A carnival sideshow performer, an old man, promises his audience wonders. He opens a coffin-like wooden container to reveal a somnambulist — a perpetual sleepwalker under his command. Three young adults are seduced and see their lives upended.
Robert Wiene’s 1920 film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is a horror classic. Now Quantum Theatre is hoping playwright Jay Ball’s new stage adaptation will strike contemporary audiences as its own provocative political fable for our times.
Ball, who formerly taught at Carnegie Mellon University, has long been fascinated by the silent “Caligari” film, whose nightmarish set design is an icon of German expressionist art. He said its central question is, “Is it possible to take a morally normal human being and turn them into a killer against their will?” The film’s political resonances might not be obvious to contemporary viewers: Nothing onscreen explicitly references politics, or even World War I, which had just ended. But the film has been seen as both an allegory of Germany’s authoritarian government during the war and a premonition of the coming rise of Nazism.
“I’m firmly convinced that we are in a deeply fascistic moment in this country, and also internationally,” Ball said by phone from his home in Baltimore. “I want to create an adaptation that brings out the latent anti-fascist parable that was always in ‘Dr. Caligari,’ its anti-authoritarian politics.
” He offered the play to Quantum founder and a.