Review: The Fire Raisers by Hidden Room Theatre
by Michael Meigs

The Hidden Room Theatre of “Matriarch” Beth Burns is not only hidden; it’s a treasure repository. Burns titled her company after the odd, long rectangular room in a historic building in downtown Austin. That was back in 2010. Burns is an academic the way the imaginary Indiana Jones is—a scholar, an adventurer, and entirely unpredictable. She led her company through ten years of brainy, unexpected revelations, such as Nahum Tate’s revision of King Lear, Edwin Booth’s playbook of Richard III, German puppeteers’ interpretations of Hamlet, and more. Then COVID came and the Hidden Room sank out of sight.

 

Until now. Burns spotted Swiss playwright Max Frisch and his Biedermann und die Brandstifter (“Biedermann and the Arsonists”) and got in touch with the Max Frisch Foundation in Zürich, custodian of the playwright’s works. A hint about his orientation: the Foundation awards an annual prize equivalent currently to $75,000 to German-speaking writers tackling democratic issues.

 

The Hidden Room gang is back together again, doing their magic and their mischief. Not in the same ceremonial room but one floor up, a particularly appropriate location for a story in which an attic emanates menace. The HR uses the translation by Michael Bullock with the quirky title Biedermann and the Fire Raisers (another translator rendered it as Biedermann and the Firebugs). With the permission of Foundation president Dr. Thomas Strässle, Burns modified some aspects to align more closely with Frisch’s original.

 

Spectators are seated in a wide, shallow assembly stretching most of the length of the long rectangular room, and most of the illumination is from footlights. Michael Ferstenfield is the one-man band at stage left with piano, guitar, and Foley materials. Joseph Garlock, frocked, aproned, and faintly mustachioed, switches on a fragile light that's set on the piano. He smiles to invite us and sings verses of the sentimental  tune Lili Marlene, encouraging the audience to join the chorus (“Mit dir, Lili Marlene”). We’re in the world of shabby, happy cabaret. The action begins.

 

Unexplained fires have been breaking out In a German city, greatly worrying the populace, represented here by Gottlieb Biedermann, a portly bourgeois factory owner. Biedermann considers himself an ordinary citizen; well off, granted, but responsible and reasonable. He and his wife Babette aren’t extravagant; they employ a single servant, the intimidated and occasionally somewhat hysterical Anna. And then comes a knock at the door. “There’s a gentleman to see you, sir,” says Anna. Biedermann refuses, but so does the “gentleman.” He won’t go away.

 

 

The story is played broadly, in the comic absurdist style that evokes nightclub comedy of Germany’s Weimar years. In the U.S. we recognize it because of Kander and Ebb and Liza Minelli. Such cabaret art, cheery, sometimes naughty, but more often politically satirical, flourished in the 1920’s. It died out in the 1930’s. Authoritarian rule crushed it.

 

Sharply contrasted to this style of clowning is Frisch’s incongruous chorus of helmeted firefighters. They pop up unexpectedly to chant strophes warning of the menace of fire in the densely populated city. The grimly emphatic chorus circling the threatened Biedermann couple is both warning and rebuke; since the technique is from Greek drama, you can probably guess the identity of the protagonist with the tragic flaw.

 

The insistent caller at the door is homeless and hungry. Tobie Minor is Joe the wrestler, refugee from a circus and a a theatre, both of which went up in flames. Minor is plausible, expressive, friendly, and in need of help from the good citizen Biedermann. With his muscled pleasantry he inserts himself into the household. Biedermann has Anna fetch food, allows Joe to overnight in the attic, begs him to stay quiet “because my wife has a weak heart.” To no avail. Soon Joe is joined by Garlock as the headwaiter, unemployed since the restaurant burned down, and they begin to accumulate disquieting material in the attic.

 

Biedermann, no angel, fired a longtime employee and left that man’s wife destitute and eventually bereaved. But he doesn’t dare stand up to the intruders in his attic. They intimidate him with their cheerful confidence. He becomes desperate to trust them. He reassures his wife that all will be well. Justin Scalise as a  tongue-tied academic (“Herr Doktor”) drifts across the stage, wanting to warn us but failing to articulate the message.

 

 

Things come to the inevitable climax, the lights go up, you applaud — and then learn there’s a fifteen-minute intermission. The much shorter second act is a revelation in afterlife, where Biedermann and his wife find everyone transmogrified and learn that Heaven and Hell are at odds. Which means that—maybe—the inferno in the city was . . . a good thing?

 

I read Biedermann und die Brandstifter a very long time ago and didn’t understand it at all. I’d just graduated, was studying German drama on a course in Vienna, and had little patience for Frisch’s absurdities.

 

Burns’s staging with her rowdy, gifted company set me straight, all these years later. In the 1950’s some scholars, economists and sociologists, started suggesting that the war in Europe that killed 60 million and destroyed vast urban expanses just might have had the salutary effect of a controlled burn of a dense forest. You know, like opening the way for new growth.

 

Clearly, Frisch, the Swiss-German-speaking intellectual from a country that escaped all that devastation, was having none of it. He was condemning bourgeois citizens for placating pure evil in hopes that it would just go away.

 

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

 

 

The full cast of The Fire Raisers: Joseph Garlock, Kelly Hasandras, Chandler Krison, Robert Matney, T. Lynn Mikeska, Tobie Minor, Justin Scalise, and Amelia Turner, with live music performed by Michael Ferstenfeld.

 

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The Fire Raisers
by Max Frisch
Hidden Room Theatre

 April 2 –19, 2026

All shows at 8 PM except Sundays at 5 PM. 
In a Hidden Room somewhere within 311 W 7th Street, Austin, Texas, 78701

Running time: 90 minutes.