FABLES DE LA FONTAINE
Jean de la Fontaine
Adapted by Robert
Wilson
Comédie-Française
(Paris)
Lincoln Center
Festival 2007
On
Friday, 13 July [2007], my friend Diana and I went to the Gerald W. Lynch
Theater at John Jay College on 10th Avenue between 58th and 59th Street [the
theater’s former location until 2011, when it was relocated to 524 W. 59th Street]
to see Robert Wilson’s Fables
de la Fontaine with the Comédie-Française in the Lincoln Center
Festival. A friend remarked that the photo in the Times review (which was
pretty close to a rave to boot; https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/theater/reviews/12fabl.html)
was “a stunner,” and his response to the photo pretty much sums up my response
to the show itself—the stage pictures are stunning. But a little of that
goes a long way and an hour and 40 minutes of pretty pictures is more than
enough.
You
all probably know that Wilson was a visual artist before he turned to theater—a
painter and architect, as I recall. His productions are usually visually
stunning, from the sets and costumes to the actors’ sculpted movements and
gestures. When the material he’s staging has some depth and complexity,
too, then the whole makes a hugely theatrical experience, as happened with The Black Rider, which I
saw at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1993. (It didn’t hurt, I
imagine, that his collaborators were William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits.)
When the material itself is less interesting, like The Temptation of St. Anthony, which BAM
presented in October 2004, the visual splendor can get enervating.
That’s
what happened here, I’m afraid. Jean de la Fontaine’s (1621-95) 17th-century
fables—the Comédie-Française selected the “beast fables”—are often dark
(unlike, say, James Thurber’s), but they are very short and tend to beat the
same drum—the venality and selfishness of most creatures—so that the program
ended up with 19 pieces that get awfully repetitive. They even approached
preciousness. (One piece, “The Oak and the Reed,” had no living creatures
in it—it was performed . . . well, by the set with voice-over narration.
I suppose that’s clever—but is it theater? In the 19th century, when all
kinds of new theater tech was being introduced, there were exhibits of
miniature theaters in which the stage designs and sets “performed”
all manners of wonders. These dioramas were mechanical marvels, of
course, but they were hardly drama. Should we go back to that? I
vote no.)
So,
after a while, it got hard to pay too close attention to what was happening,
which wasn’t necessarily fair to the actors because they were doing some pretty
terrific work. (Diana said this was about as avant-garde as the
Comédie-Française—the traditionally classic theater company of France whose
usual fare is Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille—gets, though they have
opted to do more modern material in the last decade or so.) Still, it was
the look of the production that is its chief accomplishment, so let me dwell on
that.
I’ll
dispense with the set right off—it was minimal, stark, colorless, and
functional—sort of a cubist-cum-expressionist module that represents nothing
specific. Even the lighting—both lighting and sets were designed by
Wilson—wasn’t especially noticeable. (The music, to take a quick step
from visual to aural, is, as Ben Brantley notes in the Times, faux-Baroque and
quite appropriate, if unobtrusive. Composed by Michael Galasso, it works
fine.)
As
to the costumes, et al., there were 30 different animals represented (by a cast
of 15), plus several humans—including a narrator figure who is de la Fontaine
(played by a woman, Christine Fersen.) I’m certainly not going to
describe each costume (by Moidele Bickel), mask (Kuno Schlegelmilch), and
make-up design (Elisabeth Doucet), so let me just say that they were often very
clever and many are striking. I noticed a couple of things about the
concept that were curious, too.
For
instance, not all the designs were of the same style. Masks and costumes
ranged from fairly realistic (the Cock, Gérard Giroudon, with “feathers” and
the horizontal silhouette of a bird), to expressionistic (the Ant, Muriel
Mayette), to totally anthropomorphic (the Cicada, which was a woman—Coraly Zahonero—in
a pea-green evening gown and a ’20s-style cloche hat with two curved green
feathers sticking up from the top like antennae!)—and some stops in
between. The Wolf (Christian Blanc) and the Fox, (Laurent Natrella; he’s
in the Times photo),
for instance, had pretty realistic masks, but the lion’s mask was more
stylized.
The
Donkey (Giroudon) had a completely realistic mask—it was grey, of course, and
so was his suit, a regular man’s dress suit—but the Stag’s (Charles Chemin) mask
was realistic in outline, but looked like it was made of pewter. The Frogs
(Laurent Stocker, Grégory Gadebois), in contrast, were almost
comic-looking, like something for a children’s play, but a full costume,
not human clothing used symbolically. The cutest costume was the Little
Dog (Françoise Gillard)—a kind of furry 17th-century coat, breeches, and
peruque that look as if they were made from a light-brown, curly
shag rug!
Another
curiosity was that the same animal may have as many as three appearances.
(The main animals, like the Fox, Wolf, Lion—Bakary Sangaré—Stag, and others,
which showed up in several tales, were consistently played by the same
actors. Other animals who were in one or two stories were doubled.)
So
the Fox had a moderately realistic mask in one fable, a very stylized one in
another, and no mask (just a kind of head-wrap that left his face
visible—like that leather thing old-time pilots used to wear). They were
unified by all being bright red—the actor also wore red gloves—and in the
way the actor made his movements (which I’ll get to in a bit). I
didn’t really make anything of any of this, and I’m not sure if it enhanced the
production any, but it was curious.
The
actors, as you might guess, made sounds to emulate the animals from time to
time—nothing obtrusive—but what really showed the actors at work here was the
movement. It was close to dance-like, though not quite dance. It
wasn’t mime, either—and it certainly wasn’t mimetic of animal behavior in any
literal sense. It seemed to be more related to the characters’
personalities as filtered through the animals’ zoological behavior—but not
literally, more suggestively. The result was often very non-realistic
behavior (some of this looked like Bob Fosse on acid!) and whenever a
particular beast appeared in a fable, this movement style helped establish the “character”
regardless of the style of mask or make-up he or she was wearing that time
around.
I
suppose the word for Fables
is “charming.” But over an hour-and-a-half of charming was really too
much. At half that, an hour at the most, it would have been far more
enjoyable. A friend of mine says that he thinks of Wilson’s shows as a kind
of “meditation”: If you’re willing to go into a trance and just let your
mind go, you can watch them for hours and not worry about what any of it
means.
As
it was, it became a sort of design curiosity, the stories having become
irrelevant. Brantley recommended reading the translations supplied with
the program before the performance so as not to have to bother with the
(somewhat truncated) supertitles, and he was right as far as that went.
(Once again, Brantley’s oversold the production.) But after a point, it
no longer mattered what the characters were saying anyway; it was the visuals
that were dominating the stage.
DIVINAS PALABRAS
Ramón del
Valle-Inclán
Centro Dramático
Nacional (Madrid)
Lincoln Center
Festival 2007
Then
on Friday, 27 July [2007], Diana and I went to the Rose Theater in the Time Warner
Center at Columbus Circle for our second (and last) Lincoln Center event for
the season, the 1920 Spanish play Divinas
palabras (Divine
Words) by the innovative playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán
(1866-1936), whom I compared as the Spanish counterpart to Luigi Pirandello
(and Wilborn Hampton, in the Times,
equated to Bertolt Brecht, except without the worldwide rep). Not that
those playwrights’ work is similar, but as experimenters and envelope-pushers,
they were situated in history at the same moment—Valle-Inclán and Pirandello (1867-1936)
are almost exact contemporaries; they both precede, but overlap, Brecht (1898-1956)—and
breaking the same rules.
Valle-Inclán,
who was also a novelist, hasn’t been translated into English much, which might
account for some for his lesser renown outside Spain, but he is considered a
major figure in world literature, especially in terms of using theater in new
and provocative ways—one of the most prominent cultural phenomena of the years
between the world wars.
(I’ve
often fantasized about visiting that decade between 1920 and ’30—so much new
theater was happening across the West, from France—Symbolism, Surrealism,
Dadaism, Existentialism; Claudel, Cocteau, Sartre, Anouilh; Italy—Futurism;
Pirandello, Betti; and Spain—Valle-Inclán, Lorca—straight across to
Russia—Constructivism; Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Mayakovsky, Michael
Chekhov. The rise of Stalin ended the experimentation in eastern Europe,
the Spanish Civil War did it for Spain, and the Fascists and Nazis did it for
the rest of the continent. Upon the rise of Franco, Valle-Inclán’s plays
could not be performed in Spain for 25 years. WWII pretty much put the
kaibosh on all cultural movement for everyone else, and we had to wait until
the ’60s for another upheaval. Here endeth the theater history lesson.)
The Lincoln Center
Fest often carves out a special focus for the season, and this year they were
spotlighting Spanish theater, including troupes from Spain and Latin
America. There will have been four major productions of Spanish-language
works, including Un
Hombre se que Ahoga (A
Man Who Drowns), a gender-reversed adaptation of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters from
Argentina’s Proyecto Chejov. The
Three Brothers, so to speak . . . .) So, since I had read Divine Words back at NYU
but had never seen it—I’m not sure anyone’s ever done it in New York, or very
much elsewhere in the U.S.—I wanted to check it out. The company was the
Centro Dramático Nacional, the national theater of the country, and I always
sort of feel that they have a special handle on the works of their culture—the
way I like to see the late Ingmar Bergman do Swedish (and Scandinavian)
classics with his Royal Dramatic Theater.
The
works of Valle-Inclán, one of Spain’s most politically subversive writers,
attack the hypocrisy of bourgeois theater and often deploy obscene language and
vulgar imagery to counteract theatrical blandness. He wrote
Surrealistic plays before anyone (the French!)
coined the term, beginning with verse plays before the turn of the 20th
century. Valle-Inclán’s work anticipated Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean
Genet, and Fernando Arrabal (who acknowledged Valle-Inclán’s
influence). He apparently experienced a disillusionment around the
time of WWI (maybe for that reason—it did launch the cynical Dadaist movement
in Switzerland) and developed a concept he called esperpento, which is
translated in the dictionary as “grotesque” or “weird” but which is also used
to mean “absurd” (though that’s really too loose for Valle-Inclán’s
style).
The
playwright described the concept as a distortion of theatrical conventions like
a funhouse mirror distorts reality; it was intended to show the grotesque truth
behind the façade of Spanish culture and politics. Valle-Inclán’s
later plays (including Divine
Words) use a combination of comedy and horror to expose the tragedy
of life in Spain.
I
don’t know if there’s a relationship between Valle-Inclán and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948),
who was already writing his theories before the Spanish writer died (the French
edition of The Theatre and
Its Double came out in 1938 but was compiled from previously
published essays), but Valle-Inclán’s plays certainly demonstrate at least some
elements of Artaud’s theater of cruelty—they are grotesque, violent, and
shocking. Certainly the influence could be Valle-Inclán on
Artaud—though my recent rereading of Artaud‘s writings didn’t reveal any refs
to the Spanish writer. (There’s apparently a 1967 Educational Theatre Journal
essay by Felicia Hardison [Londré] that makes the connection—though I don’t
know if she has evidence or is theorizing—so I guess I’m not far off.)
Forgive
all the background info on Valle-Inclán, but since he’s so little known outside
of Spain, I thought it would be helpful to situate him in the literary matrix
of Europe. I can only say, from my little exposure—having read and now
seen one of his plays, arguably his best—that Valle-Inclán is the
kind of writer theaters and artists attracted to Brecht, Arrabal, Pirandello, Alfred
Jarry, and Artaud ought to find intriguing, if a little daunting. An
English translation of Divine
Words and two other later plays came out in 1993; maybe that and
additional attention to his work will raise his profile. (It’s unfortunate
in that regard, but the Times
seems to have been the only paper here that reviewed Divinas palabras—and
Hampton’s “review” was really inadequate as an evaluation of the work.
None of the other dailies did, and even the Voice
and the monthly magazines didn’t come out with anything later.)
Written for 40
characters (performed here by a company of 23), the tragicomedy Divinas palabras is a spectacle that reveals
the difficulties of rural life among peasants whose struggles are only relieved
by religion and the hope of redemption after death. Composed in 1920, Divinas palabras captures moments when
crises occur and people must choose between the new ways and the old.
The play portrays a
family of Galician beggars, spotlighting two sisters-in-law fighting for the
privilege of displaying their nephew, a hydrocephalic dwarf, at village
fairs. In addition to its corrosive satire of religious superstition and
hypocrisy and its introduction of the theme of incest, the text calls for the
appearance on stage of a nude actress. (I don’t know if Valle-Inclán’s
intention was to stage this literally in 1920, but it would have been anathema
in Catholic Spain—and pretty much elsewhere at that time!)
When Mari-Gaila
(Elisabet Gelabert), the sexton’s adulterous wife, is caught in flagrante delicto by
the villagers, they bring her naked to the church for her punishment.
Only by saying Jesus’ words in Latin (the divine words: “Let him who is without
sin . . .,” identified by Hampton as John 8:7—not that I’d know)—incomprehensible,
and therefore magical to the peasants—is the cuckolded husband able to prevent
them from stoning his wife. The play deals with the grittiness of life
with grotesque humor and a feeling of redemption at the end.
The plot of Divinas palabras is “relentlessly
bleak,” as Hampton describes it, and it’s not insignificant. It’s far too
complex, however, to capsulize for you, so I refer you to the Times review (Saturday, 28
July [2007]; https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/28/theater/reviews/28divi.html).
I said Hampton’s piece was inadequate as a review—it reads much more like an
extended play-catalogue entry or listing description—but he does a pretty good
job summarizing the text. He had little to say about the performance,
however.
I seem to be spending
a lot of space on the script and Valle-Inclán’s dramaturgy rather than the
performance. That’s for the same reason that I said so much about his
background and literary style: The play’s not generally known and it’s
Valle-Inclán’s and Divine
Words’ places
in theater history/dramatic literature that was the main reason I wanted to see
this play.
The production, as
Hampton characterized it, was stark and spartan, but highly energized—actually,
my word is “intense”; I wondered, after the first act, how the cast could
sustain that level of intensity not only throughout the performance, but over
an entire run of this production. It was frightening just to watch
it!
There were decided
Brechtian aspects to it as well, though some of those can be ascribed to the
company’s modern (that is, post-Brechtian) take on the staging. Some of
the elements, however, are part of the script, which predates Brecht’s major
works by at least half a decade. Most obvious is the cart in which first
Juana la Reina (Julia Trujillo), the dwarf’s mother, then the family that
inherits him after her death wheels him around the countryside. It’s a
very vivid foreshadowing of Mother Courage’s canteen, both in its visual and
its dramatic import. (I have no idea if Brecht was influenced by
Valle-Inclán any more than I had that Valle-Inclán was influenced by
Artaud. Might could be, as some folks say.)
I should add, too,
that the Centro Dramático production is stripped down in playwright Juan
Mayorga’s adaptation. After reviewing some of the references to
Valle-Inclán and Divinas palabras,
I managed to recall that there are a lot more grotesque and strange elements in
the play than are presented in this staging (goblins, birds that tell fortunes,
singing frogs, and more). (The Lincoln Center production was just about
2-2½ hours, including an intermission; I suspect a staging of the full text,
without the cuts, would not only require many more actors, but an additional
hour or two.) In a way, that’s too bad, because my vague recollection of
reading the script back when is that it’s not only strange and weird, but has
elements of what later would be known as “magic realism” which was lost in this
production due to the cuts.
I remember the script
being a little hard to sort out as I was reading it, and maybe it would be the
same on stage, but the swirl of phantasmagoria would have provided an
opportunity for some magnificent theatricality. (And you all know how
much I love theatricality!) Maybe I’m wrong there, and my imagination,
disadvantaged as it is by elapsed time, is misleading me and the stripped-down
version is more stageworthy. On the other hand, maybe it’s just more
economic—which is not an artistic choice.
I had a problem with
the supertitles again, so I just gave up on them and watched. (I wish
theaters would go back to earphones and simultaneous translations. I know
it costs more to hire readers than to project some slides, but I hate
those damn things!) I don’t understand Spanish at all, so I couldn’t
follow the dialogue exactly, but I listened for intonations and rhythms.
I’m annoyed at myself because I thought I remembered the play better from
reading it 20-odd years ago than it turned out I did, so I didn’t try to review
it beforehand. I wish I had; I think I would have enjoyed the
performance more; I wouldn’t have devoted so much of my consciousness to trying
to remember what I read all those years ago! But that’s on me—no fault of
the Centro Dramático cast.
The acting wasn’t one
of the Brechtian aspects of the production, so it was essentially
Stanislavskian naturalism (within the context of the grotesque world of the
play, of course), so reading the body language and speech patterns of the
actors wasn’t impossible. They were excellent. I imagine that
working on this play is one of the clearest examples of the necessity of
immersing yourself in the world of the play—especially if you are going to
maintain the intensity level I saw. You have to commit to this world and
essentially shut out the real one, or they’ll collide somewhere on stage, I’d
think.
There didn’t seem to
be any Brechtian commentary on the situation of the characters—at least as far
as I could tell—which suggests that from that perspective, at least, these
actors were working more in the Stanislavsky vein than the Brechtian one.
The Verfremdung
here is Artaudian, not Brechtian. (Which is fine—the same task is
accomplished. Brecht wasn’t after a certain style of performance, but a
result.)
I don’t consider it a
Brechtian element, but the most striking bit on the stage for me was the
fact that an almost ubiquitous figure in the story—the program called him the “guide
to our journey”—was Coimbra, a dog. Again, I don’t know how
Valle-Inclán intended this to be staged, but here Coimbra was played by a man
(Pietro Olivera) who wore no mask or dog costume—in fact, he was barely
clothed at all—and only vaguely behaved like a dog.
Well, that’s not
really accurate: he did behave like a dog; he didn’t move like one much of
the time—if you get my distinction. This was no Fontaine Fables hound: he was
vicious, snarling, and mean—and totally anthropomorphic. My
interpretation is that this is the clearest statement by Valle-Inclán (or the
director, Gerardo Vera) about the beastliness of man—a dog who is a man (who is
a dog!). (The dwarf baby, Laureano, by the way, was also played by a man,
Emilio Gavira—a very small but decidedly middle-aged man, but no dwarf in
reality, and certainly not hydrocephalic. Thought you might be curious.)
Ricardo Sánchez Cuerda
and Gerardo Vera’s set (something else Hampton doesn’t mention, by the way) was
an important element in this production.
(The lighting was designed by Juan Cornejo and the costumes by Alejandro
Andújar.) The characters did notice it
from time to time—it wasn’t supposed to be invisible to them, apparently—but
they hardly reacted. It was more like this kind of ominous phenomenon was
just part of their existence—threatening, dangerous, ghostly, and, if it didn’t
happen all the time, frightening. The tree sometimes flew out of the
space altogether, only to return later (though that may have been an indication
of changes of location).
In any case, this was
no benign or ambiguous Beckettian space—Estragon and Vladimir feel
relatively safe by the side of their road, don’t they? There were abstract,
expressionistic structures stage right and left—mostly a sort of two-level
bridge (to nowhere) or scaffold—but the most salient set devices were
doors. Big ones, small ones, huge ones—doors within doors—that opened or
were opened (sometimes we saw who opened them, sometimes they seemed to
open by themselves) admitting, along with the characters, shadows—or light that
cast shadows.
The huge ones were
like dungeon doors—or the kind that you expect to have written above them “Abandon
hope . . . .” Now, I may have glommed onto this visual element because I
was unable to follow all the dialogue, so my attention was less prescribed by
the text, but the doors and the dog seemed especially significant to me in this
production.
Valle-Inclán
was born in Galicia, a Celtic (and primitive) region—the name is related to “Gaelic”—so
there is some resemblance to the work of Irish writers, especially in the
characters who inhabit both worlds, but he worked in Madrid. I don’t know
enough about Spanish to distinguish between Galician and Castilian dialects or
accents, but I assume, since the Centro Dramático is located in Madrid, that
the company speaks Castilian Spanish. In any case, it’s not the accent we
are used to hearing here, a variety of South or Central American and
Caribbean dialects.
It
was interesting to hear the European version of the language (which, of course,
I used to hear from time to time when I lived in Germany—though that was 40
years ago!). It’s not dramatically significant, I don’t think (though it
may have been to Spanish-speakers in the audience), but it just struck me
subliminally.
It’s a
minor footnote, but this was not only my first time at a performance at the
Rose Theater, part of the complex of performance spaces usually devoted to Jazz
at Lincoln Center, but the first time I even set foot inside the Time Warner
Center. I can’t say anything about the TWC—I didn’t explore it, and it
just struck me as large and cold—and almost certainly expensive—but I poked
around the Frederick P. Rose Hall, of which the Rose Theater is a part.
(There’s also a jazz club, Dizzy’s Club—for Dizzy Gillespie, I’m
guessing—which apparently also serves food; a couple of other spaces;
the Jazz Hall of Fame; and a large double- or triple-height open space
which looks like a lobby or reception area, but which has lights rigged in a
way that suggests some kind of performance use as well.)
It’s not
exactly welcoming or friendly, but it seems functional. The complex’s
first floor is on the fifth floor of the TWC, and the Rose Theater, which seems
to be the largest space and the only formal theater (it’s a 1200-seat
proscenium) is a three-level house, with an orchestra, mezzanine, and
balcony. (Since the whole Rose Hall, which opened in October 2004, is
devoted to music performance, I wonder what the intended use of the theater
is—it has way too much backstage and fly space for just concerts.)
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