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.

Two Productions by Eminent 'Auteur' Directors from the Archive

(Part 1: Play Reports)

[I had intended to re-present these archival play reports from my pre-Rick On Theater archive along with some inserted commentary on the two directors and their illustrious companies.  Both artists, Giorgio Strehler and Ariane Mnouchkine, are—or were: Strehler died in 1997—world-renowned theater artists and their companies, Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano and Le Théâtre du Soleil, are internationally acclaimed.

[I felt, though, that most people who know of them are theater folk—artists themselves or devoted theatergoers.  I wanted a chance to make sure that ROTters who aren’t in either category got a chance to know about these astounding stage artists and performing troupes.  (You will find that both pairs are represented on this blog; the reports on two of their other works are cross-referenced in Part 2.)

[When I finished reediting this play report, which I wrote in 2005, four years before I started ROT, and then inserted the profiles and background material I wanted to add, the post got very long.  I struggled with a way to preserve both my intentions—re-present the play reports and profile the artists—and finally decided to post the report first on its own—slightly reedited from my original, but substantially unchanged—and then publish a second post with the commentary I’d composed.

[So below is the report I wrote for some out-of-town friends back in 2005 and on 13 October, I’ll post the profile and background comments.  I hope you’ll derive something interesting from the two parts of “Two Productions by Eminent Auteur Directors from the Archive.”]

LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL
1 August 2005 

Last month [July 2005], Diana, my usual theater partner, and I saw two of the events in the Lincoln Center Festival: Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters and Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées).  (The latter was a two-parter, so three performances all told.)  This is a clear and unambiguous representation that New York City gets more and a broader variety of cultural events from all over the world than, I believe, anywhere else on the planet. 

(I’ve never done a survey—and I’m not aware that anyone else has—but unscientifically, I think that’s so.  For theater alone it seem to be true, but if you add in opera, dance, and music performances, and then count all the visiting visual art exhibits—New York City is the capital of the world.) 

Both productions were fascinating experiences, and both had serious flaws as productions despite extraordinary performances.  We saw Arlecchino first (22 July), so that’s where I’ll start.  (It’s as good a place as any, right?)

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

The Piccolo Teatro di Milano’s three-hour production of Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters, originally staged by Giorgio Strehler in 1947, is his take on the farce by Carlo Goldoni (1707-93), The Servant of Two Masters, written in 1745 and first performed in 1747.  It’s an adaptation from the previous century’s commedia dell’arte scenarios and is representative of Goldoni’s take on the commedia tradition. 

Arlecchino, known as Harlequin in English, is arguably the best-known character from Italian commedia dell’arte (with the possible exception of Pulcinella, who became Punch in the popular English puppet shows).  To celebrate this inventive and sly servant, Strehler changed the name of his production of the Goldoni classic to Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters.

Strehler, who died in 1997 at 76, stripped the text down to allow more improvising by the cast, returning the play to its commedia roots.  (I’m going to assume a certain familiarity, if not with Goldoni’s classic, then the basic facts of commedia.  Like that genre, the plot of Arlecchino is virtually irrelevant—just a frame to hang hi-jinks and verbal play on—so I won’t bother to recount it.  [In Part 2 of this post, I will provide a brief synopsis of the background of commedia dell’arte.] 

(Suffice it to say that the play involves mistaken identities, scheming servants, plotting parents, separated lovers, and everything, in fact—as someone once said—that makes life worth living!  From what I gather, both from reading reports and watching, the improvisation came during rehearsals and conception.  The performances are choreographed tightly and, obviously, verbal improv wouldn’t allow the supertitles to follow the dialogue closely, which they apparently did.) 

In order to focus attention on the lead character, Strehler slightly renamed the play, which has been in the Piccolo’s repertoire for nearly 60 years (and over 2000 performances in 40 countries, according to their count).  This production has been staged by Ferruccio Soleri, who’s played Arlecchino for more than four decades and, at 75, is still doing it. 

That’s one of the most remarkable aspects of this event—Soleri, under his mask, takes on the frisky, scheming clown like a man of . . . oh, I don’t know, maybe 35 at the most.  He’s astounding, to put it mildly.  (I had read Charles Isherwood’s 22 July review in the New York Times beforehand, so I knew Soleri was 75, but when he took off his mask at the curtain call, it was still a mini-shock.  I had really forgotten while he was working how old he was.)  

The whole cast, as a matter of fact, is perfect.  (There’s one guy—Paolo Calabresi, who plays Il Dottore—who I swear is either a giant or the rest of the cast is shrimps.  He looks immense.  I’d guess his huge belly is padding, but he isn’t wearing stilts or lifts, so his height is real, and he towers over everyone else on stage!) 

[I just looked Calabresi up on IMDb and was surprised to find him listed; his page even has his height.  It turns out he is tall, but not a giant—he’s 6' 2¾".]

And the concept of reproducing commedia, with its little street stage (representing the commedia wagon bed), flat painted scenery, the actors “off stage” sitting or standing on the Alice Tully Hall stage to the right or left of the commedia stage as they awaited their entrances, the musicians and stage hands mostly visible—and sometimes engaging the actors in arguments when something doesn’t go “right”—the inserted lazzi, and the songs into which the actors break at the drop of a hat during scene changes, is delightful and, from my limited knowledge of theater history, wonderfully accurate.

I’m going to take a short (?) side trip here and delve into a topic Isherwood brought up in his review: the connection of commedia, especially as depicted here, with contemporary comedy.  If you don’t already know it, or haven’t really seen it beyond reading about it in some theater history treatise, you can absolutely see where our common comic practices on TV and on stage originated.  Isherwood mentions Homer Simpson, but I don’t watch that so I can only take his word for the reflection—but Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Chaplin, Martin and Lewis, Peter Sellers, Monty Python, Laugh-In, That Was The Week That Was, and Saturday Night Live: they’re all in there. 

This production even makes liberal use of an actual slapstick, the comic device (that dates back to Roman comedy, I think—a progenitor of commedia) that gave its name to a whole genre of modern (?) Western silliness.  (The circus clown is, of course, a direct descendant of the zanni Harlequin/Arlecchino, followed by the Red Skeltons, Jackie Gleasons, Jerry Lewises, Lucille Balls, Carol Burnetts, Jim Carreys, among others 

(After watching Soleri, I’m also convinced that Chico Marx was Arlecchino’s great-great-great-. . .-grandson!  Not to mention Ed Norton and even Barney Fife—who were more like his great-great-great-grandnephews.)  What’s amazing is that it’s still all hilarious!  I’m not even a great lover of clowns—none of those performers I just listed are favorites of mine (except maybe Burnett)—and even though you know what’s coming most of the time—the routines haven’t changed in centuries—the execution by true masters like Soleri makes them seem fresh and surprising, even though they’re really not. 

Possibly the funniest scene in the play—one you could easily imagine Chaplin doing—is the one in which Arlecchino simultaneously serves separate dinners to his two masters at Brighella’s tavern.  Soleri juggles the dishes and trays, tumbles and pratfalls, balances and dances in every direction, dodging the tavern keeper and his servants—never spilling a drop or dropping a platter!  (It gives entirely new meaning to what we used to call at summer camp “running the biddie”!)

I made a brief reference above to the set, which is sort of bifurcated.  The Piccolo Teatro’s set (designed by Ezio Frigerio) is an evocation of a town square, not quite realistically presented—there are awnings which resemble birds’ wings or ships’ sails—in the middle of which is a small raised platform that is the commedia playing area. 

At the rear of the platform is a frame on which are hung four pairs of painted curtains which represent another town piazza with the front entrances of several houses (Il Dottore’s and Pantalone’s), a large room in Panatolone’s house, the interior of Brighella’s tavern, and a Venetian street by a canal.  As the scenes change, the stage hands simply step up on the platform and draw back or close the appropriate drapes to reveal the new locale.  

Off the sides of the platform, on the original Tully Hall stage, are waiting areas where the actors prepare for their entrances, the stage hands idle until they’re needed, and the musicians sit with their instruments.  (There’s also an old fellow sitting stage right with a large book, obviously the text of the play or the instructions for the scenario.  He’s either supposed to be Goldoni or a prompter—Michael Feingold in the Village Voice says he’s the prompter; I don’t recall that the commedians used a prompter, but never mind—and he occasionally got into disputes with the actors and others.  It was an innocuous gag and just added to the general whirl of activity that included, but wasn’t limited to, the action on the platform.) 

Props are minimal—only what is actually used in the scene, no decorative elements beyond the painted drapes.  “Decor” is painted onto the drapes, which looked to me to be modeled on 18th-century settings (Goldoni’s period) rather than 16th- or 17th-century (commedia’s period). 

The costumes, from what I could judge, are also early or mid-18th-century.  Arlecchino, of course, wears his customary diamond-patterned patchwork outfit (an article on Soleri says he goes through three of them each show because of the sweat); all the comic male characters wear commedia masks, though only Arlecchino wears his all the time.  (That’s, of course, why it was such a shock to see Soleri’s face at the curtain call.)

You may have noticed that I’ve focused on the physical aspects of the performance and haven’t said anything about the verbal comedy.  That’s because that’s where the problem lay for me.  It wasn’t the company’s fault, really—they spoke Italian, which I don’t understand, but that’s their language. 

The difficulty was in the supertitles and the auditorium configuration.  I couldn’t read the titles from my seat without missing what was happening on stage entirely—it was physically impossible.  There was only one title screen—up on the proscenium arch, right in the center.  I was sitting fairly close to the stage, but over on house right.  Alice Tully Hall is really a concert stage, and it has a wide stage with a very pronounced curve to it so that the house right and left seats are at about a 45° angle from the center of the stage.  (Think of trying to watch a TV screen from the side.) 

Between the height above the stage and the angle of my view, reading the titles meant straining so much that I’d never get them read in time to look back at the stage to see what anyone was doing.  So I decided to pay attention to the physical work, rely on the synopsis and my knowledge of the play and commedia to clue me in to what was going on, and ignore the actual dialogue. 

It wasn’t a completely satisfactory trade-off because I know that commedia includes a lot of jokes and other verbal play which I missed (assuming they would have even translated into English, which I supposed is problematical—though one review suggested that all the humor was replicated), and I wish that Lincoln Center, or whoever made this decision, had put screens at the sides and/or on the front of the stage (as several productions have done at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). 

I can understand why a simultaneous interpreter wouldn’t have worked—the dialogue came too fast—but additional screens wouldn’t have been an imposition, especially since the performing area was confined to the center of the Alice Tully stage; the rest of the space was “off stage” and would not have been hampered by a screen placed at the outer edges of the proscenium.

Now Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées).   

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

This six-hour-plus production of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil is performed in two parts, each of which runs over three hours.  Théâtre du Soleil has erected a large tent in Damrosch Park next to the Met and the New York State Theatre (since 2008, The David H. Koch Theater).  I understand that Théâtre du Soleil supplied the bleacher structure—not the tent itself, and I don’t know about the stage platform. 

This makes some sense, since one of Mnouchkine’s principles is that spectators should come and watch the actors prepare and the “dressing rooms” are beneath the bleachers so you can stand around and watch the make-up and prep.  The bleacher structure would have to be somewhat specially designed to accommodate this.  In Paris, where Théâtre du Soleil is housed in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, I believe they even run open rehearsals to which the public is welcome. 

If you haven’t read about this production, it is about refugees (a caravanserai, or caravansary, is a place where a caravan stops en route; the analogy is to refugee camps and detention centers).  Mnouchkine and her assistants traveled to several refugee centers all around the world, including Sangatte on the French coast which was originally established for Kosovar refugees, and collected their stories and, apparently, letters and/or diaries recounting their “odysseys” (hence, the play’s parenthetical subtitle).  Le Dernier Caravansérail (“The last caravanserai”) is, in this sense, a documentary play. 

You could go to the whole play in one day, with a meal break (I think they offered this on weekends), but Diana and I went on two nights, a Wednesday and a Friday (27 and 29 July).

Théâtre du Soleil was last in New York in 1992 with Les Atrides, Mnouchkine’s take on the four Greek plays by Aeschylus and Euripides that tell the tale of the House of Atreus.  They performed at a Brooklyn armory—Les Atrides was part of the BAM season that year—and used the same kind of bleacher set-up as Caravansérail.  (I presume it was the same structure, in fact—though over a 13-year period it may well have been replaced.) 

Les Atrides, like most of Mnouchkine’s material from what I know, was based on existing classical theater texts (she’s also done a Tartuffe, reset in the Middle East), which makes Caravansérail different for her.  (I’m not on real solid ground here: Théâtre du Soleil may often do original texts and I just don’t know about it.)  

I’m not sure if the difference in source material is wholly to blame for my difficulty with Caravansérail or not, but in comparison to Les Atrides, I found this less exciting dramatically, even though Mnouchkine’s staging and the work of the actors and other performers (Théâtre du Soleil always uses live music specially composed for Mnouchkine’s productions) was exceptional. 

Les Atrides was a remarkable experience which remains with me still.  Mnouchkine presented the Greek classic tragedies in the costumes and style of Indian (that’s East) theater, principally Kathakali as far as I could tell, in a set that looked to me like a squared-off bull ring.  It was stunning, even at 10-plus hours.  (I was so impressed with that production that I not only bought the photo book covering half the show that was on sale at the armory, but got Diana to buy me the second book when she went to Paris and saw Théâtre du Soleil there.) 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Caravansérail, whose two parts are titled “Le Fleuve cruel” (The cruel river) and “Origines et destins” (origins and destinies) respectively, isn’t entirely divorced from classical texts: Mnouchkine has modeled her play somewhat on Homer’s Odyssey, though it’s not at all an adaptation. 

The similarity, from my perspective, is pretty simplistic: the narrative, if you can call it that, is episodic, like the Odyssey, though the personalities aren’t continuous.  (Some “characters” repeat, but Caravansérail doesn’t follow one family or group the way Odyssey follows the crew of Ulysses’ ship.) 

Also, Ulysses and his crew have left a war that ended and were returning home victorious—circuitously, to be sure, but home was their goal; the wanderers in Caravansérail are fleeing on-going conflicts, of which they are victims, and they’re not headed anywhere familiar—or even predictable.  It would also be hard to describe the events of Caravansérail as “adventures.” 

There is, in fact, no actual narrative to Caravansérail.  Each episode recounts the fate of a group of oppressed and threatened people from some troubled part of our world from Afghanistan to Chechnya and Bosnia to Iran and Kurdistan. 

I don’t know if Mnouchkine had some intent in mind, but all of her refugees are Muslims.  Their oppressors are mostly Muslim, too—Taliban, Iranian ayatollahs, Baathist thugs—but not all of them are—Russian soldiers, Serb terrorists and “ethnic cleansers,” Australian coastguardsmen, French border guards 

I also don’t know if she deliberately avoided any portrayal of Americans or Brits as the instigators of flight—none of the Afghan or Iraqi refugees are fleeing the post-9/11 fighting; all are fleeing the regimes we overthrew and expelled.  That she’s French suggests to me that she wouldn’t down-play this out of a sense of “loyalty”: the French weren’t on our side in this tempest.  (Even if you characterize her as “Russo-French,” as one writer does—the Russians weren’t with us on Iraq, either.) 

It’s possible that this is because some of the material originated before 9/11, of course—though dates used in the text go well up to today.  Maybe she just didn’t want to alienate her potential audiences, and the point is not about blame or responsibility but about human intrepidity and capacity to hope and survive. 

It may be easier to make this point if the bad guys aren’t “us.”  (Remember, we are not a culture that likes to see itself portrayed in black hats, even if we were actually wearing one.  Think of the brouhaha over recent attempts to mount exhibits on the A-bomb and the current controversy over what can go into Ground Zero’s historical exhibits.)  One writer suggests when noting that the U.S. doesn’t figure in Caravansérail’s stories that it is a way of pointing out that we are not “at the center of everything.”

There is no “set” for Caravansérail.  The stage is bare and there is no decoration of any kind on the canvas walls.  There is a long trench-like hole near the front of the stage from which stagehands clamber and out of which some set pieces are fed, especially the large tarp that becomes the raging waters first of a river (part one) and then the Indian Ocean (part two).  (The trench also stands in for the entrance to the Chunnel into which would-be illegal immigrants from France to England are smuggled in several scenes.  This is the only time characters—as opposed to stage assistants—touch the stage floor as they leap from the border-fence platform into the Chunnel or are brought out by border guards.) 

Settings for each scene are rolled out on the same kinds of platforms as the actors themselves.  You may have read about this—it’s the salient image of the production: the characters are all rolled around on wheeled sleds—”big skateboards, essentially,” Charles Isherwood calls them.  They almost never walk and they virtually never touch the stage floor: they step from their “entry” sleds onto another platform with a set—a house, a clinic, a border fence—and they may take a few steps on that larger platform, but entrances and exits are all propelled by other cast members scooting along squatting or even virtually lying on their sides, pushing with their legs. 

(The “stage assistants,” as they function here—though they are actually actors not in the current scene—are all dressed in the same costumes as the characters in the scenes, not in black or other “invisible” attire like Japanese kurombos.  The costumes are realistic and culturally appropriate for the locales of each scene.) 

They also do other tasks, such as flapping the skirt hems of characters on the wind-blown bluffs above the Dover coast, say, or twitching the tail and turning the head of the (stuffed) donkey one character had ridden in on, or “flying” a bird on a long pole.  They also occasionally sweep the stage floor—they did walk, or really run (all scene changes are on the run), to do this—I presumed so the sleds would move smoothly after some scene littered the stage with sand or other detritus.  It was all very Brechtian.) 

Everything moves on these dollies—trees, telephone booths, a motorcycle—which are soundless.  The symbol is, of course, rootlessness—no connection to the ground, no permanence.  If the main point of Caravansérail is that people find the will to keep going, despite what they encounter along the way—insensitivity, exploitation, threats, danger, violence, death—the main symbol is the peripatetic rolling platform.  This is quite striking at first, but you get used to the convention soon and it just becomes part of the mise-en-scène. 

The dollies also gave the actors a kind of ethereal quality—like the women in mid-18th- or mid-19th-century gowns who seem to glide across the floor because you can’t see their feet or legs—as well as a robotic aspect, since the actors don’t move while they are on the roll—just strike a pose until they arrive at their place.  Then they may step onto a larger platform for a scene, even pace around some as the scene requires (the acting is generally naturalistic), but when they exit, they step back onto the smaller sled and become static, like an automaton that is turned off until needed, then turned off again for storage off stage somewhere.  Not quite human, you know?  “Other,” maybe.

The action is episodic, as I said—like the Odyssey—though, the stories don’t connect for the most part.  (Each part has one continuing story: “Love in Afghanistan” in “Cruel River” and “A Caucasian Story” in “Origins”; other connected episodes concern locales—Calais or the Chunnel in part one—or themes—”Returns” and “Reminiscences” in part two).  We don’t get to know anyone—some aren’t even identified at all, remaining just unknown émigrés. 

Obviously, however, the common thread is flight from oppression and/or danger and hardship and/or exploitation on the way.  Both parts open with a similar, very effective and excitingly theatrical scene of some kind of water crossing.  In part one, a family or group is trying to cross a raging river between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in a ferry drawn across on a cable: “A Crossing (Central Asia).”  (New York magazine has a photo of this scene in the 8 August issue and so does the Village Voice of 26 July.) 

The little ferry is tossed about by the river whose water is portrayed by that gray silken tarp which is hauled out of the trench and flapped vehemently by the stage assistants (aided by a wind machine); it can’t carry but one or two passengers plus the ferryman and keeps returning for more of the large group.  When the river becomes too wild for the ferryman, who nearly loses some passengers and his boat and even falls overboard himself, he refuses to return to the other side with more passengers, and one actually steals his boat and sets out on his own, nearly capsizing until the ferryman scrambles aboard by using the cable as a tightrope. 

Though there is shouting over the sound effects of roaring water, no dialogue can be made out—the whole scene is a mass of confusion and peril.  In part two, the same theme is repeated in “On the Way to Australia” in which a small, overcrowded boat is being tossed in a violent storm on the Indian Ocean somewhere between Pakistan and the coast of Australia.  (Think The Perfect Storm, if you saw that movie.)  Once again the torrent is represented by the gray fabric swells (this time with a white tarp added for the whitecaps), and passengers fall overboard and are rescued as the little vessel is jostled and rocked. 

At one point, when the boat is apparently within Australian waters, a helicopter hails it and orders it to turn back: “Australia will not accept you!” yell the soldiers dangling from ropes as spotlights illuminate the tiny boat and the clinging passengers.  (The ’copter is not visible—we just hear the rotors and see the effects of its wash.) 

It’s hard to describe how cleverly and effectively this is all handled: the boats move about the waters—the second one meanders all over the center of the stage, though the first goes back and forth in a mostly straight line—and passengers fall off and bob alongside in several different spots.  There are obviously holes in the tarp to permit the boat to move “through” the water and for the swimmers to pop up here and there—but you can’t see them. 

Even though you know the water is fabric, the whole thing is immensely effective—theatrical and at the same time terrifyingly real.  Nothing else in the play is as effective or as theatrically satisfying as these two scenes—and that’s unfortunate. 

The languages of the performance are French, of course, plus all the languages spoken by the travelers and their tormentors—Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Serbo-Croatian, even English (one of the refugee centers is in Australia).  This could even become amusing, perhaps unintentionally, because when both parties in a scene don’t speak the same language, such as at the medical clinic of the refugee camp at Sangatte, they speak a kind of pidgin French which sometimes evolves into Franglais, the lingua franca of international students in places like Geneva.  (We developed our own argot principally from French and English—both British and American—but also bits of German and whatever other languages people in the group spoke.  This may not have amused anyone but people like me, however.  [See “Franglais,” posted on Rick On Theater on 1 July 2020.]) 

Obviously, with so many different languages going on, the supertitles are pretty important in Caravansérail, and they were much more accessible than at Arlecchino.  First of all, the stage and the bleachers are straight—no deep curve to create angled sightlines—and there is no proscenium arch for the screen to be placed on, high above the stage. 

Théâtre du Soleil uses all kinds of locations for the projected titles—the back wall of the tent, a small screen that rises up from the slot at the front of the stage, on parts of the various mobile set pieces, even on the fabric which serves to create the roiling waters of the opening scenes of both parts.  I found that it was easier for me to read the texts through my opera glasses, but I could do that and return to the action pretty quickly without missing anything.  (The trick was to spot where the projection was going to show up—I did sometimes miss the first lines or two before I found the titles.  It was a little game.) 

The titles are more than just the transcription/translation of the dialogue, however.  There are also the texts of letters—some apparently from Mnouchkine to her informants—and prayers or poems, read over the loud speakers like a voice-over in film—there is no action on the stage during these moments (except scene-change cleanups or that kind of thing; no dramatic action)—and the titles of the scenes with locations and dates (another Brechtian element). 

The letter projections are quite interesting in themselves.  First, they are in a cursive-like font (the dialogue text is regular block letters), and they appear word-by-word as the speaker reads them out.  It isn’t so much as if we are watching the letter being penned, but more like it is being typed, despite the font.  Still, it is a case of supertitles-as-performance. 

(I have no idea if this is something new that Mnouchkine devised, but I’ve never seen it before.  Titles have always been just a utilitarian element in anything I’d seen before.  As it happens, we were sitting right above the technicians for this effect, and it is run by a laptop computer attached to a projector.  I have no idea, though, how the technicians could have so unerringly hit some of the spots on the moving set pieces.  In many cases, the titles are projected on beams of wood no wider than a 1”x4”, and since the platforms couldn’t always end up in precisely the same point on the stage each time, how did they always manage to hit their marks?) 

Out of curiosity, I sampled a number of reviews of Caravansérail (and Arlecchino as well) from several New York area publications and a couple from around the country.  As you might expect, opinions varied as to the result of Mnouchkine’s work here, though everyone was very respectful of the effort and the concept.  (Some of that may be political correctness in operation: who can admit publicly to not caring about refugees?  Even if you actually don’t.  [Note that this was written before Donald Trump and his administration appeared on the scene.]) 

Every critic describes, in almost the same detail, the two remarkable water scenes, but many mention and describe different other scenes that made impressions.  From my perspective, the closest review to my own response is Michael Feingold’s Village Voice piece, “Escape From Drama.” 

Overall, I found the piece more interesting than engaging—except for those two water scenes.  The ideas were intellectually or conceptually intriguing—the dollies, the titles, the episodic non-narrative—but didn’t add up to a truly exciting theatrical experience, the way Les Atrides did 13 years ago. 

The rolling actors and set, while it may have symbolized something significant, became just a convention; it wasn’t really moving (pardon the pun).  The titles, for all their curious manipulation, didn’t do much more than inform me of facts and delay the visual and active display on stage.  One writer compared these to an element of a PBS documentary, and that may be accurate. 

The string-of-pearls structure, all those episodes, ended up numbing me to the dramatic plight of the refugees and the human drama to which Mnouchkine seemed to want me to respond.  Not that there wasn’t emotional response—but I contend that it was less evoked by Mnouchkine’s theater than by pushing personal buttons which we essentially brought in with us. 

What I mean is, if someone who was steeled against the refugee plight came to this show, and he didn’t have any innate sense of despair or pity for the wanderers—Caravansérail wouldn’t rouse them in him.  Several critics indicated that the lack of character development and, therefore, personal connection was a tactic Mnouchkine used to open our eyes, but I have to side with the ones who said that it was counterproductive—it didn’t let us care; it just made us numb. 

One scene after another of basically the same tale—details and languages changed, but the fundamentals were the same, however superficial that similarity may have been.  I had thought that “The Cruel River” would somehow be different from “Origins and Destinies,” that one would show a different aspect of the refugee story—but the second part was more of what the first showed.  (Yes, I’m sure there were subtle differences in perspective or approach or something—but they were too subtle for my puny mind.) 

You remember that my criteria for good theater are that the piece must be theatrical and it must do more than just tell a story, it must reveal something to me about the human condition (sorry for the cliché: I don’t know another term).  Caravansérail ought to fit that bill—but it doesn’t work in the end. 

I think I also appended that the result must be good—and though I don’t want to dismiss Caravansérail as bad by any means—it’s too interesting for that—it just doesn’t connect.  It’s a shame.  (While many of the critics I read said that the piece doesn’t work in the end, several didn’t say that—and in some cases I got the distinct sense that they were afraid to say so.  My God, the empress has no clothes on!)

[Please come back to Rick On Theater on Tuesday, the 13th, to find out a little more about these artists, their work, and their companies.]

'Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters' (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005)

[On 9 July, I published my report on a production of Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. That production was an adaptation by playwright Constance Congdon, first performed by Hartford Stage in 1996. In 2005, I saw an older interpretation at the Lincoln Center Festival, a 1947 version, called Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters, originally staged by the internationally renowned Italian director Giorgio Strehler, the founder of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano who died in 1997. As a contrast to the STC production, originally presented in 2010 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, I’m publishing my seven-year-old report on the Lincoln Center performance. Even though Goldoni’s play is a classic, you’ll see that the interpretations of his 270-year-old script are quite different. (The second part of this report, which I have deleted here, covered the LCF performance of the Théâtre du Soliel’s Le Dernier Caravansérail, staged by Ariane Mnouchkine.)]

The Lincoln Center Festival is a clear and unambiguous representation that New York City gets more and a broader variety of cultural events from all over the world than, I believe, anywhere else on the planet. (I’ve never done a survey—and I’m not aware that anyone else has—but unscientifically, I think that’s so. For theater alone it seem to be true, but if you add in opera, dance, and music performances, and then count all the visiting visual art exhibits—New York City is the capital of the world.) In July 2005, I saw the Piccolo Teatro di Milano’s Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni and Le Dernier Caravansérail by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. Both productions were fascinating experiences, and both had serious flaws as productions despite extraordinary performances.

The Piccolo Teatro di Milano, founded by Giorgio Strehler in 1947 as one of the first cultural endeavors of post-WWII Italy, experienced the throes of rebirth when Strehler died in 1997 at 76,. The Piccolo turned to two men to preserve Strehler’s vision: opera house manager Sergio Escobar and the experimental theater director Luca Ronconi. Through the continuity of artists like Ferruccio Soleri (who restaged Strehler’s Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters this year), a member of Piccolo’s company since 1958, the troupe’s been able to keep up the work Strehler began, maintaining the Piccolo as a home to the classics and the works of the great writers of the 20th century like Beckett, Brecht, and Pirandello, becoming known as the “Theater of Art for Everyone.” Strehler took a less innovative view of the classic plays the Piccolo presented than contemporary auteur directors like Araine Mnouchkine, reviving the plays’ spirits and relevance without reinterpreting their milieux or texts. The Piccolo’s production of Goldoni’s Trilogia della Villeggiatura, for instance, is staged as an 18th-century comedy even if the energy and dynamic of the cast is as modern as David Mamet. Strehler, and now his successors, put an emphasis on the physical work of actors—Strehler was a specialist in commedia dell’arte—and that’s in evidence in Arlecchino. Mnouchkine, in contrast, re-envisioned the Greek plays that tell the story of the House of Atreus as quasi-Kathakali dramas for Les Atrides and reset Tartuffe in the Middle East. Strehler guided the Piccolo for 50 years; In the theater, that’s a lifetime of leadership.

The Piccolo Teatro ‘s three-hour production of Arlecchino, originally staged by Strehler in 1947, is his take on Goldoni’s 1743 farce, The Servant of Two Masters—itself an adaptation from the previous century’s commedia dell’arte scenarios. Strehler stripped the text down to allow more improvising by the cast, returning the play to its commedia roots. (I’m going to assume a certain familiarity, if not with Goldoni’s classic, then the basic facts of commedia. Like that genre, the plot of Arlecchino is virtually irrelevant—just a frame to hang hi-jinks and verbal play on—so I won’t bother to recount it. Suffice it to say that it involves mistaken identities, scheming servants, plotting parents, separated lovers, and everything, in fact—as someone once said—that makes life worth living! From what I gather, both from reading reports and watching, the improvisation came during rehearsals and conception. The performances are choreographed tightly and, obviously, verbal improv wouldn’t allow the supertitles to follow the dialogue closely, which they apparently did.) In order to focus attention on the lead character, Strehler slightly renamed the play, which has been in the Piccolo’s repertoire for nearly 60 years (and over 2000 performances in 40 countries, according to their count). This production has been staged by Ferruccio Soleri, who’s played Arlecchino for more than four decades and, at 75, is still doing it. That’s one of the most remarkable aspects of this event—Soleri, under his mask, takes on the frisky, scheming clown like a man of . . . oh, I don’t know, maybe 35 at the most. He’s astounding, to put it mildly. (I had read Charles Isherwood’s 22 July review in the New York Times beforehand, so I knew Soleri was 75, but when he took off his mask at the curtain call, it was still a mini-shock. I had really forgotten while he was working how old he was.) The whole cast, as a matter of fact, is perfect. (There’s one guy—Paolo Calabresi, who plays Il Dottore—who I swear is either a giant or the rest of the cast is shrimps. He looks immense. I’d guess his huge belly is padding, but he isn’t wearing stilts or lifts, so his height is real, and he towers over everyone else on stage!) And the concept of reproducing commedia, with its little street stage (representing the commedia wagon bed), flat painted scenery, the actors “off stage” sitting or standing on the Alice Tully Hall stage to the right or left of the commedia stage as they awaited their entrances, the musicians and stage hands mostly visible—and sometimes engaging the actors in arguments when something doesn’t go “right”—the inserted lazzi, and the songs into which the actors break at the drop of a hat during scene changes, is delightful and, from my limited knowledge of theater history, wonderfully accurate.

I’m going to take a short (?) side trip here and delve into a topic Isherwood brought up in his review: the connection of commedia, especially as depicted here, with contemporary comedy. If you don’t already know it, or haven’t really seen it beyond reading about it in some theater history treatise, you can absolutely see where our common comic practices on TV and on stage originated. Isherwood mentions Homer Simpson, but I don’t watch that so I can only take his word for the reflection—but Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Chaplin, Martin and Lewis, Peter Sellers, Monty Python, Laugh-In, That Was The Week That Was, and Saturday Night Live: they’re all in there. This production even makes liberal use of an actual slapstick, the comic device (that dates back to Roman comedy, I think—a progenitor of commedia) that gave its name to a whole genre of modern (?) Western silliness. (The circus clown is, of course, a direct descendant of the zanni Harlequin/Arlecchino, followed by the Red Skeltons, Jackie Gleasons, Jerry Lewises, Lucille Balls, Carol Burnetts, Jim Carreys, among others After watching Soleri, I’m also convinced that Chico Marx was Arlecchino’s great-great-great-. . .-grandson! Not to mention Ed Norton and even Barney Fife—who were more like his great-great-great-grandnephews.) What’s amazing is that it’s still all hilarious! I’m not even a great lover of clowns—none of those performers I just listed are favorites of mine (except maybe Burnett)—and even though you know what’s coming most of the time—the routines haven’t changed in centuries—the execution by true masters like Soleri makes them seem fresh and surprising, even though they’re really not. Possibly the funniest scene in the play—one you could easily imagine Chaplin doing—is the one in which Arlecchino simultaneously serves separate dinners to his two masters at Brighella’s tavern. Soleri juggles the dishes and trays, tumbles and pratfalls, balances and dances in every direction, dodging the tavern keeper and his servants—never spilling a drop or dropping a platter! (It gives entirely new meaning to what we used to call at summer camp “running the biddie”!)

I made a brief reference above to the set, which is sort of bifurcated. The Piccolo Teatro’s set (designed by Ezio Frigerio) is an evocation of a town square, not quite realistically presented—there are awnings which resemble birds’ wings or ships’ sails—in the middle of which is a small raised platform that is the commedia playing area. At the rear of the platform is a frame on which are hung four pairs of painted curtains which represent another town piazza with the front entrances of several houses (Il Dottore’s and Pantalone’s), a large room in Panatolone’s house, the interior of Brighella’s tavern, and a Venetian street by a canal. As the scenes change, the stage hands simply step up on the platform and draw back or close the appropriate drapes to reveal the new locale. Off the sides of the platform, on the original Tully Hall stage, are waiting areas where the actors prepare for their entrances, the stage hands idle until they’re needed, and the musicians sit with their instruments. (There’s also an old fellow sitting stage right with a large book, obviously the text of the play or the instructions for the scenario. He’s either supposed to be Goldoni or a prompter—Michael Feingold in the Village Voice says he’s the prompter; I don’t recall that the commedians used a prompter, but never mind—and he occasionally got into disputes with the actors and others. It was an innocuous gag and just added to the general whirl of activity that included, but wasn’t limited to, the action on the platform.) Props are minimal—only what is actually used in the scene, no decorative elements beyond the painted drapes. “Decor” is painted onto the drapes, which looked to me to be modeled on 18th-century settings (Goldoni’s period) rather than 16th- or 17th-century (commedia’s period). The costumes, from what I could judge, are also early or mid-18th-century. Arlecchino, of course, wears his customary diamond-patterned patchwork outfit (an article on Soleri says he goes through three of them each show because of the sweat); all the comic male characters wear commedia masks, though only Arlecchino wears his all the time. (That’s, of course, why it was such a shock to see Soleri’s face at the curtain call.)

You may have noticed that I’ve focused on the physical aspects of the performance and haven’t said anything about the verbal comedy. That’s because that’s where the problem lay for me. It wasn’t the company’s fault, really—they spoke Italian, which I don’t understand, but that’s their language. The difficulty was in the supertitles and the auditorium configuration. I couldn’t read the titles from my seat without missing what was happening on stage entirely—it was physically impossible. There was only one title screen—up on the proscenium arch, right in the center. I was sitting fairly close to the stage, but over on house right. Alice Tully Hall is really a concert stage, and it has a wide stage with a very pronounced curve to it so that the house right and left seats are at about a 45° angle from the center of the stage. (Think of trying to watch a TV screen from the side.) Between the height above the stage and the angle of my view, reading the titles meant straining so much that I’d never get them read in time to look back at the stage to see what anyone was doing. So I decided to pay attention to the physical work, rely on the synopsis and my knowledge of the play and commedia to clue me in to what was going on, and ignore the actual dialogue. It wasn’t a completely satisfactory trade-off because I know that commedia includes a lot of jokes and other verbal play which I missed (assuming they would have even translated into English, which I supposed is problematical—though one review suggested that all the humor was replicated), and I wish that Lincoln Center, or whoever made this decision, had put screens at the sides and/or on the front of the stage (as several productions have done at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). I can understand why an interpreter wouldn’t have worked—the dialogue came too fast—but additional screens wouldn’t have been an imposition, especially since the performing area was confined to the center of the Alice Tully stage; the rest of the space was “off stage” and would not have been hampered by a screen placed at the outer edges of the proscenium.