Jody McAuliffe remembers when she first got hooked on German theater: It was as an undergraduate, when she acted in Peter Handke's "The Ride Across Lake Constance."
"It blew my mind. It was like having open brain surgery," says McAuliffe, Duke professor of the practice of theater studies and Slavic languages and literatures.
From that moment on, McAuliffe was a committed Germanophile, exchanging musical theater comedic fare such as "Guys and Dolls" for Sturm und Drang. During her career, she has staged German plays such as Bertolt Brecht's expressionistic "Drums in the Night" and Peter Weiss' postmodern "The New Trial."
Now McAuliffe has written her first play, about one of the German experimental playwrights from whom she takes inspiration. "My Lovely Suicides," based on real and imagined events in the life of Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, will have its premiere Nov. 1 at Durham's Manbites Dog Theater.
McAuliffe adapted the play from her own novella of the same title. The book is set to be released by Ravenna Press in April, but advance copies will be available this fall to coincide with the play's premiere. McAuliffe submitted the play to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and was a semifinalist for attendance at the 2007 National Playwrights Conference.
The premiere at Manbites Dog is being produced by McAuliffe's colleagues in Duke's theater studies department, Jay O'Berski and Dana Marks, who is also directing. Their production company, The Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, is presenting the play as part of Manbites Dog's Other Voices series.
Manbites Dog is a professional non-profit theater company that just celebrated its 20th anniversary; since 1998 it has been housed in a building at 703 Foster St., just beyond the outfield fence of the old Durham Athletic Park. ("My Lovely Suicides" will be staged across the street from the theater at 410 West Geer St.; tickets will be sold from the Manbites Dog building.)
Jeff Storer, Manbites Dog's artistic director, says that although the relationship between Duke and the theater is informal, Manbites Dog has proved to be a fertile area of collaboration and a testing ground for students, alumni and fellow faculty.
"Duke does not have any kind of financial connection to Manbites Dog. But talented students who've come out of our classes and our program at the Department of Theater Studies have occasionally auditioned and been cast," says Storer, who also is a Duke professor of the practice and director of undergraduate studies in Duke's theater department.
Last season, for example, he directed current Duke senior Madeleine Lambert in Naomi Iizuka's "At the Vanishing Point."
"Working alongside professional actors from diverse backgrounds gave me greater insight into the collaborative process of creating theater," Lambert says.
O'Berski calls the relationship between Duke and local community theater companies "symbiotic."
In McAuliffe's play, Marks directs O'Berski as Kleist, a maverick figure in German letters and would-be rival of German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Kleist died in a murder-suicide pact in 1811, first shooting a woman named Henriette Vogel and then himself on the banks of a lake in Berlin.
"He was a criminal artist," says McAuliffe. "I call him the first performance artist because he staged his own death as a theatrical event meant for an audience."
McAuliffe blends historical figures with characters from Kleist's dramas to tell the story of the writer's obsessions and unquenched ambition.
Director Marks says the audience can expect a surreal and dream-like play, with staging that is going to ask "more of their imaginations."
The multimedia show also includes a film shot by Josh Gibson, assistant director of Duke's Program in Film/ Video/Digital. The producers received a grant from Duke for a projector and to cover the cost of making the film.
"I had no idea who Kleist was [coming into the project]," Marks says. But after researching him, she found Kleist to be a fascinating, aberrant figure much like the English Romantics Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
"It was all about making some kind of enormous statement with their art," Marks says.
Although much of Kleist's behavior was bizarre, she says audiences will relate to him because he struggled desperately and unsuccessfully for recognition in his own time.
"If you are an artist, it's not all butterflies and flowers all the time. It's actually painful. This is a guy who wanted something so badly, and we can all identify with that," Marks says.
With the production of "My Lovely Suicides," McAuliffe hopes this collaboration, along with her novella, will help reintroduce modern audiences to Kleist's finely tuned ear for moral ambiguity.
"I'd say some people in this country think we live in a world where things are either good or evil no shades of gray. And Kleist absolutely understood that that just simply wasn't the case," McAuliffe says.
"I frankly think it's time for his voice to be heard again."