Among the brilliant series of provocations initiated by Heiner Müller in his HAMLETMACHINE is a moment when an actor slowly and methodically tears Müller’s photograph in half. With Müller, one learns quickly to postpone questions until the provocations have multiplied. His ground rules are plain enough: he prefers drama to other forms because it enables him to “say one thing and say the contrary”, and isn’t suggesting self-destruction; rather he is offering himself stripped to essentials. The torn photograph is like the text itself — stripped, blasted, divided. Nothing in HAMLETMACHINE can be taken as found, least of all our dramatic expectations or our experience of Shakespeare. But if this were its only innovation, it would be just another version of the fragmentary, non-linear forms that have been disrupting drama since Woyzeck. His recent plays — HAMLETMACHINE goes back to 1977 — are histories with a difference, gathering into their explosive energetic fields a remorseless sense of loss and destruction. He might mix different periods into his text, or pieces from his own biography. Unlike most Americans, however, he is using the stage as public discourse rather than private confession. Müller’s discourse is embedded in his confrontation with theatrical possibility. Still an East Belriner, but freely traveling in the West, he is calling a plague on all our houses. If theatrical texts can act as public documents, they can do so only as they are willing to deny the truth of history as normally reported. Müller’s plays are such denials, suggesting an exhaustion that can be overcome only by theatrical process itself. In the absence of coherent ideology and leadership, the playwright adresses us from unexpected, dislocating barricades. “The political task of art today,” says Müller, “is precisely the mobilization of imagination.” And so he does what little he can do. Which turns out to be a lot. HAMLETMACHINE is a six-page scenario in five parts that stands, like most of Müller’s plays, as an artifact waiting for a director whose imagination can be mobilized. Taken literally, the text appears to be a little more than Dada scribble: Ophelia’s heart is a clock; Hamlet begins by saying “I was Hamlet,” but later says he was Macbeth; the third part is called a “Scherzo” and takes place in the university of the dead; the actor playing Hamlet is not supposed to notice that stagehands are putting a refrigerator and three TV sets on the stage; and in the fourth part, Hamlet splits the heads of Marx, Lenin, and Mao with an ax. Even if any of this could be literally embodied, there would be no point. Müller’s ideal mobilizer has to be more cunningly theatrical — more provocative even — than Müller’s wildest dreams.