

Think of Lee Marvin as Mack the Knife, Lucille Ball as Mrs. Peachum and Tovah Feldshuh as Polly, and you get a sense of their German counterparts. But this leaves out the best performance, that of Arno Wyziewski as Peachum.

Most actors play Peachum as a Dickens character--the jolly profiteer. Not Wyziewski. His Peachum is an intensely respectable man, with something of the retired educator about him. His seedy black suit says he has known reverses, but he seeks no man’s sympathy. He simply tends to his business. If it is a shady business--what’s your line, brother?

It’s also amusing to see the Ensemble’s traditional burlap curtain used like an opera curtain, with the requisite rigmarole about who bows and who leaves the stage first. Co-directed by Wekwerth and Juergen Kern, this “Threepenny Opera” elects not to be hard-hitting, but to poke fun at its form and its characters, pointing out, for example, how middle-class these denizens of the underworld are. It’s not what one had expected, but we watch it more attentively than if it had been. The double-take effect again.

“Caucasian Chalk Circle” is a 1976 production by Peter Kupke. It is the entire play, complete with prologues and narrative interludes and songs, and it is not continuously absorbing if the listener has no German. An attempt at supertitles was made in Toronto, but they washed out in the light spill from the Royal Alex proscenium.

A general note about the acting: Brechtian acting isn’t cold or aloof. It is clear, classical technique applied to colloquial material, as if the Royal Shakespeare Company were to do “The Grapes of Wrath.”

But the details of a scene are more thoroughly worked out than we are used to. A piece of wedding cake isn’t cut without attention to where the crumbs are falling. A bucket of water isn’t poured without someone registering its exact temperature. A bottle of wine isn’t opened without a vignette about the difficulty of getting the cork out.

This tendency testifies both to German thoroughness and to Brecht’s wish to explore the complexity of all social transactions. But, for an American, it does lose the forest in the trees.

The performances are alive, however. Grusha, the peasant girl who proves worthy to raise the young prince, is played by Franziska Troegner. She is an apple-cheeked girl trying to keep one step ahead of the sheriff, and that’s it--no pathos, no checking with the audience to see how she’s going across.

Schall plays Adzak, the drunken justice of the peace. This rascal is always putting on some kind of act, and we laugh at his barely-covered behind. But his spontaneity is that of panic. It’s an electric performance, full of the risks that great actors take. I’d give anything to see Schall play Falstaff.

He does play Shakespeare, he said. Hamlet is behind him, but he’s got “Timon of Athens” coming up with the Ensemble. Plus all his Brecht roles, some of which he’d like to put aside. (He’s been doing “Arturo Ui” for 20 years.)

“All I’ll be good for at the end,” Schall sighs, “is playing the Cardinal in ‘Galileo.’ The old Cardinal.” But now he is at the top of his form and the Berliner Ensemble seems to be in its second spring. Why has it never played North America before?

“Because we are very expensive,” said Barbara Brecht. “Someone did ask us once, but they decided on the Lippizaner Horses when they saw how much we cost.”

How much? A Royal Alex official said that it cost about $250,000 to bring the 93-member company across for one week. Would that be beyond financial reach for the 1987 Los Angeles World Arts Festival? Or do they come from the wrong part of Germany?