Our times are full of peculiar things,” Carlotta sings in the first act of Franz Schreker’s 1918 expressionist psychothriller, “Die Gezeichneten.” She is referring to a woman who paints hands—delicate ladies’ palms, fat workingmen’s fists—but by the end of the evening she will have found herself (at least in Calixto Bieito’s new staging at the Komische Oper Berlin) engaged in a 15-minute sex scene with a nine-foot-tall, Kelly green, stuffed bear. That this scene doesn’t feel gratuitous, that I didn’t laugh—that instead, in combination with a smoke-filled stage, green lighting, and Schreker’s thick harmonic taffy, the ursine tryst became a poignant evocation of a woman trapped by a lifetime of using sex as currency—is a tribute to the commitment of the performers and the success of this staging.
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