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 Steven Rishard & Karen Kandel in Heiner Müller's Quartet. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
Synopsis In his adaptation for the stage, Müller simplifies the lengthy novel and employs only the two co-conspirators, Valmont and Merteuil. These two impersonate other characters from the novel, as well as each other. Quartet maintains the form of the novel in passages spoken as letters from one character to the other. Müller's characters break out of their narration, revealing and shedding personas, adding immediacy to the letter reading. The play unfolds in a timeless, unspecified place. From this ambiguous place, Valmont and Merteuil meet to reenact the degradation and annihilation of the innocent and guilty. In the end, this game of seduction and revenge blurs the lines between amusement and fetish, as Valmont and Merteuil face their mortality and moral bankruptcy. Sarah
Gubbins  Heiner Müller Müller was born in 1929 in the Saxon industrial village of Eppendorf. At an early age, he was tutored in the real life consequences of political beliefs when his father, a minor official in the Social Democratic party (a Communist organization that was banned by Hitler), was arrested and sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis in 1933. In the midst of this turbulent upbringing, World War II broke out. Müller was drafted into the army in 1945 and was captured by the American forces. However, his command of English was so good that he was able to talk his way past the American prison camp guards and escape. At the end of the war, Müller remained in East Germany. When the rest of his family defected in 1951, Müller had an opportunity to leave. He declined, opting instead to stay in the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and move to East Berlin. He began working as a journalist and started writing poetry and plays. At first, his work was well received by the GDR establishment. In the early 1950s, the East German government strictly censored the Arts; only work deemed permissible by the state was allowed publication and performance. His early social realism plays, the 1958 production of Der Lohndrücker (The Scab) and the 1957 production of Die Korrektur (The Correction), were met with high regard and conformed to the appropriate censorship standards. Yet his third play, Die Unsiedlerin (The Resettled Woman) was closed down after a dress rehearsal and banned from performance. Müller was expelled from the Writers' Union. Consequentially, his plays would not be published or performed in the GDR for the next two years. The ban did not deter Müller’s writing. His plays were all set in contemporary East Germany or during an event from German history. Like Brecht before him, Müller mined the history, myths, and the political climate of Germany. He assembled collages drawn from other works of classical literature such as Shakespeare, Seneca and Goethe. His writing evolved from social realism of the late fifties and early sixties into more evocative writings that hinged on meta-phors and employed narrative collages. Perhaps this move away from social realism was in direct response to the GDR censors. Without a doubt, the move did not distract him from continuing his contemporary examination of Brecht's work. Müller was constantly reinterpreting his predecessor. "To use Brecht without criticizing him is betrayal," Müller said in a 1980 interview. The censors attacked Müller’s work again in 1965. This time it was his play Der Bau (The Construction Site) that was canceled. With little hope of having his plays produced, Müller continued writing and working in the theater. He was invited to join the Berliner Ensemble, the company Brecht founded, as a dramaturg in 1970. His work as a playwright and his reconceptualization of Brecht was gaining attention in the West. His play, Philoktet (Philoctetes), premiered in 1968 and was the first of a trilogy of plays he wrote in direct response to the Brechtian model of "learning plays" or Lehrstück. Such a model emphasized the experience of the creators of a piece of theater and incorporated such devices as role switching and casting amateur actors to perform the plays. His popularity in the West allowed him to be granted travel visas out of the GDR. He traveled to the U.S. to teach at University of Texas, Austin in 1975 and shortly thereafter had productions of his play Mauser produced in Texas and his play Cement at Berkeley Stage Company. Müller wrote Quartet in 1981, inspired by Heinrich Mann's German translation of the French novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Along with Hamletmachine, it remains one of his most widely produced plays. He continued to write throughout the early 1990s. In the spring of 1995, he became the Artistic Director of the Berliner Ensemble. However, on December 30, 1995 he lost his battle with cancer, dying just before rehearsals began for his last play, Germania 3. Les
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