EDGE Boston

The original title for Wim Wenders’ 1988 film was Der Himmel uber Berlin, which translates loosely as heaven, or sky, over Berlin - an apt description of a movie that peered down on the city blocks and its disgruntled citizens in cool black-and-white. There is a story - an angel falls in love with a trapeze artist, and gives up his spiritual powers to be with her; though the film may be best remembered as capturing the city at the end of a historical era: the next year the Berlin Wall was to come down and reunification would forever blur the geographical and political distinctions that defined the city since the end of World War II.

How can such a distinctive film - with its angel-eyed views of the city - be turned into a stage production? That’s the challenge that was faced by two theater companies - Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre and the Dutch Toneelgroep Amsterdam when it was decided to somehow find a stage equivalent to Wenders’ cinematic experience. And it embodied numerous issues, such as how is it possible to find the stage equivalent of the film techniques that Wenders used so extensively in his film; and, even more tellingly, how do you capture the film’s evocation of a city at a great historical moment?

It’s these questions that Gideon Lester, the American Repertory Theatre’s Associate Artistic Director, and Ola Mafaalani, the Syrian-born director, wrestled with for the past three years after deciding to bring Wenders’ film to the stage. The result of their collaboration - Wings of Desire - recently completed a run at Toneelgroep Amsterdam and now has its American premiere at the Loeb Drama Center, where it runs through December 17. (Mafaalani directs the production, Lester co-adapted the stage text with Dirkje Houtman.)

It was Robert Woodruff, the ART’s artistic director, who brought Lester and Mafaalani together. He had seen her production of The Merchant of Venice in Amsterdam four or five years ago, and knew immediately he wanted to work with her. He invited her to Cambridge where she met with key ART personnel to discuss that possibility; and the project she was most interested in was to stage Wenders’ film.

"We wondered how the hell is she going to do this?" explained Lester last week. "Because it is such a film - it’s virtually about a city and a time that doesn’t exist anymore. Even Wenders was very aware of that when he was making the film. He wrote in a essay that he was an archivist recording a city and a life even as it was disappearing; so there was that whole question - how do we deal with fact that the fall of the Berlin Wall completely changed the world? We couldn’t pretend that the world was the same place as it was in 1987.

"And." he continued, "there was also the question of how do you put angels on a stage. In a film you make them appear and disappear, and use subjective shots and effects - but how do you find its stage equivalent? So we knew from the beginning the challenges were huge."

To realize this effort, it was decided that Wings of Desire be a collaboration with Toneelgroep Amsterdam. It was a company that Mafaalani has worked with a number of times over the past decade, specifically with Shakespeare adaptations whose common thread was her use of angels as observers in the action. "As far as Olla is concerned, her fascination with angels comes from the film. I feel that if she was ever going to stop using angels, she had to exorcize them by going back to the source, which is this film. She saw it in the 1980s, forgot about it, and then angels started cropping up in her Shakespeare productions. She started putting these silent witnesses in. In a way they were extensions of the audiences - observers to the tragedies she was presenting. For her they are not religious and not moral, rather they stand outside the world of humans, and they give a different kind of perspective to the world as it unfolds. There’s something very comforting about it. They’re a force for good - and have always been that. - invisible friends and, of course, guardians. There is something very hopeful about them at the time when the world feels pretty bleak. That was also the case of Wim Wenders when he made Wings of Desire. Berlin was a pretty troubled place that had its heart cut in two. The angels provided a kind of unity for the city before unification was possible - they could walk through the Wall and belong equally in East Berlin or West Berlin. What you realize through the angels eyes is that human life is all the same - it didn’t matter if you lived in communist East Berlin or capitalist West Berlin, or Amsterdam and Boston in 2006. The concerns of daily life are the same."

The approach, then, is to strip the stage of any specific geographic locale. There is no representation of Berlin onstage; instead there’s a largely empty stage with spare design elements that allow their scenario to take place anywhere. "You travel around the Western world today and cities are looking more and more the same;" Lester explained, "so it doesn’t matter where the production is set at the moment. Obviously it is not set in Baghdad, but in the West it doesn’t matter where it is set because life is becoming more and more homogenous; but there is this distinction in the film and in the production as well between a global political context, and a personal story of the concerns of daily life - of falling in love, of losing someone you love, of anxiety of death, of hunger; and those two worlds run in parallel with each other."

Wenders’ story focuses on a pair of angels - Damiel and Cassiel - who observe the everyday life of Berliners. Eventually Damiel focuses on Marion , a beautiful aerialist who dresses like an angel and performs in a third-rate circus, and becomes so overwhelmed by her that he chooses to put his own wings (figuratively, that is) aside and become human. (If the plot sounds vaguely familiar, it turned up in the American remake, City of Angels, with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan.)

If the stage version humanizes the angels, it also turns Marion into an ethereal figure who can soar high above the stage with the ease of a supernatural being. To find an actress capable of such daring moves, Lester and Mafaalani auditioned a good number of aerialists, before finding their Marion in the person of American actress Mam Smith. "She was incredible." Lester recalled. "We spent a day auditioning in Brooklyn and when Man came in and we realized we had never seen anything like her. I actually find her hard to watch, because my heart is my mouth all the time when she performs. It’s unbelievable what she can do. In this show she’s performing in huge white strips and hoops of fabric suspended way up above the proscenium, and the fabric becomes a total extension of her body. She’s completely fearless, but watching from the audience her can be heart-stopping."

In order to give their production a contemporary immediacy, Lester and Mafaalani came up with the device of using a newsperson who sits onstage and reads today’s news. For the Cambridge production the role will be played by WBUR’s Robin Young, a journalist best known for her as host of the daily news magazine Here and Now. "Luckily Robin Young is a good friend of the theater, and lives nearby, so we called her asked her if she was interested in being part of this crazy project, and she agreed. She has now taken time off from Here and Now, and his playing herself onstage as a newscaster reading the news of the day as she would on NPR. It’s great, because it adds a completely different dimension to this poetic story - you’ve got these great poetic images, and then you’ve got this icon of news and reality who is very familiar to the audience acting as an counterpoint to those images. It’s kind-of cool that you get to see a radio personality onstage."

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