Werner Herzog's Stroszek: Bedtime for Bruno

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Werner Herzog's Stroszek: Bedtime for Bruno

Hyde Park Theatre,

through March 18

Running Time: 2 hrs

"Bruno is getting pushed aside," says Bruno. Bruno is burly. Bruno is very German. Bruno plays the accordion. Bruno likes beer. Bruno incessantly speaks about himself in the third person. Bruno's last name, by the way, is Stroszek, and the Theaterless Theatre Corps' adaptation of Werner Herzog's film of the same name is a sweetly existential play about this complex hero.

Russ Guy Roten booms and broods with incredible presence as the title character while he makes an enthusiastic, if doubt-plagued, series of journeys: from Germany to America, from a Berlin jail to a Texas mobile home, from living decently with a prostitute to living badly without her. His girlfriend Eva (played with languid grace by Andi Teran) and friend Mr. Sheitz (a sensitive, screechy fellow in the hands of Trant Batey) accompany him for most of his ramblings, but Stroszek still suffers from a sense of profound isolation in his well-founded sense of personal doom.

Stroszek, Eva, and Mr. Sheitz escape their doctors, pimps, and other enemies when they leave Berlin, but the trio encounter these predators once again in the U.S., reborn in the form of smiling but equally malicious creditors (and played by the same deliciously menacing actors who played the villains in Germany). In Texas, they also encounter Clayton, a supremely rural auto mechanic, played by the versatile and ingenious Clint McCown (who recently portrayed Jesus in KAiROS! Co.'s clever Frontera Fest offering).

Set in 1977, and as German as they come aesthetically, Werner Herzog's film had to have mounted some serious translation issues for adapters Josh Frank and Didier Gertsch. The duo coped by making the play "cinematically styled," i.e., a lot like you'd expect a live movie to be, with credits and occasional slides of the actors in character projected against a backdrop.

A few of the gags that the troupe employs could be considered flippant. A talking bird's voice is tweeted by an offstage actor. A chase scene between Stroszek and his girlfriend's pimp on the streets of Berlin is less funny the second time. The slides, while delightful, are perhaps too prolific. But these are minor points, and are outweighed by plenty of successful details ranging from cute to epic.

The bare light bulbs, the pimp wearing a KISS T-shirt, and the "A Little Bird Song," composed by Josh Frank and Conrad C., are such gems. The last -- a ditty somewhere between "Little Birdie," by local band the Orange Mothers, and "Little Yellow Bird," the number sung by a plaintive Angela Lansbury in the film The Picture of Dorian Gray -- has a somber-yet-hopeful tone that nails the hard-won, late-night epiphany, and it fits right into this charmingly done, melancholic bedtime story. In the program, director Josh Frank oozes such fondness for Herzog (who approved the production) that this adaptation could have been one of those hero-worships gone awry. Instead Frank's Stroszek is a coup for devotion.