Two days before American voters decided to return the authoritarian Donald Trump to the White House, I attended a production of Quantum Theatre’s adaptation of the 1920 German Expressionist horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Staged in a hidden theater inside the Union Trust Building in Downtown Pittsburgh, director Jed Allen Harris, working with a script by Jay Ball, reimagined the movie (infamous for its alienating angles and disorienting perspectives) as an allegory about incipient fascism. Ingeniously structured as a metafictional play-within-a-play, the audience is ostensibly watching a 1970s East German version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari overseen by the literal spirit of Bertholt Brecht. True to Brecht’s principle of Verfremdungseffekt, that is the “distancing effect,” Harris uses not just performance, but also film and music, to craft a disturbing narrative about the titular carnival barker who is able to use hypnosis to entrance his victims into somnambulism.
In Quantum Theatre’s reconceiving of the Robert Weine movie, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari becomes a potent and prophetic allegory about the way in which irrational psychic impulses can be harnessed by demagogues, about the electric thrum that vibrates just below the surface of polite society that awaits to be activated by unscrupulous grifters and aspiring dictators. At the conclusion of the play (or I should say the play-within-a-play), the characters are able to trap Dr. Caligari into a vertically-placed coffin-shaped box, having seemingly liberated themselves from the fascist danger which he represents. Yet as Brecht and his wife make clear, even with Caligari seemingly imprisoned, “If we do not reform our attitudes toward life, we shall find ourselves drawn to the darkness again.” Before the lights went out Caligari’s box shakes for a second as he tries to get out; some 48 hours later Trump would win Pennsylvania’s nineteen electoral votes.
Last week I met with Karla Boos, the inspired founder of the company, who it was announced yesterday will be producing her final season of Quantum Theatre before her retirement at the conclusion of the 2026-2027 season. We met at East Liberty’s Margaux Café, a coffee shop and bar that in its Central European elegance seemed a particularly apt place to discuss things like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Since 1990, Boos has produced all 106 of Quantum’s plays, directed 33, and acted in seventeen. I told her that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was consummate Quantum for me, the way in which her company always intersects with our current reality at a cutting angle. That shaking coffin inextricably connected to the dark day of November 5th, a prescient reminder of Brecht’s point about how we must be ever-vigilant against the return of fascism, how it’s a problem of the soul as much as it is of politics. The conclusion of the play provided a communion with my fellow theatergoers, no matter how dark the warning was (or maybe especially because of how dark it was). “Our lefty politics are always there,” Boos told me laughing, and in my two decades of being an avid Quantum audience member (at least when I’ve been living in Pittsburgh, and sometimes even when not) that’s often been the case, with the company’s experimental approaches to language, format, and especially environment particularly suited to exploring the political realities of our present.
The Voluptuous Tango by Dominic Muldowney imagined a 1932 encounter between the Italian fascist artist F.T. Marinetti and dancer Isadora Duncan as an avant-garde opera staged in the appropriately ominous art deco stage inside the Mellon Institute; John Krizanc’s immersive classic Tamara, which takes place in the villa of the Italian fascist poet Gabrielle D’Annunzio, was adapted for the Beaux Artes magnificence of Rodef Shalom synagogue, so that audience members followed dozens of actors across several different rooms where performances occur simultaneously, as if you were actually in attendance at this 1927 party; the American premier of John Hodge’s Olivier-award winning Collaborators, about the suffering of Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov working in the dark shadow of Stalin, performed by Quantum behind Bakery Square in 2017. As this litany might indicate, part of what is notable about Quantum productions is that they’re not housed in a traditional brick-and-mortar theater, but rather use the region itself as its stage, with plays performed everywhere from the Gilded Age resplendence of the Flemish-Gothic Union Trust Building to the defunct Carrie Blast Furnace, the Schenley Park Skating Rink to the Frick Park Lawn Bowling Green, the One Oxford Center skyscraper and Chatham University’s bucolic pond. But as Boos emphasized, the “play always comes first and then we look for the setting,” because for her, the nature of Quantum’s experimental aesthetic is dedicated to exploding the bounds of the “language and environment” of the theater.
Pittsburgh’s theater scene punches far above its weight, with Point Park University’s Drama Program ranked number 9 in the country and Carnegie Mellon’s number 4, as well as the region featuring dozens of dynamic theaters and companies like City Theater, the Public Theater, barebones productions, Kinetic Theater, and Quantum. Despite its smaller population, Pittsburgh theater is every-bit as innovative as stagings in larger cities where I’ve lived such as Boston and Washington DC, and in large part the vibrancy of our theater is directly Boos’ doing. Born in Las Vegas, raised in West Virginia, educated at the University of Pittsburgh, and working early in her career in Los Angeles, Boos returned to the Steel City right as the industry was in collapse, though despite its economic tribulations it was a city that already had a vibrant theater community, albeit not one doing exactly what she would forge with Quantum. Kevin McMahon, former president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, said in a press release that “Karla and Quantum were a big part of showing how the arts could shape the city’s reinvention,” that the company “became a hallmark of what Pittsburgh could be,” and this is absolutely correct.
But as Boos also emphasizes, there were certain qualities inherent in Pittsburgh which made the radical nature of Quantum possible, not least of all the dramatic geography of the region itself. We can “never get away from the physical landscape,” Boos said, describing how she found a “virtue in landscape,” and explaining how it was fair to call Pittsburgh, with its “integrity and grittiness,” as a kind of character itself within Quantum’s plays. Pragmatically, Quantum was bolstered by the nature of Pittsburgh as a “city of relationships,” where an attitude that too many dismiss as being provincial is actually an aspect of generosity, where a transplant was able to raise funds for her company through the region’s numerous foundations, or where a cold call to Duquesne Light could yield a performance space or help find a contractor to work on a heating system during off-hours. Fortune favors the brave in Pittsburgh, and as Boos describes it, her “strange, idiosyncratic vision” found a keen reception from critics and the public very early on in the days of the city’s post-industrial decline.
There are some landmark productions across Boos’ thirty-five-year career. For example, the 1994 production of Robert Lepage’s Polygraph when Quantum found its footing in the cultural scene. Then there is Dan Jemmett’s Dog Face, a 2005 adaptation of Renaissance playwright Thomas Middleton’s 1622 The Changeling, performed in a trailer on the site of the former Heppenstall steel mill in Lawrenceville. When the company was invited to perform the play as part of Madrid’s prestigious Festival de Otoño, Boos recalled the difficulty that the company had in having the trailer, originally found on Route 51, where Dog Face was staged, being disassembled and sent on a shipping container across the Atlantic (it had to be sawed in two). Less logistically difficult was the 2022 restoration of the lost 1730 opera Idaspe by Riccardo Broschi at the Byham Theater, directed by Claire van Kampen, known for her work at Shakespeare’s Globe and for her arrangements of early music, who transformed the Baroque piece into a story with contemporary resonances about the plight of refugees. The musicians of Chatham Baroque and mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux brought to life the music of Broschi through the expertise of Van Kampen (who passed in January), the “only living person who had mastered these arias,” as Boos explained. A play that Boos remembers particularly fondly is 2015’s All the Names, her adaptation of the Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s novel of the same name, performed in five separate locations throughout the Allegheny Center Carnegie Library (now part of the Children’s Museum). Nine of the plays staged by Quantum have either been written or adapted by Boos, but All the Names was particularly important to the director, not least of all because her script received the blessing of Saramago’s widow. A production that, as Boos said, she did with “beautiful people that I love.”
A steel mill, a Cultural District theater, a library – the very psychogeography of Pittsburgh has been transformed by Boos, where it can sometimes feel as if there are few places that Quantum hasn’t staged a groundbreaking production. Referring to the common Pittsburgh affectation of always giving directions based on things that aren’t there anymore, I asked Boos if she has to describe locations based on where she has staged an Ibsen or a Chekhov? Not exactly, she let me know, as there is some regret about the places where she wasn’t able to stage a production, including an “Ardmore Boulevard dirt pile.” Though, as she looked around Margaux, Boos did let me know that in 1991 Quantum performed her adaptation of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo in the very room where we were now drinking coffee. Now Quantum will endeavor to find Boos’ successor. “Right now, we’re in excellent shape,” Boos told me, the reserve funds for the theater nearing six million dollars, with those funds aided by a philosophy that emphasizes staying lean and small so as to continue to mount ambitious productions. She told me that she expects whoever follows her tenure will be a person that will “want to take risks, to experiment, and imagine, but who will do all of these things in their own way.”
Returning to the dour contemporary political context allegorically portrayed by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Boos explained that the “energy and engagement of young artists is the antidote” to our current dystopian moment, that she has “hope and faith” in new artists and new voices being able to make space for expressions that question and trouble, challenge and uplift. “And still I think that I turned the layers of the past into something,” she said, reflecting on how the work of the company engages with what is still, in someways, a “beautiful present” that encompasses what our possibilities and potentials may be. This is right, I think, the way in which Quantum and its innovative, evocative, revolutionary stagings, not only in their setting, but in every aspect from performance to language, demonstrate how theater at its most vital is synonymous with life, how it can lend itself to the enchantments of places where we live, and work, and normally just exist. Appropriately enough, this summer Boos’ last directed production will be of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Carrie Blast Furnace. That play, with its evocation of how our “revels now are ended… and/Are melted into air, into thin air,” where the “cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,/The solemn temples, the great globe itself,” and the museums, libraries, skyscrapers, and steel mills, “shall dissolve.” At the conclusion of Shakespeare’s play, his stand-in the wizard Prospero puts aside his magic books. If anyone has earned her right to just be a member of the audience, it’s Boos – but let’s hope she doesn’t entirely put away those volumes of spells.
