RADIO REVIEW : ‘Outsider’ a Slice of History

You’ve heard of museum theater. Now, you can hear museum radio theater.

After its revelatory premiere last week with Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s cantata, “The Flight of Lindbergh,” Voices International’s series of German radio drama, “Soundplay,” takes a turn at the corner of Sturm und Drang with Wolfgang Borchert’s tragedy, “The Outsider” (at 10 tonight on KCRW-FM (89.9).

As the first radio theater work produced in Germany after World War II, “The Outsider” offers a rare glimpse into the heart of a broken nation, and, at its best, the play’s almost defiant attempt to reach back to a pre-Hitler Expressionist style is like a second, aesthetic defeat of Nazism.

The ghost of Georg Buchner hangs like a shroud over Borchert’s tale of Sergeant Beckmann, a guilt-ridden grunt in Hitler’s defeated army returning to Germany after three years in a Siberian POW camp. Like Buchner’s tortured, alienated soldier, Woyzzeck, Beckmann becomes Everyman, assuming a society’s collective shame while standing apart from that society. Unlike the shattering “Woyzzeck,” however, “The Outsider” regurgitates obvious sentiments; in some ways, it’s more of a tract than a drama.

It defeats director Georges Wagner Jourdain’s efforts to humanize Borchert’s parade of straw characters. Jeremy Geidt, for instance, is a slithery vocal presence as a double-talking cabaret producer until he comes out with lines like, “Where would we be if everyone started telling the truth?” Jeremiah Kissel makes us almost see the sweat dripping off Beckmann when he learns of his parents’ suicide, but, finally, he sounds like an actor trying to play Jesus.

Martyr characters rarely serve even the best actors very well, and next week’s “Soundplay” production, Gunther Eich’s 1951 “Dreams,” suggests a Germany moving beyond Hitlers, martyrs and guilt. It’s not at all museum radio theater.