Performing Arts Department to present world premiere of Kokoschka: A Love Story Feb. 8 to 11

In 1973, while a doctoral student at Indiana University, Henry I. Schvey befriended the eminent Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). Now chair of Washington University’s Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences, Schvey has written an original drama about a notorious incident from Kokoschka’s youth: his torrid affair with Alma Mahler (1879-1964), the beautiful widow of composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911).

Kaylin Boosalis as Alma and Lee Osorio as Oskar
Kaylin Boosalis as Alma and Lee Osorio as Oskar

Kokoschka: A Love Story will receive its world premiere Feb. 8 to 11, 2007, in the university’s A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre. Performances take place at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Feb. 8, 9 and 10; and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 10 and 11.

Tickets are $15 — $9 for students, senior citizens and Washington University faculty and staff — and are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, (314) 935-6543, and all MetroTix outlets. The Hotchner Theatre is located in the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. For more information, call (314) 935-6543.

“Alma was the great love of Kokoschka’s life,” Schvey recalls. The couple met in 1912, a year after Gustav Mahler’s death. Though Alma was already famous, and several years older than Kokoschka, she and the young painter — who had scandalized Vienna with his radical “black portraits” and was known as “The Terror of the Bourgeoisie” — quickly became inseparable. “Kokoschka felt that Alma was almost his female half, his ‘Anima,’ and that he could not create without her. He liked to wear her red blouse while working and for a time even signed his name ‘Alma Oskar Kokoschka.'”

Mahler lived with Kokoschka for three increasingly tumultuous years until 1915, when Kokoschka destroyed a death mask of Gustav Mahler, and Alma ended the affair. Kokoschka enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army and was seriously wounded at Galicia, receiving a bullet to the head and a bayonet wound in his side. When newspapers mistakenly reported him dead, a distraught Mahler ransacked his studio and destroyed their correspondence.

Kokoschka: A Love Story juxtaposes the history of their affair, which unfolds in flashback, with the equally riveting story of the artist’s convalescence. Set in 1918 in a small boarding house outside Dresden, the play finds Kokoschka on the verge of madness, scarred both physically and emotionally yet still obsessed by his memories of Alma. In desperation, he begins corresponding with a doll-maker in Stuttgart and eventually commissions a life-size recreation of his beloved.

Lee Osorio as Oskar
Lee Osorio as Oskar

“There are various accounts of how the doll was received,” Schvey notes. “It’s said that Kokoschka took the doll to the opera; and that he hired a servant to act as the doll’s handmaiden, dressing her in expensive Parisian fashion. But at some point, during a lavish party, the doll was destroyed, thrown from a window and buried in the back yard. And finally he was able to move on and resume his career.”

Kokoschka’s career flourished throughout the 1920s while Mahler eventually left her second husband, Walter Gropius for the novelist Franz Werfel. Yet by the late 1930s both had fled Germany: Alma for France, Spain and finally New York; Oskar — branded a “degenerate artist” by the Nazis in 1937 — for Britain and, after the war, Switzerland, where Schvey met him at his home.

Schvey first contacted Kokoschka while researching the painter’s early forays into playwriting. “Kokoschka’s plays are historically important because they’re the first examples of German Expressionism in theater,” Schvey explains. “He was very, very rebellious and basically made it up as he went along. His apocalyptic one-act Murderer Hope of Woman (1909) caused a huge scandal when it was first performed, with fistfights breaking out in the audience. When we met, Kokoschka told me he had never seen a play before, so he created one that mirrored what he had always longed to see onstage.”

Schvey eventually wrote a book on Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright (1982) and translated one of his major poems, “The Dreaming Youths”, the first example of Stream-of-Consciousness technique in German. Schvey also continued to visit the artist in Switzerland while teaching at Leiden University in the Netherlands. During one trip Kokoschka gave him a portfolio of 13 lithographs illustrating his anti-fascist play Comenius (1972).

“On the way back, I was arrested by German police for smuggling,” Schvey says with a laugh. “They asked if I had anything to declare. The portfolio was in plain view and I responded, in German, ‘Do you mean wine or tobacco?” They said yes, so I said ‘No, I have nothing to declare.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh that’s some artwork that was given to me.’ I had to pay duty on the art as well as a fine for ‘lying to customs officials.'”

Lisa Sullivan as Hulda and Lee Osorio as Oskar
Lisa Sullivan as Hulda and Lee Osorio as Oskar

Perhaps surprisingly, Schvey found the artist and his wife, Olda, more than willing to discuss his extraordinary relationship with Mahler. Olda even showed him photographs of the doll.

“I was a little reticent to raise the subject,” Schvey admits. “But I think Kokoschka felt I understood his work and, even in his late 80s, those years with Alma remained very much in the present tense for him.

“Alma was the great love of his life. He never got over her.”

Kokoschka: A Love Story is directed by William Whitaker, senior lecturer in drama. The cast of nine is led by sophomore Kaylin Boosalis as Alma and junior Lee Osorio as Oskar. Junior Lisa Sullivan stars as Hulda, the doll’s handmaiden, with sophomore Sathya Sridharan as the journalist Karl Kraus.

Set design is by Patrick Huber, visiting artist-in-residence. Lighting design is by Charles Chapman, artist-in-residence. Costumes are by Sally Dolembo with doll design by Bonnie Kruger, senior lecturer and design coordinator for the PAD. Sound is by senior Derek Dohler.

In addition to the play, Schey will lecture on “Kokoschka: Painter and Playwright” at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 2, in the university’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Room 103. The talk will explore Kokoschka’s work in both mediums as well as the intersections between the visual arts and drama. The Kemper Art Museum is located near the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker boulevards. For more information about the lecture, call (314) 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.

Calendar Summary

WHO: Washington University Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences

WHAT: Kokoschka: A Love Story by Henry Schvey, directed by William Whitaker

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Feb. 8, 9 and 10; 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Feb. 10 and 11

WHERE: A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, Washington University, Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd.

COST: $15, $9 for students, senior citizens and Washington University faculty and staff. Available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, (314) 935-6543, and all MetroTix outlets.