International collaboration set `Wings' in motion
ART, Dutch company unite to produce play based on Wenders film
Gideon Lester is in Edinburgh, speaking by cellphone across the Atlantic about the rehearsals in Amsterdam of a Cambridge-bound stage adaptation of a film set in Berlin.
If all that border-crossing is a little dizzying, it's also highly appropriate for a conversation about ``Wings of Desire." Inspired by the Wim Wenders film, this world-premiere coproduction of the American Repertory Theatre and Toneelgroep Amsterdam explores and expands upon the film's interest in ``boundaries and divisions," says Lester, the ART's associate artistic director.
Working with director Ola Mafaalani and Dutch writer Ko van den Bosch, he is adapting the film to the stage and providing the English translation. The play will open in Amsterdam in October, then tour Belgium and the Netherlands before coming to the ART on Nov. 25.
The story of an angel who chooses to become human when he falls in love with a trapeze artist, the 1987 film is also Wenders's ode to Berlin, then still a divided city. The stage version remains faithful to that vision, Lester says, but it also goes beyond Berlin to explore global divisions.
``It's about huge divides, not just between East and West but between humans," Lester says. ``This is not an attempt to put the film onstage; it's an effort to find a theatrical way of telling the story."
The collaboration began after ART artistic director Robert Woodruff saw Mafaalani's work in Europe and sought to find a project to do with her. It turned out she was ``obsessed," Lester says, with the Wenders film. The idea struck the ART as particularly appropriate for an international collaboration.
The same cast -- half American, half Dutch -- will perform in both Amsterdam and Cambridge. An American actor and a Dutch actor play the angels Damiel and Cassiel, but they'll switch roles depending on the venue: In each city, the native speaker will play Damiel, the angel who becomes human.
As for the script, in Amsterdam it will be a mix of Dutch and English; here it will be mostly in English, with only a little Dutch used ``for the musical quality of the language," Lester says. ``We have no interest in producing a production that the audience can't understand."
The two versions will also vary in their cultural allusions; here, for example, ``Angels in America" is an obvious touchstone, though it's less obvious in Amsterdam. Still, it's ``absolutely" related, Lester says: ``They're both great stories of compassion," and they pose a similar challenge: ``How do you put an angel onstage?"
Mafaalani's approach to that question, Lester says, is typical of her work: ``pretty rock 'n' roll and very playful." Most of the actors will play music, and the set is a hot dog stand with a few chairs -- like the coffee kiosks where, in the film, Peter Falk's character meets Damiel.
``Her work," Lester says, ``is both very simple and very poetic."
Nov. 25-Dec. 17 . 617-547-8300 , www.amrep.org 
