There is no fourth wall in “Don’t Wait for the Marlboro Man,†a play from Luxembourger playwright Olivier Garofalo.
The fourth wall is a convention in theater where the actors pretend the audience isn’t there, kind of like the two-way glass in a police interrogation room. The actors are on the mirrored side.
But in “Don’t Wait for the Marlboro Man†someone is narrating action to us, even to the point of telling us “nothing is happening.â€
“It’s a highly theatrical framing device,†says Philip Boehm, artistic director of Upstream Theater, which is staging the U.S. premiere of the play starting on April 12. “It’s almost like a sports commentator.â€
The unusual nature of the play, which blends comedy and drama, was what drew Boehm to it. He previously worked in theater in Europe and is conversant in several languages, so he often looks through catalogs of international plays, which is how he discovered “Don’t Wait for the Marlboro Man.†Boehm read it in its original German and decided to translate it and put it in Upstream’s season.
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The first big hurdle was that the play had no punctuation except in the stage directions.
“That’s the challenge of my text,†Garofalo told the Luxemburger Wort, a German newspaper in Luxembourg. “It does make a difference if certain sentences are read as questions or statements. If someone puts a comma in a certain place, the sentence means something different than if the comma is somewhere else. Every translation is an interpretation, but in this case it’s doubled.â€
Boehm agrees. “You have to really listen, and break down what this speech might mean, how the phrases might pan out, and then you have to reconstruct that in English.â€
Boehm left the punctuation out of the translation as well, so in addition to his interpretation of the text, the actors had to interpret the dialogue for their performances. “It really makes you delve into the work,†Boehm says. “Also in Germany the theatrical text is a little less sacrosanct than here. The directors typically have more leeway there. Here you can’t change a word without the agent’s/playwright’s permission.â€
Garofalo is not concerned with strict adherence to a particular vision for his work and doesn’t even specify how big the cast should be. Instead, he looks forward to the staging and how it will be influenced by the “American aesthetic,†he told Luxemburger Wort.
The American aesthetic clearly resonated with Garofalo since the Marlboro Man — the rugged, smoking cowboy who, between 1954 and 1999 convinced Americans that smoking filtered cigarettes wasn’t girly — is mentioned in the play’s title.
“(Garofalo) has taken this image, which overlaps with the cowboy image, and he plays with it a little in the piece,†Boehm explains.
The play takes place in a hospital waiting room where Sarah is trying to find out what happened to her partner, who was in a motorcycle accident. Also waiting there is Pedro, her partner’s motorcycle buddy, who couldn’t be more unlike her.
Sarah is in her early 30s and trying to build her career, postponing starting a family. She also has a big project at work and is always on her cell phone. She is living her life in the way described by Seneca in a quote that appears at the beginning of the script: “Everyone sends his life racing headlong and suffers from a longing for the future, a loathing of the present.â€
These questions come up again and again in the play, Boehm says: “Are we as a society just racing ahead without even taking the present into account? Are we sacrificing life in the present to rush into the future?â€
He also says the play defies genre. While there are light-hearted moments, there are also “serious discussions about personal security, security for society and individual freedom.â€
Boehm thinks that the themes will resonate with audiences but also challenge them. “It’s our mission to expand local theatrical horizons by producing work that otherwise people wouldn’t see. So this is a chance to see a different type of play, but at the same time we chose a piece that would resonate. I mean, Marlboro Man is in the title. It’s clear the U.S. would be a great place to produce this.â€