"Dreams Against the Cold": Characterization in Kroetz's Help Wanted

Abstract

As interest in Franz Xaver Kroetz spreads and more productions of his plays are mounted in North America, increasing numbers of American actors will confront a challenge for which their training does not fully prepare them. Kroetz's characters are deceptively realistic. Like so many others from Zola to Albee, they inhabit a world that mirrors, poetically or photographically, that of their audience. They behave in a manner that is, in Chekhov's words, "just as complex and yet just as simple as in life." Their much heralded ordinariness — with few exceptions they are unassuming middle–class working people — reinforces their naturalism, but they are somehow more than real. Rather than a deep psychology or an inescapable past, Kroetz endows his characters with a self-consciousness triggered by their immediate situation. They scrutinize themselves constantly, as if from the outside, and this imposes on them a duality of character which makes an actor's close identification with his role a reductive approach. Kroetz's recent play, Help Wanted, both in its structure and its ostensible subject matter, clarifies this method of characterization and suggests his ultimate concerns as a playwright.