"Aging & Achieving: Staying Active in the Industry for Decades"

[As long as I’ve been sentient, theater people have been protesting the treatment older people in the profession have received as they age.  This has been especially, though not exclusively, true of actors, and most demonstrably of women actors.  The Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents professional stage actors and theatrical stage managers, has been trying to address this apparent inequity pretty much since it was formed.  

[The situation may be looking up.  The Winter 2020 issue of Equity News (vol. 105, iss. 1) ran an article on the progress that’s being made in an issue titled “Aging & Achieving.”  I’m posting the article on Rick On Theater as part of my occasional series about issues in the industry.  Here is Gabriela Geselowitz’s “I’m Still Here: Aging and Longevity in the Theatre.”  Geselowitz is Senior Writer and Project Manager at Actors’​ Equity.]

“I’M STILL HERE: AGING AND LONGEVITY IN THE THEATRE”
by Gabriela Geselowitz 

Marjorie Horne was about 23 when she got her Equity Card. It was for a chorus contract, earning $100 a week in summer stock in Michigan‘s upper peninsula. While rehearsing the third production of the summer, producers ran out of money, and on her very first union contract, they had to use the bond to send her home. Horne was undaunted:

“It was very clear when I was offered my card, there was no going back,” she said. “I just looked totally ahead and was there.”

That year was 1967, and now Horne is a successful stage manager and Equity councilor who has been working in the industry for over fifty years.

Theatre is for all ages, and that’s for audiences and artists alike. For those who have made their careers on or backstage, the industry isn’t just a youthful pursuit, but a lifelong occupation. Despite its reputation to the contrary, successful theatre professionals can achieve career and financial stability. Equity members in particular have access to protections that give them the freedom to age on their own terms, and stay active in the industry as senior citizens. Many actors and stage managers slow down or cease working in later years due to dwindling job opportunities, health necessity or personal desire. But some artists continue working well into their sixties, seventies or beyond.

Why keep working at an age when their peers are retiring? Do decades of experience bring the luxury to choose when and how you participate in theatre, or does the hustle last forever? Equity News spoke with several working members about aging in the theatre, changing opportunities and, for some, how the drive to make art never goes away.

“I have always thought that I wanted to do this until I die,” said actor Anita Hollander, 64.

“Actors don’t retire. Do actors retire? I’m not retiring,” asserted actor Sally Wingert, 62.

The average age of retirement in the United States is 65 for men and 63 for women, thanks in part to Social Security, though that number is likely to rise as Americans have greater difficulty acquiring the resources to stop working. Most would not likely guess that theatre actors could be among those who can choose to retire and live off a nest egg. However, Equity offers a 401(k) plan, and as members reach their 60s, they may start collecting the pension that they have been feeding through union contracts over the course of their career.

Even though Equity affords protections for members as they age, no one spoke of that as a motivation for joining the union. Some members had no idea what Equity was when they joined, and others recalled wanting to earn their card as a sign of prestige, only appreciating later the extent of the practical benefits it would afford.

“I never thought of old age,” said Delphi Harrington, 82. “Who would be called an actor and think about old age?”

“It wasn’t that I was particularly mature or thinking ahead. Certainly I was not thinking about retirement in the way that I should have been,” said Wingert. “The fact is I have told so many young performers that I’m working with currently that it is the complete and utter gift of my union to have a solvent, significant pension, and those are going the way of the dodo bird.”

“As a 62-year-old performer that knows I’m going to be using my pension within the next decade, I could not be more grateful that I joined my union when I did,” she added.

With exceptions, members can usually begin collecting on their pension at 65, and they must by age 70.5. Many Equity members belong to SAG-AFTRA as well, and may be pulling funds from multiple pensions, in addition to Social Security payouts. But finances can be a complicated, frustrating matter, as actor Dale Soules, 73, learned firsthand.

“In the years of the recession things weren’t so jolly,” she recalled. “I went to The Actors Fund and talked with them about what to do. I applied for food stamps and after difficulty reapplying for unemployment, it came through – for $67 a week.

Soules’s fortune improved, first with Hands on a Hardbody (her seventh Broadway show), and then, after a career predominantly onstage, when she became a series regular on Orange is the New Black. And then, in what she described as a “perfect financial storm,” she, by law, had to begin collecting her Equity pension and Social Security, and along with her television work this moved her to a higher tax bracket. She also took a hit from the new tax laws that limited her ability to claim deductions . . . and then got audited. During that process she received a history of her earnings under Equity contracts over 50 years, and it totaled just under $500,000 – an average of $10,000 a year.

“I would not have been able to survive a number of dry patches in my career if it weren’t for the fact I live in a rent-controlled apartment,” she admitted. “The day I can’t make the four flight walk-up things may get a little tricky but for the moment I’m still in shape and it’s like having a free gym!

“Actors often subsidize their own careers, and they subsidize the theatre,” she reflected. “But I do have that pension. And whatever I lost in taxes, even if I were to lose everything I made I would be OK. I could get by because of social security and that pension.”

Some stories are more serene. Stage manager Bob Bennett, 75, began taking his pension when it became available while continuing to work, stage managing fewer shows each season. He doesn’t want to leave the theatre, but the pension allows him to take fewer jobs and pursue other passions in his new spare time.

“It makes it possible for me to do some of the things that I might not be able to do as freely,” said Bennett, who is a long-distance hiker. “It’s one of the great benefits of our union.”

“I think it’s a huge credit to the business that I’ve not felt ageism at all,” he added, “I don’t feel it from my cast; I don’t feel it from my crew. The most I hear is, why am I still working? Because I like to. I don’t know that I’d find that in other businesses.”

Others have not been as fortunate in avoiding discrimination.

“There’s a patronizing attitude people have about aging that in some way you’re diminished,” said Harrington, who moderated an Equity panel on ageism in the theatre this past spring. “I don’t feel diminished. I feel expanded, richer, deeper, more various, stronger! I don’t like people to make assumptions about me.”

Some theatre artists have actually been denied roles based on their age.

“I’ve lost work because I was honest,” says Marjorie Johnson. She recalls an employer asking her age, and when she answered honestly, they told her they thought she was younger, and she lost the part. It is actually prohibited by federal law to discriminate against anyone 40 or older based on their age, and anyone in a similar situation should contact Equity, but Johnson no longer makes her age public.  [Respecting her wishes, I’ll only add that Johnson is in the middle of the range of ages of the Equity members interviewed here.]

“I just thought, ‘Oh, I guess I shouldn’t have said that,' and so from that point on I just don’t,” she said.

“I do think that roles are harder to find for women as we age,” added Greta Lambert, 63. “They’re not impossible, but for example my first season here [at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival] there would have been six to eight shows where I could have had a role as a young leading lady, and now there’s one show, maybe two in a year where there’s an age-appropriate role.”

“Usually directors like to hire young people and make them look older,” said Virginia Wing, 82, noting that even roles written as older characters are no guarantee.

Many professionals, however, have been surprised to find that their golden years are some of their best working ones.

“When I reached my fifties, I entered into probably the most significant decade of work that I’ve had in my life and it seems to be continuing,” said Wingert, who credits ample job opportunities in the Twin Cities, “Any given year I have worked between 35 and 60 actor work weeks.”

“Actors more than stage managers have the option of not retiring,” explained Horne, since at least some plays have characters of advanced ages that are cast appropriately. And yet, she too is still working, both new and recurring gigs like the Tony Awards.

“I’m making more money than I had ever seen in my whole life in a year. It is nuts,” she said. “I’m still putting into my pension because I’m still working on contract a couple of times a year.” 

The land of semi-retirement can be a fertile one, as members work on their own terms. For some, that means declining to take understudy roles, or a refusal to audition. Stepping away from solely acting or stage managing may also mean broadening one’s theatrical horizons, pursuing other technical work, directing, writing or teaching.

Lambert lives in Alabama, and while that meant passing on New York and the opportunities it offers, it also meant that she found an intimate home, where there’s always a way she can participate in the theatre, and where she runs into audience members at the supermarket. She has been part of the same company on and off since 1985, served as faculty for an MFA program and held titles of Director of Education, Director of Fellowship Company and Associate Artistic Director.

“I’ve had to redefine what success means for myself because it’s not about what the business tells me it’s supposed to be about” said Lambert, “For me, it’s been about playing great roles and being part of a community – not only other artists but the community I live in now.”

Lambert has also found that aging publicly, in front of an audience, can be a daunting proposition.

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be willing to perform because of my own vanity, that I’ll be able to keep letting audiences watching my growth,” she confessed, “I don’t think my struggle is any different than any other person who ages. If it’s difficult it has very little to do with my business. It’s the culture of aging.”

Ernest Abuba is transitioning in the opposite direction; now retired from teaching theatre and in his seventies [he’s 73], he is looking to act more than he did when he was working at Sarah Lawrence College. (He has also worked as a director, playwright and founding member and resident artist of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre.) He thinks he may have more opportunities now, in part because fewer older working actors means less competition, and because he has seen improvements overall for actors of color.

“For many years it was all about stereotypes,” said Abuba, who has worked in the theatre for 50 years. “Now the way I look at it, the system has opened up more, it has been opening up more for the Asian American, in the last ten years or so.” An activist for better representation and an early member of Equity’s Equal Employment Opportunity Committee, Abuba now hopes to enjoy some of the hard-won progress.

Even if the work opportunities are present, other complications arise as Equity members age in the business. For those struggling with health issues, the choice to keep working can be very much a privilege. Some members spoke of actor friends who had to leave the business when they could no longer memorize lines.

“As long as I’m still functioning and my brain is still functioning, I’m in it for the long haul,” said Johnson, “Thank God my memory is still intact.”

Hollander is acutely aware of how to navigate physical wellbeing and an onstage career. When she was 26, she had her leg amputated due to cancer. She was back performing on stage four weeks later, and she spoke about how working with a disability prepared her for aging in the industry.

“I was not only under pressure for how I would make a living, I was now a cancer survivor and an amputee,” she said, “I was definitely not going to ever let anything get in my way. I am aging, and I am noticing, ‘Oh my gosh, this is not easy.’ But I’ve been disabled since my twenties and working in this profession. I didn’t go into this so naïve that it wasn’t going to be difficult and painful and worrisome, but I wasn’t going to give up on that.”

Hollander is one of many members who finds she is working more now than she ever has, in part on the strength of autobiographical solo shows. However, steady work never fully addresses her concerns.

“The results are happening and the irony is, I’m still struggling to get my insurance,” she said, “This industry has been very challenging to navigate as any kind of performer, but particularly a performer with a disability – and add to that an aging performer with a disability.”

Hollander is grateful that in the 1980s she found a home in Manhattan Plaza, a federally subsidized residential complex that takes her medical expenses into account. She is also aware of The Actors Fund Home, a short and long term care facility in New Jersey, as well as other resources.

“I’m just hoping that I can be OK, but I do feel fortunate that The Actors Fund exists,” she said. “I have been working all my life and there may be a time I need help.”

Members agreed that a support network is crucial for survival in the industry long term, not only in terms of health and finances, but professionally and socially. Hollander, for example, directs as well, and she casts her peers who are also aging actors with disabilities. Horne has decades as a stage manager behind her, and that means decades of connections.

“I have good relationships with the people that I work with,” she said. “The new jobs that I’ve gotten have come from other people that I’ve worked with and their recommendations.”

“I have a group of friends that are very, very supportive of each other,” added Johnson. “I have a very strong network of performers in my age category. Even if we have the same audition, we’ll work with each other, including gathering to read opposite one another or record one another for virtual auditions."

By now, members know that a spate of good working years does not mean permanent comfort, and that a dry spell does not spell the end.

“For the last ten years I would say I’m in my retirement mode, and then the next week I’d have a job,” said Johnson, who in 2016 received critical acclaim for a leading Off-Broadway role in Dot, playing an aging woman struggling with Alzheimer’s.

Soules was optimistic, thinking that a general aging population would create a mirroring effect in the arts world. But she knows that all she can do is continue to perform as best and as long as she can.

“You never really know on what criteria you’re being judged,” she noted, “The only thing you have any control over is the work that you put into it.”

“When you love what you do,” said Harrington, “You don’t quit.”

[A note about one of the Equity members interviewed above: Marjorie Horne, the 76-year-old stage manager, is also featured in another Equity News article I posted on ROT: “Get Me to the Stage on Time,” part of “Stage Managers,” posted on 30 January 2017.  “Stage Managers” is an entry in another ad hoc series on ROT, introducing and explaining the work of performing arts jobs theatergoers seldom know much about.]

Some Plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from the Archive

 

THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY
by Robert Wilson
(based on Gustave Flaubert)
2004 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
21 October 2004 

My first show in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave season this year was Robert Wilson’s gospel-inspired version of The Temptation of St. Anthony on 19 October [2004].  Wilson’s piece, presented in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, is based on a Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) novel (La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1874) of the spiritual torment of Saint Anthony the Great (251-356), but Wilson tells his version virtually without spoken dialogue at all, having turned the story into a gospel-music revival.  

Flaubert’s novel, written in the form of a play script (and itself inspired by a ca. 1557 painting of the same title attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1525-30 – 1569), details one night in the life of Saint Anthony who begins to question his years of self-imposed solitude and asceticism.  The devil tempts him with both physical pleasures—luscious food, a shower of gold, a beautiful woman (The Queen of Sheba) and man (Adonis)—and many different non-Christian beliefs and philosophies.   

(The painting referenced above as the inspiration for Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony was cited in the Wikipedia entry for the novel.  It was originally attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but has since been ascribed to one of his followers.  

(There were, however, at least two other canvases with the same title by painters in Bruegel’s family, including one painted by his younger son, Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1568-1625, in 1594, and another by his elder son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1564-1638, in ca. 1600.  [After 1559, Pieter the Elder dropped the h from his family name; his relatives continued to use Brueghel.] 

(The French Wikipedia page for the Flaubert attributes the inspiration to the version from Pieter Brueghel the Younger.  Unless Flaubert left something in writing to attest to his stimulus, I don’t know how scholars can be sure.)

Anthony’s desert retreat is visited by a phantasmagorical array of evil characters and visions.  He struggles, but he prevails.  Along the path, he’s questioned and challenged by his disciple, Hilarion. 

In Wilson’s more austere adaptation, gone are the wild delusions of diabolical temptations.  Many are represented by the gospel hymns (gluttony in “Table Is Spread”; lust in “God Is Love”).  The director’s spare style is punctuated by sections of vibrant dance (choreographed by Christalyn Wright) and spiritual Christian revelry.

As usual with Wilson, the piece is short on drama, but long on theatrical spectacle.  The music is glorious of course (more on this later), but the visual images Wilson evoked are stunning, whether enhanced by the movement (the movement coach is Valerie Winborne), set, or costumes (designed by Geoffrey Holder, a certified theatrical genius to be sure). 

I suppose that if you’re susceptible to being touched by the story of Saint Anthony, the hermit saint who went in search of the true faith by living alone in the Egyptian desert, the play (if that’s what you can call Wilson’s piece) may move you—but since I don’t have a dog in this race, I was taken by the spectacle alone.  Over a brief, intermissionless hour and forty minutes, that was enough sustenance.

Since the music is the center of this piece, I should say something about that up front.  In contrast to a musical I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown this summer, which was inspired by the clash of musical cultures in Texas (so the playwright/director said) but had no one working on it who had any background in Mexican, Latin, or Tejano music (or country-western, either), Wilson did this absolutely right.  [The play at CATF was The Rose of Corazon by Keith Glover.  I reported on it on Rick On Theater on 8 July 2015.]  

Wilson collaborated with Bernice Johnson Reagon, about as much an expert in gospel music as you can find.  She not only knows the music as an academic who has studied the background and origins, but she just retired from her own gospel group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Now, I’m not a great fan of gospel music especially, but the vocal harmonies are gorgeous, and the music—which carried all the verbal element of Temptation—is superb. 

Reagon used existing songs, some of which she adjusted to fit the Saint Anthony story, and composed some original pieces.  All of them are wonderfully executed by Wilson’s cast.  (There’s a tinge of African rhythms in some of the pieces, and some of the costumes also bear African elements, but that may be embedded in the gospel tradition.  In any case, it does nothing but enhance the performance.) 

As I indicated, there’s no real spoken dialogue—except for the songs, the only other words are recitative or chants.  It makes the whole thing seem like a church pageant.  (As you might have imagined, Wilson’s Temptation was compared some to Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus.  Gospel did, by the way, have something of a life after BAM in 1983: it was shown on PBS’s Great Performances in November 1985, which is where I saw it, and went to Broadway in 1988.  It appeared in the repertoires of several regional theaters in the years afterward, too, but it’s popularity may have faded substantially by now.)

The base set, designed and lit by Wilson, is a unit which never changes—a square room with windows on the side walls and arched alcoves in the rear, flanked by doors at right and left.  The floor is essentially bare except for thin, wooden benches parallel to the side walls, one on each side of the stage.  (As usual with Wilson, the floor lights up in various colors, and there are constant washes of light from above that change the color of the set and costumes.) 

The side walls are directly perpendicular to the proscenium so they’re all but invisible from the center of the house, and the alcoves up stage resemble nothing so much as a pair of tablets for the Ten Commandments, making the space remind me of a simple synagogue, the alcoves representing the Torah ark.  This may be Wilson’s intent—to evoke the First Temple in Jerusalem, say—or I may have been the only spectator to find this resemblance.

The set’s occasionally enhanced by movable additions as the narrative calls for them.  These, of course, are seldom realistic.  In the instance that impressed me the most, a mountain flows out and one of the deities Anthony encounters descends. 

The deity first appears as a small puppet at the top of the mountain, rounds the first peak, and disappears briefly between the parts of the mountain.  When the deity emerges around another peak, it’s a larger puppet identical to the first except for its size.  Rounding another peak and disappearing again, it emerges, this time as a live actor, dressed the same as the two puppets.  Accompanied by one of Reagon’s songs, it’s a simple, but effective and delightful effect.

Holder’s costumes are mostly brightly colored and richly decorated robes but often topped by very elaborate (and, to my eyes, African-inspired) headdresses.  The women also have highly styled (and styled high) wigs of different shapes. 

Only Saint Anthony (Carl Hancock Rux) and his student Hilarion (Helga Davis) are individually cast; the rest of the characters are played by members of the ensemble while, for the most part, the rest serve as a chorus.  (According to a note in the program, most of the members of this all-African-American cast have known and worked with each other for years.)  They often weave intricate patterns, moving around the stage as they sing.  The robes are floor length and this makes the actors look like they’re gliding on wheels rather than walking.  It’s wonderfully ethereal. 

Like I said, with Wilson, often the spectacle is all.  In this case, it was enough.  Sometimes, beauty for its own sake is sufficient.

*  *  *  *

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
by William Shakespeare
Watermill Theatre production by Propeller (London)
17 March 2004 

I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night [Tuesday, 16 March 2004], in the production by Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller company from London, presented in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, the former Majestic which had been recovered for Peter Brook’s Mahabharata back in the ’80s.  I didn’t know the company previously, though they’ve been around for seven years; they’ve done other Shakespeare (Henry V), but I don’t know if they do other writers or periods [apparently not—Shakespeare is their turf]. 

For the first time that I can remember, Diana, my frequent theater partner, liked a show that I didn’t; if we disagree, it’s usually the other way around.  (She said she liked the “energy” of the performers.  That didn’t do it for me, and I didn’t question her because I didn’t want to spoil her enjoyment.) 

I guess the actors do a good enough job (especially the rude mechanicals: Tony Bell as Bottom the Weaver, Vincent Leigh as Snout the Tinker, Jonathan McGuinness as Snug the Joiner, Chris Myles as Peter Quince the Carpenter, and Jules Werner as Flute the Bellows-mender), but I just don’t see the reason to do this with all men.  It struck me as a gimmick—Hamlet on roller skates; if there’s anything more to it, it went past me. 

It’s not really Elizabethan—these actors aren’t boys, they’re men.  They don’t impersonate women, though they wear women’s clothes: there are no wigs, the actors don’t do “female” voices, or otherwise try to present feminine characters.  (Think Jamie Farr’s Klinger from MASH.  I’d add the Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo, but that’s a deliberate travesty; this isn’t supposed to be.) 

As far as I can tell, the casting of men in all the roles doesn’t add anything to the play except one more layer of humor—but I don’t see that that addition is appropriate.  There are essentially three kinds of humor in this production: 1) the jokes Shakespeare wrote into the play; 2) the physical comedy added by the director and actors; and 3) humor that arises because men are saying lines intended for female characters.  1) and 2) strike me as perfectly legitimate, but 3) strikes me as gratuitous. 

The laughs don’t come from the writing or the acting—just the casting.  It’s not clever; it’s just opportunistic.  And I don’t see how it illuminates the play or its themes (not that Midsummer’s themes are so deep they need much illuminating). 

In the program, director Hall is quoted as saying that the all-male casting “is about ‘trying to give the plays back to the actors, so that they can really tell the story in a more one-on-one way with the audience.’”  I can’t imagine how that statement even makes sense.  It sounds like he’s saying women actors can’t tell the story or work one-on-one with the audience (if that’s even an important accomplishment). 

The whole thing—which runs two hours and 40 minutes—just didn’t work for me at all.  I thought it was silly—not funny.  It even qualifies as pretentious, considering Hall’s statement.

*  *  *  *

THE WILD DUCK
by Henrik Ibsen
National Theatre of Norway (Oslo)
2006 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
1 November 2006 

My theater companion, Diana, and I went over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday evening, 26 October, to see the National Theatre of Norway’s production of Ibsen’s Wild Duck.  Like most non-musical productions at BAM, this was at the Harvey Theater.  I’m always curious to see how the natives interpret their own playwrights.  It always strikes me as sort of like going back to the source. 

Also, those national companies are usually excellent; I don’t believe I’ve seen the Norwegian company before, but I’ve seen the Swedish counterpart (with Bergman often at the helm), and they’re superb.

(I was telling my mother about this show and it made me recall two other national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s director, Eimuntas Nekrosius, and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin.  I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages. 

(And both were magnificent performances—and experiences.  I think The Square, which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts—which may have morphed into the Lincoln Center Festival, but I’m not sure—may have had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy.  Fifteen years later, and I still remember it. 

(Retro, which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 [see my report on this international theater festival, 10 November 2014], didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely clear that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening.  The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue. 

(Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language.  A tape of that performance would have been a perfect training film for Stanislavsky acting.  I guess that my remembering these performances 15 and 20 years afterwards says something.)

The Wild Duck isn’t one of Ibsen’s well-known, frequently-staged plays—at least, not in the U.S.; it’s apparently popular and even beloved in Norway—so I’ll give a short synopsis of the plot:

Hjalmar Ekdal (Gard Eidsvold) is a photographer, but he lets his wife, Gina (Agot Sendstad), and daughter, Hedvig (Birgitte Larsen), run his studio while he devotes his time to loftier pursuits: supposedly working on a “great invention,” which he never identifies.  He spends most of his time hunting rabbits in the loft with his elderly father (Kai Remlov)—who’d been imprisoned for corruption and suffers from moral and financial bankruptcy. 

The Ekdals only get by thanks to the wealthy Haaken Werle (Bjorn Skagestad)—Old Ekdal’s former business partner who’d managed to escape the charges that had condemned Old Ekdal.  Without Hjalmar knowing it, Werle has been giving money to Gina. 

One day, Gregers Werle (Eindride Eidsvold), Haaken’s son and Hjalmar’s oldest friend, returns to his hometown following a self-imposed exile.  In his search for the truth about the two families, Gregers makes discoveries that jeopardize the happiness of the entire family and have tragic consequences.

This Wild Duck, an offering of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2006 Next Wave Festival, is a kind of trimmed-down version—not an adaptation, but it only runs two hours (without intermission) and the cast has been cut to just the nine most prominent characters.  The set reflects this slimming process as well: there are only a table and about ten chairs (all Scandinavian-modern design—very stark) and an odd wood-textured wall, about six feet tall, across the back of the space. 

Director Eirik Stubø moved the action up to the late ’50s or early ’60s—at one point Ekdal plays Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” on his flute and spins Gina around as he sings a few bars—though the text isn’t altered as far as I could tell from the supertitles.  (The translation for the titles is credited to Judith Messick and Katherine Hanson, but it looks a lot like the Rolf Fjelde rendition published by Signet that I own.  I looked up a couple of things after I got home, and the wording looks awfully close; I even spotted several exact phrases as I skimmed for what I was looking for.)

It’s an entirely minor quibble, I admit, but the juxtaposition of the 19th-century text (Wild Duck was written in 1884) and the mid-20th-century look is occasionally jarring.  Two instances that I noted in passing include an exchange between Hjalmar Ekdal and his wife regarding cutting the pages of some of his reference books and a mention of “freshly-churned butter.”  Unless Norway was way behind the rest of the Western world in the ’50s and ’60s, we pretty much stopped selling books with uncut pages and getting butter fresh from a churn, as opposed to a grocery store’s fridge, was relegated to farms. 

More of a problem for me is the total ambiguity of the setting—and especially that back wall.  The script says the first act is in the Werle house, and the other four acts are in Ekdal’s photography studio.  In the published translation, the studio is described as completely furnished, not spartan, so Stubø (and his designer Kari Gravklev) are making a stylistic decision beyond the period of the action—to make a Symbolically minimalist environment for the (essentially) Realistic acting.  I can only say that I had a hard time imagining where the people are in real space—and maybe that’s my failing. 

I don’t think it’s my failing, however, that I was bothered by the constant need for the cast to reset the table and chairs, including moving the table on and off stage and adding or subtracting chairs.  (There are only three chairs and no table when we first arrive at Ekdal’s house in act two.  There are no act breaks, except that needed to reset the stage—accomplished by the actors themselves with the lights up.) 

There’s also a lot of action devoted to setting and adjusting the table (which has extension leaves, stored under the table top, that are taken out and put in as the needs of the scene demand).  I remember seeing a production of The Duchess of Malfi (by Cheek by Jowl) at BAM in 1995, and it became a play about moving chairs.  (There was a staging of The Brothers Karamazov—not the acrobatic clowns—at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in 1994 that devolved into the same thing.)  This production almost becomes a play about moving the table!

Now, that wall.  It’s just a plain, blondish wood-pattern expanse that extends from stage right to stage left, about six feet high—just over head height.  It looks to be about six to eight inches wide—wide enough for Hedvig to walk or crawl along.  But, what the hell is it?  I mean, we know that the studio is indoors—it’s described in the text as a loft, suggesting that it’s above ground level.  (I always pictured it as a sort of attic space, in fact.) 

Except for the fact that this looks like wood, it otherwise seems like a garden wall of some kind, and seems, from the action, to separate the “indoor” area (that is, the studio) from the “outdoor” area (where the rabbits Old Ekdal shoots and the wild duck of the title live).  There are no door and no windows in the wall, so when someone goes into the area on the other side (which we can’t see), he climbs over, often using a tall, wooden step ladder he brings from off stage. 

When people look over the wall, they usually climb on chairs (which are either already placed against the wall on “our” side or are moved into position for the purpose of peering over the wall’s top.  As I said, Hedvig walks along the top of the wall once and crawls along it another time.  I’m sorry, but if all this is symbolic, I didn’t get it.  (I cop to not being good with Symbolism.  I guess I’m just too literal-minded.) 

If it isn’t symbolic, I can’t figure out how that wall works (along, of course, with the rest of the space).  I’m going on about this because it occupied my focus so much of the time I was watching, trying to understand what I was looking at, that it became a distraction.  (And, believe me, what with having to look up at the supertitles and then back down at the actors, an additional distraction is totally unnecessary!)   

I’m not sure I can articulate this, but using the chairs that way and carrying an actual ladder from off stage seems to make the wall real—it’s an actual wall.  But, then, what’s it doing there?  What kind of space has a tall wooden wall with no doors or windows like that?  If it’s a garden wall, it wouldn’t be wood (unlike, say, a fence).  If it’s a room wall, it’d have windows or doors. 

But if it’s symbolic, not “real,” it seems you shouldn’t have to use real, practical things to negotiate it.  Does that make sense?  Maybe I’m way off—as I said, I’m not good with Symbolism.  If I were designing a symbolic wall, I’d have made it low enough to look over without aids, or I’d make it a scrim or a latticework painted like a wall; I’m sure someone more imaginative than I, especially in stage design, would come up with more and better ideas.  The problem I see with most of my ideas is that if the director of Wild Duck deliberately wanted the area on the other side of the wall to be invisible to the audience, these wouldn’t work.

I’ve said on several occasions that I find trying to turn Ibsen’s Realistic plays into some other style, Symbolism among them, is a usually disastrous directorial decision.  I allow that Wild Duck is partway to Ibsen’s more Symbolistic period at the end of his career—according to director Stubø’s program note, Ibsen wrote his publisher: “This new play has in certain ways its own place in my dramatic production; its dramatic progress is in many ways different from my previous ones”—but it’s not there yet.  Maybe I am too literal minded to buy such a shift.  Maybe I only think it doesn’t work—but in reality, I just don’t like it.  I don’t think that’s the case, but would I know? 

It’s not that I mind a minimalist set, a suggested set without all the 19th-century trappings.  I did that myself in an adaptation of a Chekhov story—and I believe it worked.  I don’t even mind up-dating the look of a play; I did that, too, with an Oscar Wilde play I reset in the 1920s.  But when the director moves into an alien style, then I think the balance gets tipped.  Finally, if I can’t figure out what’s going on, then almost nothing else really matters—it’s just not working.  In my humble opinion, of course.

The acting all seemed fine, except that it was all on a rather even keel for the most part.  There are a few highs and lows—and some long silences while the cast takes care of tasks like setting that table and putting in or taking out leaves (I joked that maybe Stubø is trying to rip off Pinter, but it’s not much of a corollary.) 

I mean, Ibsen’s plays lean toward melodrama by today’s standards—there’s lots of emotion and psychological drama.  These folks are all moderated and even-tempered an awful lot of the time.  Now, maybe that’s a Norwegian character trait, I don’t know, but it struck me as odd, given the circumstances. 

The casting of Hedvig was also a little peculiar.  Ibsen says she’s 14—Juliet’s age—but the actress in this production, Birgitte Larsen, plays in her later teens (and, I’m sure, the actress is actually older than that [it turns out she was 25]).  She’s much more precociously sexual than I figure Hedvig is intended to be, though I’m not convinced Larsen is playing it that way.  She just looks more like a woman than a girl. 

Diana thought she was and that the others actors, especially the men (and her father in particular), were responding.  (Diana felt that Stubø might have been suggesting the daughter is starting to take after her mother.  That might not even be contrary to Ibsen’s creed, which held that the moral corruption of the parent is inherited by the children.  That’s why Nora couldn’t stay with her children or take them with her in Doll House.)  I didn’t get that impression, however—though perhaps I just missed it.

Finally, I’ve decided I don’t like supertitles.  I’ve had a series of bad experiences with this translation device—they’re badly located on the stage so that I can’t read them and watch the actors or they’re too small or distant so I just plain can’t read them.  In this instance, the screen isn’t too high above the actors, and it isn’t too small, but I found myself bobbing my head up and down so much and trying to catch the longer phrases fast enough to get back to the stage before the next text is projected that I was losing far too much of the theater for the logistics. 

When BAM used the infrared earphones, I used to keep the volume down low so I could just hear the translators and still hear the actors’ actual speech, even if I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t have to bop back and forth between a text and the action—I didn’t have to choose where to look at a given moment—and I didn’t have to worry about reading a line or two of text instead of listening and watching. 

I’m sure paying live translators every night, maintaining the transmission system, and keeping track of those earphones was both more cumbersome and more costly than the projection system, but it was a lot easier on me.

I guess I have to come down on the side of disappointed with this experience.  It isn’t bad—say, like Nora, the German up-date of Doll House a few seasons back at BAM [see my report on ROT, 18 June 2016]—but I didn’t really enjoy it or get much out of it.  It certainly didn’t reveal anything new about Ibsen or the play for me.  Charles Isherwood had a pretty decent review (a “stark but perceptive production”) in the New York Times on Friday, 27 October, the day after we saw the show, but I can’t say I saw the benefits he did.  

"At this Virginia theater, the show – and the masks – must go on"

 by John Yang, Alison Thoet, and Maea Lenei Buhre

[On 9 October, the Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry, announced that ticket sales for all Broadway productions in New York City will remain suspended until 30 May 2021.  Touring shows are also affected, and Off-Broadway theaters, even though they’re not bound by Broadway League decisions, have been following the League’s lead on pandemic-related issues.

[Regional theaters, however, are bound to follow local and state mandates, which differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, as PBS NewsHour correspondent John Yang found out when he visited the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia.  His report, written with Alison Thoet and Maea Lenei Buhre, on how the ASC is handling this situation was broadcast on Thursday, 8 October 2020 on the NewsHour.  The transcript of that report is posted below.

[ROTters may remember that back on 18 and 21 November 2009, I posted a pair of articles on a theater troupe that built themselves a replica of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theatre.  I’d taken my mom there for a long weekend in May 2003 (for her birthday and Mother’s Day) and we saw the three shows the company was doing that season.  I wrote up the performances and then did a report on the theater recreation itself. 

[That company was then called Shenandoah Shakespeare, but now (since 2005), it’s the American Shakespeare Center.  Readers may find those earlier posts edifying—or at least interesting,  They’re available at https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2009/11/shenandoah-shakespeare.html and https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2009/11/blackfriars-playhouse-in-virginia.html, respectively.]

Seven months into the pandemic, theater companies are still struggling to raise the curtain on live performances. But one regional company in rural Virginia hopes it has found a way for the show to go on — in a way that’s safe. John Yang reports as part of our American Creators series on rural arts and Canvas, our ongoing coverage of arts and culture. 

Judy Woodruff: To be or not to be. Seven months into the coronavirus pandemic, live theaters are struggling to raise the curtain.

John Yang is back to take us to one regional company in rural Virginia that hopes it’s found a way for the show go on, safely.

It’s part of our ongoing American Creators series on rural arts and Canvas, our coverage of arts and culture.

John Yang: Theater audiences have gotten used to admonitions about silencing cell phones, but unusual times call for unusual requests.

Man: We ask that you continue to wear your masks and wear them properly. If you do not wear them properly, we will kill you.

(LAUGHTER)

Man: If this pandemic doesn’t.

John Yang: At the American Shakespeare Center, nestled in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, a rare sight, live theater, indoors, with a live audience, alternating performances of “Othello” and “Twelfth Night” through October 18.

Ethan McSweeny: Some of the very large organizations, I think they can afford to kind of run for the hills, wait for the wave to break and then come back and reopen.

John Yang: Artistic director Ethan McSweeny.

Ethan McSweeny: The small and mid-sized like us, our — I guess our solution was to surf the wave and hopefully stay afloat.

John Yang: McSweeny led an appropriately distanced tour of the 32-year-old company’s theater.

Ethan McSweeny: You don’t expect this when you come into the small town of Staunton, Virginia, and you walk into our sort of unprepossessing, rather ordinary lobby, and then you’re in here, in this incredible, world’s-only recreation of Shakespeare’s indoor theater, the Blackfriars Playhouse.

John Yang: Like Shakespeare’s 17th century Blackfriars, there is minimal scenery, no sound amplification, and universal lighting, illuminating both audience and actors.

But unlike the Bard’s theater, even though it operated at the time of the bubonic plague, there are elaborate safety precautions.

Ethan McSweeny: We started creating a series of protocols that we ended up calling SafeStart.

We started with the workplace protocols and also added the audience protocols, many of which are the same and similar. But it was — I mean, obviously, as the name suggests, safety is the primary.

Man: Wonderful first day of rehearsals.

John Yang: For the actors, the plan, developed with medical advice, had an initial two-week quarantine, with rehearsals over Zoom. Next came in-person rehearsals, first with masks, and then gradually without.

Backstage, personnel and management still must wear masks at all times. To let patrons choose the way they’re most comfortable seeing a show, for the first time, the company added outdoor performances on the grounds of the nearby Blackburn Inn and streamed performances on the Internet.

“Othello” is set in Venice at the time of the plague, so some scenes incorporate masks. Infection rates are relatively low in the area, and the company has not had any COVID cases.

The performers have daily symptom checks, live in their own bubble in company-provided housing, and have signed an isolation covenant.

Jessika D. Williams plays the title role in “Othello.”

Jessika D. Williams: You know, this is not risk-free. It’s like we have tightened it up. And I think we have done a great job. And we are all taking care of each other. And it’s been working so far.

John Yang: John Harrell is in his 26th season with the theater.

John Harrell: I think we all know, at this point, the entire enterprise depends on our being responsible to a larger group.

But that is a condition that ensemble actors are used to, whether it’s COVID or other things. We all know — actors are always on time. And we always know our lines.

John Yang: From the stage, cast members keep an eye on whether audiences obey the requirement to keep their masks on. They can stop a performance at any time.

John Harrell: It adds a certain level of anxiety. It’s like, well, she’s taking a deep breath and going to put it right back on. Do I need to stop the show? What’s — you know, what do I do? Do I alert the stage management. Am I — so, there’s — it’s just one more thing to be paying attention to and to be juggling.

But, so far, we haven’t had — everybody’s been really compliant with our rules.

John Yang: Seating capacity in the indoor theater has been cut by more than 50 percent. And the mask requirement for audiences has meant some adjustment for actors.

John Harrell: You’re used to looking, all right, is that person smiling. Is that person on the verge of laughing at this joke? Do they look angry? Do they look bored? All of those cues that we take.

But I have started noticing, you can see those cues anyway. It’s just a little bit — you have to just pay a little bit more attention.

So, it was odd at first. But, like with everything else in this pandemic, it’s gotten easier and more — you just get more used to it.

John Yang: Audience members at a recent indoor matinee of “Othello” said they felt safe.

Ezriona Prioleau and Kara Painter came from nearby Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Ezriona Prioleau: I mean, we were more than six feet away from the closest person. And so knowing that and seeing that makes it feel like they’re doing all they can.

Kara Painter: Yes, and theater is probably about one of the oldest forms of art storytelling. So, like, bringing it back outside or bringing it inside, it’s still just the same core of telling a story, telling people’s points of view and kind of learning and growing with other people.

John Yang: Laura Lattimer and Shobhit Gupta traveled from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Laura Lattimer: I wish I weren’t wearing a mask, but I think they made a good show that, kind of — they even wore their masks on stage, as you saw, at some points.

So, I think recognizing the times is very Shakespeare, too, right? He recognized what was going on in the world and played up to that. So I think it was very fitting, I suppose.

John Yang: Some said attending a live performance for the first time in nearly a year was surprisingly moving.

Karen Marsh of Charlottesville.

Karen Marsh: I didn’t realize how much I missed it.

When the — before the performance started and they came out singing, I started weeping. And that was completely unexpected to me. But it was so powerful just to be in the presence of creative people doing art. It really was moving.

John Yang: The theater hopes it’s found a way to provide more people with that experience during the pandemic, announcing that, in December, it will stage the holiday classic “A Christmas Carol.”

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m John Yang in Staunton, Virginia.

Judy Woodruff: The Bard would be pleased. So wonderful that they are doing this in Staunton.

And thank you, John.

[Readers should note that my article on “Shenandoah Shakespeare,” referenced above, explains some of the issues mentioned in passing in John Yang’s report: why a female actor is playing Othello, where that opening admonition fits into the ASC performance text, and other matters.  (“Blackfriars Playhouse in Virginia” describes the design and construction of the theater building itself.)

[A word, now, about ASC’s home town: despite its spelling, Staunton’s name is pronounced STAN-tun, not STAWN-tun.  The small town (population just under 24,000) is the home of Mary Baldwin University, formerly Mary Baldwin College, a women’s college, when I was a student at nearby Washington and Lee University (which, incidentally, started in Staunton as the Augusta Academy—Staunton is the seat of Augusta County—but moved to Lexington, in Rockbridge County, in 1780).

[Coincidentally, the two other Virginia towns mentioned above are also college towns: Harrisonburg is the location of James Madison University (formerly Madison College, another women’s school) and Charlottesville is the site of the University of Virginia.

[John Yang is a correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. He covered the first year of the Trump administration and is currently reporting on major national issues from Washington, D.C., and across the country. Alison Thoet is a writer and online reporter for the PBS NewsHour, covering primarily women’s social and political stories. Maea Lenei Buhre is a production associate for the PBS NewsHour.]

Two Productions by Eminent 'Auteur' Directors from the Archive

 (Part 2: Artist Profiles)

[For an explanation of the origins of this post, I refer readers to Part 1 of “Two Productions by Eminent Auteur Directors from the Archive,” published on Saturday, 10 October.  What follows is freshly written, but it harks back to the two performances I saw at the Lincoln Center Festival in July of 2005.  Although one of the directors profiled below, Giorgio Strehler of Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano, died in 1997, the company he founded is still producing and still internationally esteemed. 

[Ariane Mnouchkine is still working at 81 and, like Piccolo Teatro, Le Théâtre du Soleil, is also still acclaimed for its unique theater style.  As I asserted in Part 1, the very fact that I got to see the work of both these artists and companies here is proof to me that New York City is the capital of the world—at least as far as the arts are concerned.] 

ARLECCHINO, SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS
by Carlo Goldoni
Piccolo Teatro di Milano—Teatro d’Europa
Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
22 July 2005

CARLO GOLDONI

Born in Venice in 1707, Carlo Goldoni is considered one of Italy’s most prominent playwrights.  He was theater-obsessed from an early age, despite efforts by his father to redirect his life.  He eventually studied law and clerked in the small town of Chioggia near Venice; it became the setting for one of Goldoni’s comedies, Le baruffe chiozzotte (“The Chioggia scuffles”), considered one of the classics of Italian theater.

Goldoni made his theatrical début with Amalasunta, a tragedy produced in Milan in 1733.  The play was a critical and financial flop.  Goldoni returned to his inn and threw the manuscript of his first play into the fire.

When productions of his other first works, including his first opera, Belisario (1734; not to be confused with Gaetano Donizetti’s 1836 opera), were not received well in Milan and Venice, Goldoni decided that the Italian stage needed to be reformed. 

Abandoning 17th-century neo-classical theatrical traditions and the improvised buffoonery of commedia dell’arte, Goldon developed a comedy of manners inspired by the people he knew and enriched by his critical observations of the society of his time.  His comedies demonstrate a sharp eye for the difficulties, paradoxes, and injustices of life. 

L’uomo di mondo (“The man of the world”), his first real comedy, was written in 1738, and after several drafts, Il servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters) was first performed in 1747.  Between 1750 and 1751, adopting Molière (1622-73) as his model, Goldoni wrote 16 “new comedies,” comedies of representations of actual life and manners through the characters and their behaviors (as distinguished from the commedia dell’arte conventions of masks, lazzi, and intrigue), which together are considered to represent a manifesto of his theatrical ideas.  (For further information on commedia dell’arte, see my brief discussion below.)

Goldoni worked with the Teatro San Luco in Venice for nine years (1753-62).  Throughout his career, however, he was attacked by rivals who never accepted his theatrical innovations.  After a dispute with fellow dramatist Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) which left him disgusted with the taste of Italian literati, Goldoni left Italy in 1762 and joined the Comédie Italienne in Paris. 

The playwright died in Pais in 1793 at 85 after several years of illness, which he describes in his autobiography, Mémoires (1787).  Among Goldoni’s 120 plays are La putta onorata (“The honorable maid,” 1749), La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn, 1751), Il campiello (“The campiello” or “The small square,” 1755), La trilogia della villegiatura (The Holiday Trilogy, 1756; see my report on this play mounted by the Piccolo Teatro, on Rick On Theater on 27 July 2009), I rusteghi (The Boors, 1760), Sior Todero brontolon (“Sior Todero grumbles,” 1762), La baruffe chiozzotte (1762), and Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale (“One of the last evenings of Carnovale,” 1762). 

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE

Commedia dell’arte (which translates as "professional theater") developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, first in Italy and then in other parts of Europe.  This transgressive form of improvised comedy relied on the physical and verbal dexterity of actors who played scenes based on canovaccio, a basic plot or scenario accompanied by a few instructiions on how the comedy should be performed. 

Commedia performances were outdoors, often in the town square where the players set up a wagon that served as the troupe’s stage.  (The troupes were itinerant.)  Sets were minimal and stock, props were only what was needed for the action and often conventional, like slapsticks and bladders.  Actors wore masks and costumes identified with stock characters that audiences immediately recognized, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or braggart soldiers.  

Most masks had exaggerated features to aid in improvisation and help identify character and personality.  Behind the masks, actors relied on their voices and gestures, rather than facial expressions, to demonstrate feelings and emotions.  (I have a post on masks in theater, “The Magic of Masks,” on ROT on 17 September 2011.) 

Conventional gestures, phrases, exclamations, and curses were an essential part of the actors’ performances.  Extended comic riffs, called lazzi, frequently interrupted the action, giving actors an opportunity to display their improvisational skills.

Though the scripts were almost entirely improvised, the troupes sent company members into the town in advance to spy out the current gossip and get intelligence on prominent citizens and community leaders.  The scenarios would be adjusted on the fly so that topical foibles and scandals would end up in the plays.

(A secondary benefit of the masks most commedia actors wore in performance was to hide their off-stage identities from affronted townsfolk who might seek reprisals for insults and revelations made during the plays.)

Italy’s commedia troupes travelled throughout Europe, influencing theaters in Spain, Holland, Germany, Austria, England (Punch-and-Judy puppet shows; Shakespeare), and, especially, France (Molière).  In the 18th century, Goldoni, for instance, used and revised many of the theatrical  conventions of commedia, writing complete play texts and turning conventional character types into more rounded and credible human beings.  (See comments on Goldoni’s “new comedy,” above.)

Arlecchino was one of the best-known characters in commedia, with his cat-shaped mask; multi-colored, diamond-patterned costume; and constant scheming.  Il Dottore (Dr. Lombardi in Arlecchino) wore an almost-entirely black costume, including the academic robe of a Bolognese scholar.  His mask, which covered only his forehead and nose, had a small mustache and eyebrows.

Pantalone’s costume was typically tight red pants with a matching shirt, a long black cape, pointed shoes, and a belt with a purse dangling conspicuously from it.  His mask included a pointy beard and long nose; it sometimes also had a mustache and bushy eyebrows. 

Brighella wore a servant’s suit of rough fabric and a long shirt.  His mask had a hooked nose, beard, and mustache.  The Lovers (here Silvio, Clarice, Beatrice, and Florindo) wore whatever the latest local fashion was.  They didn’t usually wear masks.

In addition to particular costumes and masks, the characters in commedia dell’arte traditionally spoke specific dialects that indicated class distinctions and regional differences, as well as reflected defining qualities of the original stock characters.  For example, as a symbol of the wealthy merchant class of Venice, Pantalone spoke with a “pure” Venetian accent that was emphasized when he conducted business. 

The original zanni (or jester) character that was the basis for Arlecchino was a servant from the countryside of northeast Italy, near Venice; therefore he spoke a rougher, less polished form of the Venetian dialect used by Pantalone.  Although an innkeeper rather than a servant, Brighella was also based on a zanni character and used a dialect similar to Arlecchino’s. 

Il Dottore, however, spoke in a Bolognese dialect to indicate that he was a learned man from Bologna, where one of the oldest universities in Italy is located.  As a professor of law and medicine, Goldoni’s Dr. Lombardi often mixes his Bolognese dialect with his own versions of Latin phrases, creating an often comic manner of speaking. 

In contrast, the Lovers (and Smeraldina in Arlecchino), all spoke an older form of Italian (from the 18th century) that’s more elegant than current conversational Italian but that would be familiar to a contemporary Italian audience.

GIORGIO STREHLER

Affectionately called “Il Maestro” by his European audiences, Giorgio Strehler was one of the most celebrated directors of the 20th century.  Born in 1921 in Trieste, at the head of the Bay of Trieste on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, Strehler graduated from Milan’s Filodrammatici Drama School (literally, Academy of amateur dramatics) in 1940. 

He interrupted his career to join the Resistance movement in World War II and, in 1944, Strehler was captured and imprisoned by the Nazis and the Fascists.  After being exiled to Switzerland, he began staging plays in French, making the theater his home.

Strehler returned to Milan after the war and founded the Piccolo Teatro (‘little theater’), Italy’s first public theater, in 1947 with Paolo Grassi and Nina Vinchi Grassi.  During his 50 years as artistic director of Piccolo Teatro, Strehler developed a theater that was formally rigorous, politically committed, and open to as broad an audience as possible. 

Over the course of his career, he directed some 200 plays and operas in Milan, Rome, Paris, and Salzburg.  In addition to Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters, seminal productions include Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, William Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest, Goldoni’s Il campiello, Luigi Pirandello’s Mountain Giants (I giganti della montagna), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera and The Good Person of Szechwan. 

Strehler’s opera credits include Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff, Simon Boccanegra, and Macbeth, as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Juan, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), The Magic Flute, and Cosi fan tutti.

Strehler, always active in politics as a socialist, was also a member of the European Parliament (1983-84) and a Senator of the Italian Republic (1983-89). 

Strehler died of a heart attack during rehearsals for Così fan tutte in Lugano, Switzerland, on Chrsitmas night, 1997, at the age of 76.  The opera was to have inaugurated the Nuovo Piccolo Teatro (New Piccolo Teatro) in Lugano, the largest city in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland where Strehler had maintained a home for some years.

IL PICCOLO TEATRO DI MILANO

Piccolo Teatro di Milano (Italian for “little theater of Milan,” so named in homage to Moscow’s Maly Theater—which also means “little theater,” in contrast to the “big” Bolshoi Theater), founded by Strehler, Paolo Grassi (1919-81), a theater manager and director, and Nina Vinchi (1911-2009), Grassi’s wife, in 1947, was one of Italy’s first artistic ventures after World War II and its first public theater (also called “permanent,” as opposed to private companies, which were itinerant).  Grassi was its general manager and Strehler was artistic director.

Piccolo Teatro soon became known as an “art theater for everyone” (teatro d’arte per tutti) producing distinctive work at a price that everyone could afford.  Strehler staged numerous classical works, from Shakespeare to Goldoni to Chekhov, and many of the greatest works by 20th-century dramatists, including Brecht, Sameul Beckett, and Pirandello. 

Strehler’s productions have toured to more than 40 countries around the world.  The artistic excellence and community orientation of Piccolo Teatro has become a model followed by many other Italian theaters.  In 1991, Piccolo Teatro was designated a Teatro d’Europa and joined the Union of European Theatres, an international organization that encourages cultural exchange among theaters across Europe.

After Strehler’s death in 1997, Sergio Escobar, manager of renowned opera houses in Bologna, Genoa, and Rome, and international director Luca Ronconi, were appionted to lead Piccolo Teatro.  (Ronconi died in 2015.  Playwright Stefano Massini is currently the artistic consultant of the Piccolo Teatro.)  

With its three theaters, the Teatro Strehler, the Teatro Studio, and the Teatro Grassi, Piccolo Teatro is one of Italy’s most important cultural centers, producing some 600 performances each year.  In addition, since 1999, Piccolo Teatro has hosted an international theater festival showcasing productions from around the world.

*  *  *  *

LE DERNIER CARAVANSÉRAIL (ODYSSÉES)
conceived by Ariane Mnouchkine
Théâtre du Soliel (Paris)
Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
27 & 29 July 2005

ARIANE MNOUCHKINE

Ariane Mnouchkine, born on 3 March 1939 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, a western suburb of Paris, is the daughter of Russian-born French film producer Alexandre Mnouchkine (1908-93) and Jane Hannen, daughter of British actor Nicholas Hannen.  (Alexandre Mnouchkine named his production company Les Films Ariane for his daughter.)

Mnouchkine attended Oxford University in England to study psychology, but then joined the Oxford University Drama Society and decided that that’s what she wanted to do.  She continued her theater studies at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a school of physical theater in Paris, where in 1964 she founded Le Théâtre du Soleil (“Theater of the sun”) with some of her fellow students.

The leader of the Théâtre du Soleil has developed her own works, like the political-themed 1789 (1970), which dealt with the French Revolution, as well as numerous classical texts like Molière’s Don Juan and Tartuffe.  Between 1981 and 1984, she translated and directed a series of Shakespeare plays: Richard II, Twelfth Night, and Henry IV, Part 1.  

While she developed the shows one at a time, when she finished Henry IV, she toured the three together as a cycle of plays.  Similarly, she developed Iphigenia by Euripides and Aeschylus' Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides) between 1990 and 1992.  Together, the four Greek plays became Les Atrides.

A Mnouchkine production has been notable for the choice of subjects the director addressed, often providing food for thought on the human condition.  These subjects often present dramas that are shocking or have upset the planet to make theater a means of shedding light on the history of our time: fundamentalism in Molière’s Tartuffe, political cowardice in Tambours sur la digue (“Drums on the dike”), refugees in Le Dernier Caravansérail. 

Her pieces are especially distinguished by her very visual staging; her famous moving sets present the scenes from different angles, for example.  The performances are supported by an omnipresent “soundtrack,” often played live from the edge of the stage by the one-man-orchestra, Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, with whom Mnouchkine’s been collaborating since 1979.

While mainly a stage director, Mnouchkine’s been involved in some films.  Her movie 1789, filmed from the live production, brought her international fame in 1974.  In 1978, she wrote and directed Molière, a biography of the famous French playwright for which she received an Oscar nomination.  

She collaborated with Hélène Cixous on a number of projects including La Nuit miraculeuse (“The miraculous night”; film, 1989) and Tambours sur la digue (stage, 1999; film, 2003), two made-for-television movies.  She also has screenwriting credit for L’Homme de Rio (“The man from Rio”), 1964.  In 1987, Mnouchkine was the first recipient of the Europe Theatre Prize.

In 1992, Mnouchkine criticized Euro Disney Resort as a cultural Chernobyl and was very opposed to the decision to open the European branch of the theme park in Paris.

On 20 May 2009 (playwright Henrik Ibsen’s birthday), Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, the head of the selection committee, announced at the Ibsen Museum in Oslo, Norway, that Ariane Mnouchkine was the second winner of the International Ibsen Award.  The prize, awarded for bringing new artistic dimensions to the world of drama or theater, was given to the director at a ceremony at the National Theatre in Oslo on 10 September 2009.  

Two years later, Mnouchkine received the Goethe Medal, given to non-Germans “who have performed outstanding service . . . for international cultural relations.”

Mnouchkine’s recent productions have included Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 2014; Une chambre en Inde (“A room in India”), created by Mnouchkine and Hélène Cixous in 2017; and Kanata – Episode 1 – The Controversy, created in collaboration with Canadian Robert Lepage’s production company Ex Machina (Quebec City) in 2018.

Also in 2018, Mnouchkine was awarded two Molières, the French national theater honor often compared to the Tony Award in the U.S. and the Laurence Olivier Award in Great Britain.  Her production of  Une chambre en Inde won for the best show of the subsidized theater/public theater.  The director won an individual Molière as the best director of a public theater show for the same production. 

Last year, Mnouchkine was awarded the Kyoto Prize, Japan’s highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences, for her work as “a stage director who has innovated theatrical expressions through her original masterpieces for over half a century.”

LE THÉÂTRE DU SOLEIL

Founded in Paris in 1964 by Mnouchkine and a group of actors and technicians from L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Le Théâtre du Soleil combines socio-political activism with a collective sensibility.  The collaborative creation of original works is the hallmark of this company that consistently functions like one large family that lives together and equally shares the work of creating its productions.  The collective shares daily meals together, often with the attending audience.     

Mnouchkine has summarized the philosophy of the troupe as “Theatre du Soleil is the dream of living, working, being happy and searching for beauty and for goodness . . . .  It’s trying to live for higher purposes, not for richness.  It’s very simple, really.”

The company consists of close to 100 actors, technicians, and designers from throughout the world, speaking about two dozen different languages among them.  Included in this collective, for instance, are mask maker Erhard Stiefel and musician Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, composer and interpreter of the music for the productions, who’ve worked for the company for over 40 years, as did scenographer Guy-Claude François until hs death in 2014. 

Mnouchkine has directed scores of productions with the company.  Inspiration has come from major historical events like the French revolution and the partition of India, as well as from epics of world literature such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, and the Mahabharata.. 

The work of the Théâtre du Soleil is a mixture of Asian-based and Western influences.  Mnouchkine feels that Asian theater (music, dance, masks, and puppetry, among other techniques) is a fundamental art form and she uses this influence in her overall concepts.  She also emphasizes physical theater and improvisation, almost certainly because of her training with Lecoq, a world-renowned physical-theater and mime artist and teacher.

One example of drawing inspiration from non-Western performance was in the collective’s production Tambours sur la Digue in which they incorporated puppetry in the style of Japanese Bunraku.  Les Atrides took the classical Greek tragedies of Euripides and Aeschylus and staged them using the costumes, make-up, and conventions of East Indian theater forms, particularly Kathakali.

Commentary on current events at home appeared in the Théâtre du Solieil’s production of Molière’s Tartuffe in which the title character was presented as an Islamic zealot at a time when there was a movement in France against foreign immigration.  Le Dernier Caravansérail (the topic of the second half of Part 1 of this post) was a look at the worldwide refugee crisis that was especially prominent in France at the time (2003).

The company’s productions have included re-imaginings of classics of Western theater such as works of Shakespeare and Molière, but the Théâtre du Soleil is equally well known for its original works. The collective, under the direction of Mnouchkine, works together in a collaborative rehearsal process that stretches over many months to create a performance.  Les Atrides took over two years to complete.

Théâtre du Soleil’s productions are often performed in found spaces like barns or gymnasiums because Mnouchkine doesn’t like being confined to a typical stage.  (The troupe’s first production was mounted in a basketball court.)  Similarly, she feels theater can’t be bound by the “fourth wall.”  When audiences enter a Mnouchkine production, they’ll often find the actors preparing—putting on make-up, getting into costume—in their presemce.

Among their most influential performances are the collective creations 1789 and L’Age d’or (“The golden age,” 1975); the historical and epic plays written by Hélène Cixous, including L’Indiade (1987), L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (“The terrible but unifinished story of Norodom Sihanouk, king of Cambodia,” 1985), La Ville Parjure (“The perjured city,” 1994), Tambours sur la digue; The Shakespeare Cycle (featuring Richard II; Twelfth Night; Henry IV, Part 1; 1980-84); Les Atrides (based on the Oresteia by Aeschylus and Iphigenia by Euripides, 1990-92); and Molière’s Tartuffe (1995).

Théâtre du Soleil’s first visit to the United States occurred at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984, where they performed The Shakespeare Cycle.  The troupe made its New York City début for the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the 14th Regiment Armory in Park Slope in October 1992 with the U.S. première of Les Atrides.  Other New York apparances include the North American première of Le Dernier Caravansérail and the U.S. première of Les Éphémères (“The ephemerals” or “Ephemera”) at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the 2009 Lincoln Center Festival.

The company has also created several films, including 1789 (based on the play), Molière, ou la vie d’un honnête  homme (“Molière, or the life of an honest man”; official selection, International Film Festival, Cannes, 1978), Au soleil mème la nuit (“The sun shines even at night”; documentary of Tartuffe rehearsals, 1996-97), and Tambour sus la digue (based on the play).                                                                           

Since 1970, the company’s permanent home has been an old, spacious Paris munitions factory, La Cartoucherie (cartouche is French for ‘cartridge’).  The Théâtre du Soleil performs at the Cartoucherie, in the Vincennes area of the city, as well as on tour in France and abroad.  The company’s rehearsals are open to spectators and the troupe encourages visitors at La Cartoucherie.