From the Deep Archives: DEAD END KIDS by Mabou Mines

Anthology Film Archives, that incalculable East Village treasure, is currently halfway through a once-in-a-lifetime series devoted to the complete film and video works by Mabou Mines, the legendary American theater collective. Put together by Mojo Lorwin -- whose father, Lee Breuer, was one of the founders of Mabou Mines and one of its foremost writer-directors – the series last week screened six hours of documentation by Jill Godmilow of Breuer’s 1987 gender-reversed production of King Lear as well as the film of Breuer’s 2003 staging of Ibsen’s Dollhouse. Still available for viewing: Godmillow’s feature film Far From Poland, which stars several Mabou Mines actors; a screening of Moi-Même, an hour-long film that Breuer shot in Paris in 1968 and that Lorwin finally completed in 2024; an exceedingly rare screening of videos documenting two early Mabou Mines pieces, The Red Horse Animation and The B. Beaver Animation; and two films by JoAnne Akalaitis, a short feature called Other Children based on a Jane Bowles story and the film version of her acclaimed stage piece, Dead End Kids: A History of Nuclear Power. After the screening of Dead End Kids on Thursday March 19, I will be conducting a conversation with Mabou Mines actress Ellen McElduff, a close collaborator with Akalaitis who appears in both films.

When the Dead End Kids movie was released in 1986, I wrote an article for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section about it, which I’m reproducing here.

“A Revue for the Nuclear Era Moves from Stage to Film”

When the writer-director JoAnne Akalaitis was first approached to make a film from her award-winning play Dead End Kids, an Off-Broadway hit performed by the avant-garde company Mabou Mines at the Public Theater during the 1980-81 season, she flatly refused. “I’m not one of those theater artists who want to recycle stuff, turning plays into movies into videotapes,” Ms. Akalaitis said recently. “I don’t believe in making icons of your work.

But partly because she was offered a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and partly because of what she saw as the political urgency of the subject matter – Dead End Kids is subtitled “A Story of Nuclear Power” – Ms. Akalaitis changed her mind. The film she made, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, began a two-week run last Wednesday at Film Forum 1.

Unlike such well-known films on the nuclear issue as Testament and The Day After, Dead End Kids doesn’t dramatize a doomsday scenario. Instead, the film examines scientific research as a timeless and noble quest for knowledge sometimes corrupted for lethal purposes.

When it was performed onstage, Dead End Kids was a freewheeling intellectual vaudeville using a variety show format to express multiple perspectives on nuclear power. The segments ranged from a grade-school science fair entitled “Atoms for Peace” to a sleazy comedian’s nightclub act, from a fragment of Goethe’s Faust in German to stock film footage of American life in the 1950s, from Madame Curie’s discovery of radium to a delirious dance routine based on the Four Sergeants’ post-Hiroshima pop hit “Hubba Hubba,” which proclaimed, “It’s mighty smoky over Tokyo!”

Although many of these elements ended up in the film, they had to be entirely reconceived for the big screen. “I didn’t set out to make a movie of a play or to document a stage production,” Ms. Akalaitis explained. “The movie of Dead End Kids is quite a different experience.” For one thing, the director pointed out, “Film demands some sort of continuity, however primitive.” Abandoning the collage structure of the play, she organized the material into a loosely chronological narrative that traces the spirit of scientific research from medieval alchemy through the history of physics to the brink of Chernobyl.

“It’s obvious to me that alchemists were the original physicists,” Ms. Akalaitis said. “They weren’t crazy people trying to change lead into gold – they were involved in serious investigation of the nature of the universe. Instead of accepting the medieval way of thinking about the world, they had a secular commitment to the idea that you could physically change the world.

“But they had a corresponding idea about changing themselves, and they constantly saw themselves as seeking harmony with nature. There was this triangle: God, Man, Nature. But in the post-industrial age, things became more compartmentalized. Now it’s possible to do this terrible work, the consequences of which include the possibility of millions of people dying, and go home to your wife and kids and lead a normal life.”

When it came time to transform the stage play into a shooting script, Ms. Akalaitis found herself studying classic screenplays by Luis Buñuel, René Clair, and Jean Cocteau, whose poetic surrealism she found inspirational. For instance, a key theme of Dead End Kids onstage had been the simultaneous existence of different historical periods. To translate this into film, Ms. Akalaitis chose to give certain characters eternal life. Thus, after discovering radium, Madame Curie (played by the magisterial Mabou Mines actress Ruth Maleczech — pictured below) reappears through the movie as a silent conscience, looking askance at nuclear reactors and television commercials for glow-in-the-dark crucifixes. And a big black poodle, the guise through which Mephistopheles first presents himself to Faust, later shows up in the backyard bomb shelter of a 1950s American family – an absurdly comic image of domesticated evil.

“My biggest influences have always been film makers like Fassbinder, Godard, Alain Resnais, and Kurosawa. I idolize them,” Ms. Akalaitis said. “When I want some artistic nourishment, I look at movies, and I have been doing that for 20 years.

“In preparing for Dead End Kids, I started looking at movies with more of a student’s eye. For instance, the director of photography Judy Irola and I watched hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz together, saying, ‘Look at that amazing pink light’ or ‘Look at the way that camera doesn’t stop moving,’ just to have the experience of watching a contemporary genius at work in film.”

Between the decision to make the film of Dead End Kids and the striking of the final print came years of struggling to raise money – the independent filmmaker’s familiar dance. The actual shooting of the film took three weeks; finding the money to finish it took three years. The final cost was $500,000 – a pittance by Hollywood standards but a fortune when raised in bits and pieces. Contributions from private foundations and individuals, many of them supporters of Mabou Mines’s theater work, covered the costs of editing the film and recording the soundtrack by David Byrne of the rock band Talking Heads. A $40,000 grant from PBS allowed Ms. Akalaitis another week of shooting three years after filming began.

It wasn’t until the filming was finished that the makers of Dead End Kids realized that the political nature of the film might cause problems with finding distributors or fund-raising sources. “Corporations were not going to give us money, because it’s not easy for them to support political projects,” said Marian Godfrey, who produced the film with Monty Diamond. “Any political film will be a liability because some people won’t agree with you.” On the other hand, the film was made so cheaply largely because many people donated services or deferred payments out of political sympathy One antinuclear activist donated her home in Westchester County for a crucial 18-hour day of shooting.

Grueling as it was to proceed piecemeal on a shoestring budget, the experience was an education for the 48-year-old director, a stage veteran but a newcomer to film. “I never thought I would go to meetings where people would say, ‘Will it have legs in Canada?’ Nor did I think I would ever be saying, ‘Hey, I got a great review in Variety,’” she noted with amusement. “But I find myself doing both those things.”

Ms. Akalaitis is one of the founders of Mabou Mines, whose members include Ruth Maleczech, Ellen McElduff, Frederick Newmann, Greg Mehrten, Terry O’Reilly, and Bill Raymond, all prominently featured in Dead End Kids. Since its formation in 1969, Mabou Mines has become one of American’s most respected theater troupes through its productions of plays by Samuel Beckett and Franz Kroetz as well as original work. But the company had mostly played to small, avant-garde audiences until Dead End Kids, which has had more than 200 performances at the Public Theater and on tour across the country. Its popular success encouraged the director to believe there would be a mainstream audience for this film version.

“This is the first Mabou Mines project that has the possibility of reaching the public consciousness, because it deals with something everyone thinks about, no matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on,” Ms. Akalaitis said. “Because it entertains you, the movie tricks you into thinking about the most primitive fear of nuclear holocaust.”

New York Times, November 9, 1986

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