Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Author:Adam Ehrlich Sachs [Sachs, Adam Ehrlich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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THE LIGHTING TECHNICIAN ILLUMINATES THE LIEUTENANT’S DAUGHTER …

He arrives at the City Theater with high hopes of forming warm friendships with both the company and the crew.

This is a task he sets about with care, for in his youth he had often blundered in the first few sentences he exchanged with a new person. And because of that blunder someone who by every metric might have been perfectly suited to become an intimate friend remained, instead, a stranger, or became an enemy. In his ignorance of the art of conversation he not only failed to win people over but even arrayed them against him.

It was in order to rectify that ignorance that he was drawn to the theater. This development scandalized his guardians. He had excelled in his studies at the Polytechnical Institute. A lucrative career awaited him in a factory for the production of borosilicate glassware. Instead he went into the theater. For, as he explained to his guardians in the note with which he bid them farewell, if one wishes to comprehend the nature of human interaction—the various stratagems by which one individual secures the interest and affection of another—then even the most provincial theater is a world-class laboratory.

If his guardians wanted someone to blame, they, who raised him in seclusion from other children and were therefore responsible for his infelicities with them, should look only to themselves.

From the high perch from which he operated the limelight he had an incomparable view of the men and women onstage engaged in the age-old struggle of nurturing in one another’s breast a feeling of fondness and devotion. The actors addressed one another and reacted to one another, and over time he learned which sentences had which effects. What produced a grimace, what produced a smile. What produced a laugh! What produced tears, and what produced no effect.

In light of these observations it pains the lighting technician to recall the conversations of his youth. How oblivious he had been! How naive! For he sees now that the things he thought would produce smiles were precisely those that produce no effect, and the things he thought would produce laughter were also those that produce no effect.

On account of his outstanding technical proficiency the lighting technician rises in time from a distant provincial theater to the very center of the dramatic world, the City Theater itself.

By now he has witnessed thousands or tens of thousands of human interactions, indeed many more than even an ordinary childhood would have enabled him to see, and he is ready to put into practice all that he has gleaned in order to form warm friendships with the company and the crew.

He strikes up a conversation with this or that actor or stagehand. First he introduces himself. He gives his name—which, imagine, is something he’d often failed to do in his youth!—and notes that he is the new lighting technician. He offers pleasantries, a witticism, and praise for a recent action his interlocutor has performed. Then he touches

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