Kienberger comically plays off childhood memories

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

The other night, at the Chopin Theatre's festival of European solo performance known as "I-Fest," I caught a Swiss actor and musician working mostly in German and a little bit in English, in a show called "I Am So Alone." Being an ugly American barely conversant in English, let alone languages beyond, I had doubts about being there. Yet there was no problem. There was no "language problem."

The wide-eyed, frizzy-haired and bespectacled performer, Jurg Kienberger, handed the multinational Chopin crowd a wonderful 90 minutes. Encountering Kienberger, a man of enormous and delicate comic style - he did everything from "That's Amore" to Comedian Harmonists-style impressions of jazz band instruments - was like meeting the Swiss answer to Victor Borge, or a spiritual cousin of Peter Schickele, a.k.a. P.D.Q. Bach. I hope he returns soon.

Kienberger grew up the son of a hotel owner in the Swiss Alps. With a dazed smile recalling Andy Kaufman's, he played two roles based on traveling musicians he knew as a child. One was that of a (fictional) aged pianist given to coughing spells, requiring sips of tea while playing - a sight in itself. In the other role, the pianist's nephew, he proved a tiger on the accordion, a purveyor of such global kitsch classics as "That's Amore," and a vocalist of high, dry falsetto distinction.

The other half of Saturday's bill repeats this Friday. It is a 60-minute compression of the Marguerite Duras novel "The Lover," performed in English by the Lithuanian actress Birute Mar.

Like Kienberger, the moon-faced, red-haired Mar has toured her solo act extensively in Europe . Her version of the Duras story, in which a 15-year-old French girl enters into an affair with a Chinese man in 1930s Indochina , features a splendid sound design, full of whispers and mysterious reverberations of memory and desire. Beyond the sound element, the stagecraft is simple. Across three panels dangling from the theater ceiling, the video-projected image of a cigarette's smoke drifts horizontally, from left to right. Later, Mar lights a cigarette, and the result is a mirror image of the video projection.

It's not a piece of wide dynamic range; rather, Mar sustains a mood of romantic yearning and loss. Friday, she'll repeat "The Lover" on a bill including a French-language solo, "Music Hall," performed by Marie-Sophie Ferdane.

This Saturday at 7 p.m. the Chopin hosts the German soloist Claudia Wiedemer in "Grete" on a bill with Janusz Stolarski's "Behold the Man," in Polish. At 3 p.m. Sunday, Lidiya Danylchuk's "The White Butterflies" from the Ukraine tops a bill with a repeat performance of "Behold the Man. "

After Saturday's opening performance, Chopin Theatre owner Zygmunt Dyrkacz thanked the audience for coming, invited everyone down to the Chopin's beautiful basement-level lounge for a nice spread, and spoke about the instability of contemporary global politics. It is hard, he said, to predict which countries will remain allies and which will not.

Citing with understandable pride the stylistic array of talent in the first annual "I-Fest," he concluded:

"At least today we are friends."