19 August 2019

Two Foreign Language Shows from the Archives


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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