I remember as a kid seeing footage of Hitler addressing the populace, and the derogatory cartoons. The odd way he spoke, there was a rhythm, yet something deeply troubling. Something ridiculous in his demeanor, comical but pathological. Germany suffered crushing defeats and Adolph told them what they were desperate to hear. He also found a marginalized, innocuous Community (the Jews) to blame for all of Germany’s tribulations. He and a member of his inner circle devised a way to commit genocide without drawing attention.
In 1928, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera premiered in Berlin. New York in 1931. The characters included beggars, thieves, sex workers, a very smooth, ruthless criminal (Mack the Knife) and a corrupt cop (Tiger Brown). Threepenny Opera detailed a caste system with its inhumanity, savagery, racism, and destitution. A kind of metaphysical cannibalism. Like the slave trade in the deep South, the culture subsisted on the exploitation and abuse of the oppressed, who had no agency.
Written and Directed by Matthew Posey, the sardonic Moving Creatures gets a jolt from Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera. The costumes (opulent but sad) the makeup (the white pallor of zombies) suggest the privileged yet morally destitute members of Baron Leopold McDoogal’s “cabinet. It borrows from Brechtian techniques: distracting the audience from the narrative, actors that step out of character to sing directly to us, dovetail with Brecht’s manifesto.
The humor in Moving Creatures is darker than the gallows, merciless as the plague. It turns on the mechanics of satire. It’s been suggested that the roots of humor emerge from irony. Even in the midst of the horrific, a well-timed gag can alleviate the sting. Working from a vaudevillian vibe, Creatures is suffused with subversive humor.
Baron Leopold is depicted as a profoundly disturbed, self-absorbed, imbecile. An infant in the threads of a monarch. He’s surrounded by attendants, not servants, with no volition. They indulge his every whim, but run ragged to prevent catastrophe. Like so many idiots who find themselves perched on the throne, his idea of utopia is a kingdom, a universe (?) where no one can say “No.”
Parallel to our present situation, Posey’s narrative presents a despot who spreads misery and death by sheer narcissism and hubris. You might say Posey is on a tangent with Brecht, using the same tools, but from a different angle. Moving Creatures is an allegory, addressing our particular situation by changing the context. Baron Leopold’s court has been stripped of compassion. They have been reduced to Moving Creatures.
The cast of Moving Creatures is as poised and nuanced as they are versatile. Under Posey’s direction they have found a blend of the comical and the somber. Their movements (on a turntable!) are confident and intuitive. When you see a show at The Ochre House, the orchestration of music, song, balance, pathos, deadpan hilarity, is positively sublime.
These lunatics: they live to amaze, to enchant, to seduce, to tickle, to terrify. When they take their places on the stage, a shudder climbs up our spines, and theirs, too. Whenever I visit their realm of the fanciful, the strange, the beguiling, the hi-jinks, I know I will leave the theatre a different man than when I came in.
Ochre House Theater produced Moving Creatures, running May 3rd,24th, 2025. 825 Exposition Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75226. 214-826-6273. ochrehousetheater.org