AI & Molière

 

[I’ve recently posted several articles on Rick On Theater on the subject of computers or artificial intelligence and art: “Replicating Classic Art Works” (21 February 2026), for instance, is a report from PBS News Hour on using computer technology to examine and analyze paintings and even duplicate them; “AI Art” (26 February 2026) is a 60 Minutes segment on the use of computers to create art with AI.

[“Dreaming the Impossible at M.I.T.” by Philip Elmer-Dewitt in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” (4 October 2021), a Time magazine report, goes all the way back to 1987, almost the dawn of the modern computer age, to look at a then-new, pre-AI experimental computer program that let playwrights test scenes on screen without hiring actors and a stage.  Much later, I reposted “Tilly Norwood, AI Actress” (13 October 2025), a collection of articles on a fictional, photorealistic, 100% AI-generated “actress” whose arrival caused controversy in the film industry. 

[Now we can have a look at something in the offing that was at the center of the recent strikes against film and television producers by the Writers Guild of America (May-September 2023) and SAG-AFTRA (July-November 2023): scripts written by AI trained on the works of an accomplished writer—in this case world-famous but long-dead.  (Could the next step be seeing such a script enacted by the sisters and brothers of Tilly Norwood?)

[Below, I’m reposting a New York Times article on a French experiment in which just such a “new” play was composed by AI in the style and language (literally) of Molière (1622-73), renowned French playwright.  So far, after two years of work, only excerpts of the play, The Astrologer, have been performed.  (When the full comedy is presented in May, maybe the reviews will be devised by writebots.)

[Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, was also an actor and director.  Considered the master of comedy in Western literature, he revolutionized theater with satirical plays mocking human vices, vanity, and 17th-century French society, like Tartuffe (1664), a satire on religious hypocrisy, and The Misanthrope (1666), a study of a man who rejects the shallow conventions of society. 

[Born to a wealthy Parisian upholsterer, he was expected to take over the family business but turned to theater, adopting the stage name Molière.  He co-founded L’Illustre Théâtre (‘the illustrious theater’) in 1643, which initially went bankrupt, landing him in prison for debts.  He spent 13 years touring provincial France, developing his craft before gaining patronage under King Louis XIV (1638-1715; King of France: 1643-1715; known as the Sun King [le Roi Soleil]).

[Molière was known for full-length comedies, farces, and comédie-ballets, including The School for Wives (L’École des femmes, 1662), The Miser (L’Avare, 1668), and The Bourgeois Gentleman (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 1670).  He died in 1673 after collapsing during a performance of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire, 1673).  (He finished the performance—he was playing Argan, the title role, a severe hypochondriac obsessed with illness and death—but died shortly afterwards at the age of 51.)

[His comedies often explored themes of hypocrisy, rigid social conventions, and medical absurdity.  He specialized in creating memorable, exaggerated characters that highlighted human follies.  His plays combined the slapstick of Italian Commedia dell’arte with profound social commentary. 

[Molière’s influence is so pervasive that French is often referred to as “the language of Molière.”  He’s credited with elevating comedy to a position of artistic honor equal to tragedy in French culture.  The national theater award of France, recognizing achievement in French theater each year since 1987, are named Les Molières.  The awards are considered the highest honors for stage productions and performances, equivalent to the U.S. Tony Awards or the British Olivier Awards.]

“CHALLENGING A.I. TO MATCH
THE INTRICATE WIT OF MOLIÈRE”
by Laura Cappelle 

Scholars and artists at Sorbonne University worked on a program to imitate the French playwright, resulting i-n a new production.

[The article below ran in the print edition of the New York Times on 8 January 2026 in Section C (“Arts”).  It was reported from Paris.  It was posted to the paper’s website as “Can A.I. Match Molière’s Wit? These Researchers Think So.”]

paris — A tyrannical father, duped by a sham astrologer, promises his daughter in marriage — until she and a clever servant expose the fraud with some farcical tricks.

It sounds like a comedic plot by Molière, the 17th-century playwright who thrilled Paris by skewering paternal authority and pseudoscience. Yet the beloved French author didn’t write that one: It’s the scenario for “The Astrologer, or False Omens” [L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages], a play written by an artificial intelligence program trained to imitate Molière’s themes, structures and sense of humor.

For the past two years, the French A.I. collective Obvious has been developing the script with the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne, a theater company here specializing in historical reconstructions of the 17th-century repertoire. As part of the digital arts festival Némo, an excerpt will be performed on Saturday at the Centquatre, a Paris arts center, before a full staging at the Royal Opera of Versailles in May.

[Obvious is a Paris-based artist collective formed in 2017 by childhood friends Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier to explore the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. They achieved global recognition in 2018 with the sale of their first major work, Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, at Christie’s New York.

[Caselles-Dupré (b. 1993), as a specialized researcher in artificial intelligence and machine learning, is the technical lead and research director of Obvious; Fautrel (b. 1993) was educated in digital marketing and communication, before which, he was involved in the electronic music scene; Vernier (b. 1993) has a background in business and economics, providing the strategic and commercial foundation for the collective.

[Obvious served as the technical and creative engine behind "The Astrologer.” During the collaboration with Théâtre Molière Sorbonne for the project Molière Ex Machina, the collective utilized specialized AI models to reconstruct Molière's creative process. With Sorbonne scholars, they trained AI on Molière’s themes, linguistic structures, and humor to write the play’s dialogue. They used AI to generate sketches for historically informed costumes and stage sets that mimicked the aesthetic of the 17th-century French court and to compose music for the performance, ensuring it aligned with the period’s style.

[Also founded in 2017, the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne's mission is to revive the old-fashioned techniques of declamation and acting of the 17th century. A true school-workshop, it is aimed at the entire student community of Paris’s Sorbonne University, passionate about theater, singing, dance, or music and wishing to experiment with a new way of reproducing plays as they were performed in the time of Molière, Pierre Corneille (1606-84), and Jean Racine (1639-99). The Théâtre Molière Sorbonne performs at the Sorbonne as well as on prestigious stages in France.

[The arts center Centquatre, whose name is legally rendered as two words, Cent Quatre, but which was restyled as one in 2010 for graphical and marketing reasons, opened in 2008 in a former funeral hall. The center’s name means ‘one hundred four’ (which in French is properly two words—but the French language predates modern logotypy) and is derived from the former address of the building: 104 rue d’Aubervilliers (now 5 rue Curial).

[Centquatre-Paris, as it’s called (usually in all-caps), is a public facility that serves all forms of art, both creation and exhibition. It has large spaces for displays, exhibits, and performances; studio spaces for creating new work; workshop and rehearsal spaces for resident artists and groups; rooms for lectures and classes, plus restaurants and cafés as well as shops.]

The process was driven by “scientific curiosity,” Mickaël Bouffard, the director of the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne, said. “We’re trying to simulate Molière’s creative process, step by step. Our goal is to be as historically accurate as possible.”

The collaboration was masterminded by the sociologist Pierre-Marie Chauvin, a vice president of Sorbonne University, who said he saw in Obvious “a long-view approach to A.I., and a real interest in cultural heritage.”

The collective is best known for creating visual artworks with algorithms; in 2018, one of its paintings became the first A.I. work [Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (2018)] sold through the auction house Christie’s, for $432,500 [worth $560,000 in 2026]. Obvious opened its own research laboratory within Sorbonne University three years ago, and Chauvin brought its three members to see the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne.

Nobody in Obvious is a regular theatergoer: Its members’ experiences of Molière came primarily from their school days [all three are 32 or 33 now], they said in a group interview. Yet they immediately clicked with Georges Forestier, the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne’s founding director, whom Chauvin described as “extraordinarily curious and technophile.”

Forestier came up with the play’s main theme: human credulity, a fitting topic for an A.I.-written pastiche and one that Molière frequently touched on. Coraline Renaux, a Ph.D. student and a member of the theater company, then suggested an astrologer as a viable antihero. Astrologers are mentioned in some of Molière’s plays, and after his death, his collaborator Jean Donneau de Visé [1638-1710; French journalist, royal historian, playwright, and publicist] wrote a play about astrology, “The Comet.”

[The provenance of The Comet (La Comète, 1681) is messy and confusing, and I won’t try to recount all the theories of how it came to be written.  I’ll relate the most accepted theory of its composition and let curious readers look up the variations and permutations.

[What is certain is that La Comète was written in 1680, to capitalize on the appearance of the Great Comet of 1680 (also called Kirch’s Comet, and Newton’s Comet), discovered by astrologer Gottfried Kirch (German; 1639-1710). The comet passed through the terrestrial heavens between 14 November 1680 and 19 March 1681. It caused quite a frisson in France (and all around the world) and there were many scientific and pseudo-scientific rumors and predictions on people’s lips and in their imaginations. (Kirch’s Comet has an orbital period of 10,000 years, so it shouldn’t be back here until sometime in the 117th century.)

[Most authoritative sources, including the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France), credit the play primarily to Donneau de Visé and a man named Bernard le Bouyer (or Bovier) de Fontenelle (1657-1757 – no, that’s not a typo; Fontenelle died at the age of 99), a French writer known for his interest in science and philosophy. Donneau de Visé likely provided the commercial instinct and dramatic structure, while Fontenelle contributed the intellectual debates on chance and astronomy found in the script.

[Fontenelle was the nephew of the brothers Pierre and Thomas Corneille (his morher, Marthe, was their sister), both dramatists of some renown. (Pierre Corneille, a tragedian; Molière, a comedian; and Racine, another tragedian, were the three great playwrights of 17th-century France.) Thomas Corrneille (1625-1709) was also Donneau de Visé’s most frequent playwriting collaborator at the time. The younger Corneille brother likely acted in an advisory or editorial capacity as part of the established writing triumvirate.

[With the names of Jean Donneau de Visé, a luminary of the company at the Hôtel Guénégaud (which later became the Comédie-Française), and Thomas Corneille, a star of the troupe at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, one of France’s most important theaters, connected to the project gave it theatrical heft and credibility, especially following the disastrous reception, one month earlier, of Fontenelle’s 17th-century historical tragedy Aspar. (It did the project no harm that Donneau de Visé was also the founder and director of Le Mercure galant, a popular and influential literary gazette where Thomas Corneille was an editor.)]

After Forestier died from cancer in 2024, Bouffard continued driving the project forward. It turned out to be an arduous process. [The] creative team experimented with different prompts and programs trained by Obvious on Molière’s body of work, and struggled with the A.I.’s tendency to forget the beginning of the play once the story progressed. After a few months, Bouffard was almost ready to give up, he said, “because it was so laborious.”

“It took Molière two weeks to write a play, whereas we’ve been at it for two years,” said Gauthier Vernier, an Obvious member.

The quick progress of A.I. models provided the consistency needed to sustain long-form writing. Along the way, a team of Molière scholars provided human feedback on the evolving synopsis — which has been revised 15 times — and on the script itself, a process that is still continuing.

Among them is Lise Michel, an associate professor of French literature at Lausanne University [Université de Lausanne (University of Lausanne), Switzerland]. She said she approached reviewing the A.I. synopsis as “a game,” using her in-depth knowledge of Molière’s plays to identify anything that didn’t sound “quite right.”

Molière’s satirical humor, which blends literary wit and slapstick farce, proved especially hard to nail. The A.I. tended to excessively draw out humorous metaphors or make overly naïve jokes. Feedback from actors helped, according to Bouffard, who added that the A.I. also had “strokes of genius”: “We laughed so hard at times,” he said, “because we never thought it would be able to come up with some of these lines.”

Although the team was careful not to bill “The Astrologer” as a “new Molière play,” not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of the production. Bouffard said some colleagues had warned him that he was “taking on a sacred monster” in Molière.

In a recent Facebook post, Aurore Evain, a director and scholar who has revived forgotten plays by women, called the project a “Tartuffery” and criticized the $1.75 million budget attached to it (which came primarily from private French and North American sponsors, according to Sorbonne University).

[Obvioously derived from the name of the title character in Molière’s Tartuffe, the French word tartufferie (frequently tartuferie) means a ‘hypocritical act’ or the ‘act of a scoundrel.’ (This is the word that Evain used in her Facebook post. A tartufe/tartuffe—the word is both masculine and feminine—is a ‘hypocrite’ or a ‘scoundrel.’) The words both exist in English as well: ‘tartuffery’ means ‘religious hypocrisy’ and a ‘tartuffe’ is a ‘religious hypocrite.’]

The funding didn’t go solely to A.I.-powered writing: Three other models were trained to create historically accurate sets, costumes and music based on Molière’s collaborations with designers and composers. The resulting score and designs will be unveiled in full in Versailles in May before touring dates in France.

The show was conceived as a one-off, but the next step for A.I.-powered performing arts research may be to “complete unfinished plays or scores,” said Bouffard, who likened the idea to the restoration of a painting.

“A.I. has no ego, no taste — whether good or bad,” he said, stressing that this makes it more suited to pastiche than humans. “That sense of neutrality is really interesting,” he said. “It all depends on how we activate it.”

[Laura Cappelle is a Paris-based French journalist and scholar.  In 2023, she was appointed associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University.  She edited a French-language introduction to dance history, Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (“A new history of dance in the West”; Seuil, 2020), and her new book, Créer des ballets au XXIe siècle (“Creating ballets in the 21st century”), was published with CNRS Éditions in May 2024.  

[Cappelle has been the Financial Times’ Paris-based dance critic since 2010, and the New York Times’ French theater critic since 2017. She is also an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine, published by the Centre national de la danse (CN D; National Dance Center; Paris).

[Little is known about Molière Ex Machina aside from what’s reported in the Times article.  The participants have been closed-mouthed about most aspects of the project; nothing that I could find was even published after the excerpts were performed at Centquatre.

[The plot synopsis put out by the project team is basically what the Laura Cappelle wrote: the play centers on a tyrannical father who is deceived by a fraudulent astrologer into marrying off his daughter, a theme chosen to reflect Molière’s frequent focus on human credulity.

[As Mickaël Bouffard says above, the production was conceived as a “scientific curiosity” to explore whether AI can match the wit and neutrality required for historical pastiche.  There are some details about the creation of The Astrologer that aren’t covered in Cappella’s report.  The “historically accurate” elements, for example, were created by training specific AI models on the work of Molière's 17th-century collaborators to ensure the production felt authentic to the year 1673.

[The costumes, for instance, were designed by an AI model trained on visual archives of Henri (de) Gissey (ca. 1621-73; French draughtsman and designer), the primary costume designer for the Cabinet of Louis XIV and a frequent collaborator of Molière.  Although designed by AI, the costumes were hand-stitched and embroidered by human artisans using 17th-century techniques, materials, and patterns, with no modern shortcuts like zippers.

[The stage design follows the “historically informed” principles of the Théâtre Molière Sorbonne, which specializes in reconstructing 17th-century theatrical aesthetics.  The AI was fed data from period engravings and stage directions from Molière’s time to generate sets that mimic the depth and style of the Palais-Royal or the Comédie-Française.  Designs emphasize the perspective-heavy, painted-flat scenery typical of the Baroque era.

[The Théâtre Molière Sorbonne production aims to simulate a complete 17th-century sensory experience, so an AI model was trained on the works of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87; Italian-French composer, dancer, and instrumentalist; considered a master of the French Baroque music style), who composed the music for Molière’s famous comédie-ballets (like Le Bourgeois gentilhomme).

[Beyond the music, the actors were trained in period-accurate diction and gestures, ensuring that the AI-written text is delivered with the specific rhetorical style of the 1670s.

[Reactions to the AI’s imitation of Molière's style in The Astrologer have been a mix of scholarly fascination, practical challenges during the creative process, and sharp criticism from the theatrical community.  Researchers found that the AI identified patterns in Molière’s work that were so "scattered" they had previously gone unnoticed by scholars, offering new insights into his structural craft.

[The media coverage has been reported as characterizing the work as a comedic plot that “skewers paternal authority and pseudoscience,” successfully imitating Molière’s specific structures and sense of humor—but, as I observed, I couldn’t find any outlets with published reception to confirm this.

[The sold-out excerpts were scheduled at the Centquatre on 10 January 2026 as part of the Némo digital arts festival (11 October 2025-11 January 2026).  A full staging is planned for the Royal Opera of Versailles in May 2026.]

'The Misanthrope' – The Musical

 

[I’ve written several times on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his Shaliko Company, an experimental theater troupe based in the East Village.  I got to know Leo Shapiro in 1986, when I covered the Theatre of Nations international theater festival that took place in Baltimore that year.  I was very taken with his company’s work, represented then by The Yellow House (see my post on 9 February 2018), a company-created play about painter Vincent van Gogh.

[My report on the ToN was published in The Drama Review of Spring 1987.  A separate article on The Yellow House appeared in the same issue.

[Six years later, TDR editor Richard Schechner asked me to write a profile of Leo and his company.  I shadowed Leo for several months and “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” was published in TDR in the Winter 1993 issue.

[Combing through Shaliko’s files and interviewing Leo and his colleagues and collaborators, I eventually put together a fairly complete history of his and the company’s work over his lifetime.  Though the original article focused exclusively on the work of The Shaliko Company (1972-93), I expanded that focus and included a record of Leo’s independent work, for a prospective book. 

[One production that fell into that category was an abortive staging of a musical based on Molière’s The Misanthrope for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1977. Below is an account of that ill-fated production.

[Leo died of bladder cancer in Vallecito, New Mexico, on 22 January 1997.  He was 15 days past his 51st birthday.]

New York City’s Shaliko Company’s second production, Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1930), introduced the troupe to Joseph Papp (1921-91), who offered the young company the New York Shakespeare Festival as its home—only the third troupe to have been accorded such a privilege at the time.  The play, workshopped in March 1974 at Baltimore’s Theatre Project, was in performance at New York University.

Playwright Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), whom Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), Shaliko’s founder and artistic director, had known since his NYU-student days and who had a relationship with Papp and the NYSF, praised Measures to Gail Merrifield (b. ca. 1935), Papp’s wife and the NYSF director of new play development, who saw it and then brought Papp to the Shaliko production.  Measures moved into the NYSF’s Public Theater in October and Shaliko remained in residence there until 1976.

Following Measures, Shaliko presented Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1975) and then Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1976).  (For accounts of the latter two productions, see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko's Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014, and “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020.)  After Woyzeck, however, the two actors about whom Shapiro cared most, Mary Zakrzewski and Chris McCann (b. 1952), left Shaliko, Zakrzewski to quit the professional theater and McCann to pursue commercial aspirations. 

Shapiro disbanded the company and decided to try his hand at freelance directing, starting in December 1976 at the Public with The Youth Hostel, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn.  Some years earlier, Shapiro had conceived a musical version of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666) with Shaliko but let the project drop. 

The composer, Margaret Pine (b. 1948), one of Shaliko’s original members, had continued to develop the play, and, Shapiro reported, brought it back to the director who convinced Papp to produce it.  Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over several aspects of the production.  Shapiro had cast John McMartin as Alceste, John Bottoms as Philante, Helen Gallagher as Arsinoé, and Virginia Vestoff as Célimène but, according to the director, Papp wanted performers who had worked at the Public in the past, including Raul Julia and Patti LuPone or Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. 

“He wanted the Broadway pitch,” Shapiro opined.  “He wanted a Broadway musical hit.  He was hungry for another Chorus Line . . . .”  Papp acquiesced to Shapiro’s casting plans but ultimately the producer objected to the timbre of the production:

Like, Joe was upset because Alceste was too sexy.  He was upset because they were too sexy as a couple—Alceste and Célimène.  He thought that Alceste was too angry.  He thought that Alceste was too much the hero. 

He couldn’t stand that I had a scene in which Alceste and Philinte held hands.  He thought that was just awful and he said, “Are they homosexuals?  Why are they holding hands?  You can’t have that happen.”  And I said, you know, “They’re best friends.  They, as far as I know, are not homosexual.  But if they are, it’s none of your business, Joe.  I mean, that’s not the point I’m making in any case.”  And he said, “Well, you can’t make that point.”  

He said, “The audience won’t understand that.”  I said, “I am teaching the audience that.  That’s why I’m doing it.  I want them to see it.  You know.”  He just couldn’t understand that you can create a convention in that way.  He felt like this means A; it can’t mean B.  This is what it meant to him.  I’ve never forgotten that.  I don’t know what . . . .  He had this lexicon of things, you know.

Shapiro refused to make changes, he said, and Papp fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

(A Chorus Line opened at the Public Theater on 15 April 1975.  It moved to Broadway’s Shubert Theatre on 25 July and stayed there for 15 years, closing on 28 April 1990 after 6,137 performances, winning the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Musical, and, as of 2005, grossing over $277 million for the Public Theater.  The New York Shakespeare Festival’s share of the profits supported the company’s efforts for years and the play continues to produce income every time it’s revived or the 1985 film is shown.)

Needless to say, the view from the other side is a little different than Shapiro’s own. 

According to the New York Shakespeare Festival, Margaret Pine brought The Misanthrope to Papp in October 1976 after having considered other companies, including André Gregory’s Manhattan Project, and the director Mel Shapiro.  (Stage director Mel Shapiro [b. 1937] is not related to Leonardo Shapiro.  He previously directed—and adapted—the musical version of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona for NYSF in 1971, for which he won an Obie Award, among other productions for the company.) 

According to Joan C. Daly, an attorney for NYSF, Papp maintained that Leonardo Shapiro became part of the project because he had worked with Pine “in developing the concept of such a production, and she brought him along.”  (Daly [b. 1925] was a lawyer with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, attorneys for NYSF.)

From the beginning, apparently, Richard Wilbur, whose verse translation formed the book and lyrics of the musical, expressed reservations about Shapiro’s suitability to direct the production.  As both Jeffrey Horowitz, Shapiro’s prep school schoolmate, and Marilyn Zalkan, Shaliko’s long-time administrator, have remarked, Shapiro had no background in music or musical theater. 

Wilbur’s agent, Gilbert Parker, recommended J Ranelli, another of his clients, to Papp, but the Shakespeare Festival remained initially loyal to Shapiro.  (Parker [1927-2019], late Vice President of Curtis Brown, Ltd., not only represented Wilbur [1921-2017] and Ranelli [1938-2019], but also Bill Gile [1942- 2011], the director who eventually replaced Shapiro on 7 October 1977.)

Wilbur, however, had approved of Margaret Pine as the composer, but did not approve of Shapiro as director and even as early as March 1977, Wilbur held “lingering doubts about Leo Shapiro as director.”  In addition, Wilbur’s contract with NYSF stipulated that his text would remain intact unless he authorized changes.  This provision clearly would make it difficult to accommodate songs and may have ultimately helped sabotage the production. 

Reports of difficulties in the production reached Papp’s office toward the end of the rehearsal period and the producer began to feel that “while there was merit in the concept of presenting ‘The Misanthrope’ with music, Mr. Shapiro could not handle it” and that what Pine and Shapiro had developed “worked badly.” 

By this time, Papp had also become aware that some cast members were “so discouraged” that they wanted to leave but Papp persuaded them to stay “in the hope that with a new stage director and a fresh view point, the project could be saved.”

After Wilbur and Parker saw the second preview of Misanthrope on 5 October, they “urged” Papp to replace Shapiro “to move the production away from the disastrous course it was taking.”  Wilbur also objected to the alterations to his translation and demanded immediate restoration of “unauthorized cuts” in his text. 

At the same time, he insisted that he’d approved Margaret Pine as the composer but hadn’t agreed to any other composer and hadn’t been consulted on the replacement of her songs with anyone else’s.  

Finally, Wilbur demanded that his name be removed from all references to the production. 

According to Horowitz, Shapiro’s long-time friend who’d been in the cast of Shawn’s Youth Hostel at NYSF, there was more to the contretemps, much of it the fault of Shapiro. 

After the director disbanded The Shaliko Company in 1976 and left the Public Theater, Papp was angry at him and Shapiro began gaining a reputation for someone “who had problems.”  Shawn brokered Shapiro’s return later in 1976 to direct Youth Hostel, overcoming Papp’s reservations by affirming “that he really believed in” the director. 

Papp’s ultimate rejection of Shawn’s plays for the regular NYSF season had nothing to do with Shapiro’s direction, but then the producer hired Shapiro for Misanthrope and trouble started to appear.  “He wouldn’t listen to Papp,” said Horowitz, founder, in 1979, and artistic director of New York City’s Theatre for a New Audience.  “He was rigorous about his visions.”  Shapiro’s friend went even further, however:

I began to be aware then, starting in the late ’70s—around that time that Papp fired him—that he was having a great deal of trouble putting together his ideas and the community’s understanding of those ideas.

Shapiro’s fellow artistic director had watched, he said, as Shapiro’s acclaim began to deteriorate.  He saw his friend begin in the early 1970s with great respect and strength, both among critics and theater professionals like Papp.  Horowitz called that Shapiro, at the start of his career, “an enfant terrible,” a “brilliant iconoclast.”  Then, Horowitz recounted, “Something happened where he began to get a reputation as someone who had once been very good but was no longer that.”

If Horowitz is correct—and it must be said that he wasn’t present for the Misanthrope rehearsals, nor had he been a member of Shaliko—then this may have been another instance of Shapiro’s inability to function as part of a team or to defer to anyone else’s ideas.  

He would do this again in 1992, with similar consequences, with playwright Karen Malpede over the direction Blue Heaven and the administration of Trinity College over the management of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, which the Hartford, Connecticut-based college administered and Shapiro conducted in New York City.  (A blog article on Blue Heaven is posted on 11 and 14 May 2020.)

Regardless of the perspective, however, Shapiro recalled the Misanthrope episode bitterly:

I worshiped Joe; he was like my father, you know.  I came there after my father died and I basically identified Joe as my father and I thought I was going to stay there for the rest of my life.  I thought it was home. 

I never got over being fired by Joe.  It never had occurred to me that it was possible.  I never knew you could be fired; I didn’t know about contracts. 

I didn’t know it was his show; I thought it was my show.  I’d never done a show that wasn’t my show.  I mean, I made it up; it was my idea.  It was my idea to do a musical of The Misanthrope.  I mean, what was his about it? 

You know, I didn’t understand what was on paper.  I never looked at anything on paper.  I don’t have contracts; I don’t deal with that world.

(Shapiro met Papp and moved his company into the Public Theater only a few months after the death of his father, from whom he was estranged and with whom he had a strained relationship all through his life, on 15 January 1974.  The timing certainly played a large part in Shapiro’s incipient relationship with the impresario.)

The association with Papp ended acrimoniously, and Shapiro’s departure from the Public Theater left wounds that remained tender.  “I spent, like, two years sulking after that,” said Shapiro.  “I just was beaten.  That’s really like the worst experience of my life, getting fired off that show.”

Shapiro had very conflicted feelings about his relationship with Joseph Papp.  Even years later, he would say, “Joe was a very strong force in my life. . . .  I don’t know that I’d say I admire him a lot.  You know, he was like a father.  To me, he was like a bad father so it’s like a big deal.” 

He noted that there was some of Irving Shapiro in George Bartenieff’s 1992 portrayal of Hermann Kafka, but he also admitted that there were aspects of Papp in it as well.  Shapiro, after all,  saw Kafka: Father and Son as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons”—a play about child abuse and repression (see my post about this play on 5 and 8 November 2015). 

Part of the root cause of the failure of Shapiro’s freelance directing outing at the Public was his understanding—or lack of understanding—of the standing of an independent director.  Reviewing his motivation to disband Shaliko, Shapiro lamented, “[I] thought I could do bigger work without a company. . . .  I was wrong.  Working freelance didn’t work.  I wasn’t free to address issues I cared about in radical ways; I wasn’t free to rehearse for months at a time or develop original work.”

Aside from losing his company and being unable to develop his own material, Shapiro learned that he was simply no good at working for other people such as producers and artistic directors who had control over his work.  “I have had problems with producers . . .,” he confessed.  “And that’s . . . a character defect . . . .  And I want what I want, and I resent not getting it.”  

This was the basis, of course, of his falling out with Papp, with whom Shapiro had gotten along fine as long as Papp had functioned simply as sugar-daddy.  When he found himself contending with Papp over the substance of a production, Shapiro discovered he couldn’t follow orders.  Being fired by Papp left Shapiro confused:

I think that that experience has a lot to do with the fact that I basically can’t work for anyone else.  I think that I didn’t know what it was like to have somebody have power over your work and be able to say, “You can’t do this.  You have to do it my way.”  Artistically that had never happened to me and it was such a dreadful experience that I really avoided it one way or another ever since.  I mean, I basically don’t work for other people.

Papp and Shapiro never reconciled and Shapiro continued to feel cheated because he had left Misanthrope unfinished, something he said he had never done before.  (This assertion isn’t true.  Shapiro was fired from Yes Yes, No No, his first professional job as a director, before the show opened on New Year’s Eve 1968; it closed after one performance.)

An abortive attempt at a reconciliation did occur in 1984.  In a letter to Papp, Shapiro wrote, “It was nice to talk to you, it helped me set some things at rest.”  (Shapiro wrote on Trinity College letterhead rather than Shaliko Company stationery and provided his Hartford campus and residence phone numbers.  Did the younger director feel that an academic base was more likely to get Papp’s sympathetic attention?) 

Shapiro went on to broach a number of subjects, including several “projects I am interested in” (which included Edward Bond’s Lear, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Ibsen’s Little Eyolf), but Papp rebuffed the overtures.  The letter bears handwritten notes by Gail Merrifield Papp, instructions for a member of the New York Shakespeare Festival staff to respond “for JP.” 

Merrifield described Shapiro as “a director that once worked here, old rift that recently got dealt with” and she instructed the staff member to reply with “the 5 No’s”—referring to the one-word marginal and interlinear annotations she had made by each of Shapiro’s proposals or suggestions—“without being brutal.” 

The tone, at least of Merrifield’s notes, was brusque and dismissive, however.  Even though neither Papp nor his wife themselves had reached out to Shapiro, having delegated that task to a subordinate, when Papp died of prostate cancer on 31 October 1991, losing the chance to make up with the man he had thought of as his father hit Shapiro very hard.  “I really thought that it was my fault that I didn’t make up with him,” he lamented.

The New York Shakespeare Festival went on to produce The Misanthrope at the Public’s Anspacher Theater between 4 October and 27 November 1977 with another director, Bill Gile, credited with the staging. 

An additional composer and orchestrator were brought in to “enhance” the score but the show received disastrous reviews and closed with little fanfare.  (In fact, NYSF delayed opening the production to critics until 22 November, when the run was nearly over.) 

Helen Gallagher (b. 1926), who played Arsinoé, reported at the end of November that changes in everything, including her performance, were being incorporated right up until the press opening.  NYSF files confirm that new music, costumes, and set designs were being incorporated in the production as late as 10 November, and that new orchestrations were still on order at that date. 

Some of the responsibility for the failure might devolve to the new directorial team: Gile’s principle success, for which he won a Tony nomination, was the light and frivolous entertainment, Very Good Eddie (21 December 1975-5 September 1976), and the replacement composer was the flamboyant “glam rock” figure Jobriath (also “Jobriath Boone,” among other stage names; né Bruce Wayne Campbell, 1946-83), who, in an interview, once replied, “I am a true fairy.”  One reporter remarked on the need in this case for “his fairy magic.”

Though there’d been a fair amount of anticipatory press before the production started performances, I could only find four reviews of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Misanthrope.  According to a comment in Richard Eder’s New York Times notice, published on Thursday, 24 November, the Public only invited press to the show on Tuesday, 22 November, and would be closing the production on Sunday, 27 November.

In a review entitled “Miscued Musical ‘Misanthrope,’” Eder observed that all the personnel changes “has resulted is a confusion of purposes and directions, a stageful of misconceived ideas jostling one another for breathing space.”  He quipped that the festival’s belated invitation to reviewers “was for obituaries.”

“Everything is blurred and coarsened,” complained the reviewer of the musicalized version, which he labeled an “absurd trivialization.”  He protested, “The comedy of thought and character has been replaced by a comedy of gesticulation and pratfalls.” 

Of the score, Eder reported, “What the songs don't obscure is blotted out by the noisy, slapstick style of performance,” and dubbed the music “mediocre.”

The Times review-writer even had negative things to say about the physical production, finding that all the energy of the cast, which was all he felt it displayed, “is absorbed by an overlarge and extremely ugly set: fake black marble floors and columns upon which a few pieces of classical French furniture sit as if on consignment.”

(In his negative appraisal of the production, Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News described the set as a “formal, marblelike setting, severe enough for Racine . . . .”  For readers who aren’t up on references to classical French drama, Jean Racine [1639-99], a contemporary of Molière [1622-73], was a Neo-classical dramatist who wrote primarily tragedies.  One of his best-known is Phèdre [1677], on a production of which I reported on ROT on 13 October 2009.)

In the Soho Weekly News, Tish Dace, writing on 1 December, joked that “Thanksgiving week brought a real turkey in the Public Theatre’s . . . Misanthrope.”  (24 November had been Thanksgiving Day in 1977.)  She added, “Molière must have been spinning in his grave at the tacky trumpery.” 

“[T]his production confuses the crass with the comedic,” wrote Dace.  “These aren’t fops and coquettes, these are weirdos.”  The SWN reviewer exempted one cast member, John Bottoms as Philante, when she lambasted the work of the company as “dross.”

“All of this transforms a work of genius into a debased disaster of the most dreary kind,” Dace snapped.  She panned the costumes as “in keeping with the overall gross taste,” concluding, “The totality is vulgarity cultivated as an art.”

I won’t go on to summarize the other notices.  Their headlines tell the tale, I think:

·   “Molière Goes Down the Drain” (Ted Hoffman, Villager)

·   “More misadventure than ‘Misanthrope’” (Douglas Watt, Daily News)

It's noteworthy, I think, that Leonardo Shapiro, The Shaliko Company, and The Misanthrope are all omitted from Papp’s biographies: Stuart W. Little’s Enter Joseph Papp: In Search of a New American Theater (1974) and Joe Papp: An American Life (1994) by Papp and Helen Epstein.

[Past posts on Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company are:

·   “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009

·   “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009

·   “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010

·   “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010

·   “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010

·   “‘As It Is In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011

·   “‘Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep’” by Leonardo Shapiro, 7 May 2011

·   “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013

·   “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 & 6 March 2014

·   “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko’s Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014

·   “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 & 8 November 2015

·   “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 13 January 2016; “Faust Clones, Part 3,” 21 January 2016

·   “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018

·   “Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018

·   “Leon Gleckman: The Al Capone of Saint Paul,” 29 September 2018

·   “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 & 14 May 2020

·   “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020

[I haven’t included posts on topics to which I was introduced by Leo or those in which he was mentioned in passing.]

Some Classics from the Archives

PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Abbey Players

September 1990

Seeing the Abbey Players perform John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World is akin to watching the Moscow Art Theatre do Chekhov or the Berliner Ensemble do Brecht.  It just seems to be part of them: they aren’t so much acting as remembering and reliving a collective heritage.  Historically, of course, this is so.  Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, dubbed the National Theatre of Ireland, premiered Playboy in 1907, and has continued to present Synge’s works, along with those of other Irish authors, ever since.  This material does belong to them, and they cherish it, as the performance at the Eisenhower Theatre of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts demonstrates.

The story of Synge’s most famous play is simple enough.  Young Christy Mahon stumbles into the tavern of Michael James Flaherty (the set is by Noel Sheridan) and confesses that he is running from the “polis” because he has mur-dered his father.  After the townsfolk, particularly the young girls, make a hero of him, Old Mahon turns up, alive but with a crack in his skull, and the villagers turn on Christy.  There are half a dozen interpretations of the play’s meaning, including seeing Christy as a Christ figure, a Don Quixote, or a new Ireland rising up against its old masters, England and the Catholic Church.  Synge (1871-1909) has never given credence to any of these, saying, “I follow Goethe’s rule, to tell no one what one means in one’s writings.”  He did say that he “wrote the play because it pleased me,” and that it was “made to amuse” his audience.  The current Abbey production, directed by Vincent Dowling on a small but evocative set by Noel Sheridan, does this with a vengeance.

All the performances are praiseworthy, each actor finding the little idiosyncrasies and character traits that make even the briefest appearances alive and integral to the life on stage.  At the center of the production are Frank McCusker as Christy and Roma Downey as Pegeen Mike.  Downey is simultaneously romantic and strong, a dreamer who despises the weak, sniveling suitor, Shawn Keogh (Macdara O Fatharta) picked for her by her father (John Cowley).  She has a sweet face that turns a pout into an irresistible magnet, but she can set her jaw and mount a steely glare that cows the whole village.  It’s no wonder, in this production, that it is Pegeen Mike of all the fawning village lasses who attracts Christy.  McCusker’s would-be parricide is a boy-man: tall, blond and lanky with a baby face that seems most often to be gape-mouthed whenever he isn’t talking.  McCusker can effect both the blank gaze of utter incomprehension and the wide-eyed stare of childlike wonder. 

Among the wonderful character roles with which Synge populated his County Mayo village, cowardly Shawn Keogh stumbles and trips over his own feet in O Fatharta’s round-eyed performance and the Widow Quin is both sly and openly lustful as portrayed by Nuala Hayes.  Singling these players out should not, however, suggest that this company is anything less than a perfectly integrated ensemble. 

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In the end, it is neither the plot nor the characters which makes the Abbey’s Playboy a special theatrical experience.  It is Synge’s language in the mouths of actors for whom it is like a mother tongue.  Oscar Wilde, an expatriate Irish writer, once said, “The English took our land and left it desolate.  But we took their language and gave it a new beauty.”  Synge, who immersed himself in the study of the language of Irish peasants, has written what is arguably among the most beautiful prose poetry in English literature.  It was written to be spoken, and here it is spoken—almost sung—by people who know and love it.  Listening intensely, you could easily get lost in the thick brogues and unfamiliar vocabulary (the program includes a glossary), but by allowing the prose to flow over you, you can enjoy both the lyric beauty of the sounds the words make and the sense they convey.  The apparent effortlessness of the verbal performances enhances the enjoyment.

The Abbey has not made a tour of the U.S. in 55 years.  In case it takes another half-century for them to come back, which Heaven forbid, you would be doing yourself a favor to try to catch it on its current tour, arranged by American Theatre Productions, Inc.  After closing in Washington on 21 October, the production moves on to one- and two-night stands across the mid-west, with stops in the southwest and south, then closes in Toronto in late November.  (There is a tentative plan to add a Boston stop before returning to Dublin, but no play dates have been set.)

*  *  *  *

TWELFTH NIGHT & UNCLE VANYA

Donmar Warehouse

22 & 30 Jan. 2003

The first thing about Donmar Warehouse’s Twelfth Night (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre) is that it’s not terribly funny most of the time.  (I’d say that’s a problem.)  To begin with, Sam Mendes has paced it very deliberately, as if it were a drama.  Aside from the obvious, this also accentuates the consequences of the Malvolio plot (which has always presented a problem for me anyway), making it more portentous and horrific than it otherwise is played.  Everything else is played so soberly (Ben Brantley in the New York Times refers to the style superseding the content, and I interpret that to mean this effect) that there is little mirth, even among the buffoons.  The songs Feste sings are all also melancholy, even the drinking song with the two Sirs.  I was never under the impression, even given the Malvolio subplot, that William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601-02) is a dark comedy.

Brantley mentions the ill-conceived picture fame, which is practically the only set piece on the stage.  (There are a few other occasional pieces of furniture—tables, chairs, a couch—but the rest of the set is the twinkling lights he mentions—upstage, forming a background of stars or, as I interpreted them, the lights of the rest of the town as seen from the two chateaux.  The sets are by Anthony Ward and the lighting design is by Hugh Vanstone, recreated for BAM by David Holmes.) 

This huge frame, center stage and silver-gray, becomes an unavoidable focus of the performance, and it was entirely confusing as to what Mendes means when a character appears inside it.  All the characters—except possibly Orsino, but I’m not sure—stand in the frame at one time or another.  Sometimes they face outward, like a portrait hanging in one of the living rooms (that’s what I thought it might be at first, but that doesn’t hold up), and sometimes they have their backs to us.  (Diana, my frequent theater companion, thought Mendes might have been trying to say something about mistaken identity, which isn’t far from Brantley’s idea that it was about the way others saw the various characters.  I had no idea what to make of it.  And that was a problem of its own—I kept trying to figure it out, distracting me from what was happening on stage.)  In any case, the device doesn’t work and adds only confusion to the production—exacerbated by the fact that it’s so prominent.

In the end, it was an interesting production without being good.  If Much Ado is my favorite Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night is my second favorite comedy, and this wasn’t really enjoyable—just curious.  Diana thought it was a case of wanting to do Hamlet on rollerskates, but I suspect Mendes, who ought to be too good for that kind of conceit, had something more portentous in mind—and it just doesn’t work.

By the way, Brantley spends a lot of his review praising Simon Russell Beale, the actor who plays Malvolio (and also plays Vanya).  I can’t argue that he’s not a good actor—even an excellent one—but I think Mendes steered him in an ill-chosen direction here.  Until he’s imprisoned and tormented at the end of the play, Malvolio ought to be a legitimate figure of ridicule; this Malvolio is unpleasant, a prig and a martinet—but not funny.  It’s of a piece with the whole production. 

———

Well, the Donmar’s Uncle Vanya is an interesting experience to try to describe—or evaluate, I guess.  All the parts of the performance of the classic play (1899-1900) by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) were good, even excellent.  The acting was superb, and the physical production was nicely conceived.  Even the music (live) worked nicely with the show.  Brian Friel’s translation is very good—contemporary without being anachronistic—and nicely poetic.  What was the problem, then?  Like Twelfth Night, it was slowly paced and deliberate, but that didn’t seem wrong in this case—even if the show went for three hours.  I can only say that Mendes fell into the Vanya trap.  The play’s about boredom; a play about boredom can’t end up being boring.  In spite of all the good elements that made up the production, it added up to a lassitude that was self-defeating.  I don’t know how else to explain it.  What’s more, I don’t think I’d know how to fix it, either.  The shame here is that the work is so good in all other respects.  The acting really is an object lesson in 19th-century Realism and the casting is superb: everyone just made their roles fit like gloves.  I can’t say it was too slow—like the Twelfth Night, which I thought was—but I don’t know what made it work so unsatisfyingly in the end.  I feel inadequate because I can’t diagnose the problem; I feel like I should be able to.  (I suppose it’s proof that a theater production is more than the sum of its parts.)

*  *  *  *

GHOSTS

Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden

11 June 2003

Before I report on Ingmar Bergman’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts at BAM’S Harvey Lichtenstein Theater, let me tell you a few things about his translation and adaptation.  First, this staging is based on Bergman’s own translation, not some existing text.  Second, he amended it—with some scenes from two Strindberg plays and one scene he wrote himself.  (I wasn’t as familiar with the text as I thought; I didn’t recognize for sure which scenes weren’t Ghosts.)  The program note, at least the part that I got to read before the show started, didn’t say if Bergman also cut some of Ibsen’s text to accommodate the additions.  The play ran 2½ hours, but that only seems right—even short, perhaps—for an Ibsen; that suggests he might have cut some to allow for his inserts.

Third, he has clearly sexed up the play some.  Oswald (Jonas Malmsjö) and Regine (Angela Kovács) are pretty randy: he runs after her relentlessly, feels her up and down and jumps on her, usually between her legs, at every opportunity.  Manders (Jan Malmsjö) and Mrs. Alving  (Pernilla August) aren’t exactly passionate on stage, except for one Hollywood kiss that’s far from paternal, but it’s clear from the text that she did try to entice him to take her into his home—and, presumably, his bed—when she briefly leaves Alving after his fling with Regina’s mother.  They are also clearly closer friends from years past than most conventional productions indicate: she calls him Gabriel (I didn’t even know he had a first name), and Oswald calls him Uncle Gabriel.  Finally, it’s not sexual, but in the end, Oswald strips off his clothes in the throes of a syphilitic attack and rolls around the stage nude before his mother.  It’s not a sexual moment, but it’s decidedly un-Victorian, even, I suspect, for Scandinavians—either Norwegian or Swedish.  Oh, and Bergman’s text had a lot of vulgarity I know Ibsen (1828-1906) never used; one character even yelled “Fuck you” at Mrs. Alving (though I don’t know what she said in Swedish, of course).

I make these observations because, as you might have expected, I had Leo Shapiro’s production on my mind [see my report “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (SHALIKO’S GHOSTS, 1975,” 6 September 2014) and the contretemps he had with the New York Times’ Walter Kerr and other critics who accused him of “messing around with Ibsen,” as one review headline put it.  The sexiness was castigated pointedly, though Shapiro didn’t change the text (he used a Rolf Fjelde translation).  Now, I suppose an argument can be made that a “great artist” like Bergman can “mess around” with Ghosts, but an upstart like Shapiro has no business doing it.  I won’t buy it, but you could argue it.  And Bergman has the temerity to fool with Ibsen’s text adding in Strindberg—whom Ibsen didn’t much like, I don’t believe—and words of his own.  Now, that’s arrogant.  (The word “bowdlerize” comes to mind—derived from the name of Dr. Thomas Bowdler who “improved” Shakespeare in the early 19th century by expurgating “offensive” bits.  I’m also reminded of a German practice of the 19th and early 20th century in which works like Shakespeare’s were published in versions verbessert—that is, “improved”—by an editor.)  Now, I’m not offended by Bergman’s having done this—just by the opprobrium heaped on Shapiro for doing much less.  It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

Now, as for the production itself: it was a disappointment.  Once again, the acting was terrific, but the actors were subverted by one choice Bergman made that seemed ill-advised.  His main set, designed by Gören Wassberg, is a revolve, with three playing areas wedged into it.  (There’s a little area on stage right, with an upholstered chair and an end table, which is used in conjunction with some of the revolving areas when appropriate, and Mrs. Alving is seated there, quietly, in the first scene when Regina and her father have a scene down center.  Now, the problem with this set-up is that, except for one open playing area, the set pieces restrict the actors to a tiny little space at the front of the turntable (plus a little platform in front of that).  There’s no room to do any movements, and Ghosts is a talky play with little innate action. 

The first act, which took place mostly on or in front of a sofa (area “one,” if you like) and around or in front of a small table (area “two”), was virtually enervating; act two was a little more active—Bergman used area “three” more—an open floor bordered on each side by a small bench and chair, and there were more three- and even four-character scenes.  But it was still essentially a static production.  As my companion, Diana, pointed out, we felt little of the emotion that the characters seemed to be feeling on stage—it was remote and cold for all the realism of the acting.  I blame the staging for most of this.  It is, however, exacerbated by having to listen through earphones, which makes the dialogue flat, but also very prominent—it’s right in your ear.  (In past experiences with translations, the devices haven’t caused this sensation by themselves, so I attribute the effect to the production, but increased by the earphones.)

(I was thinking of Bertolt Brecht, of course.  Alienation works in Brecht’s own stuff and others’, but I don’t think it works in Ibsen.  I think Ibsen intended us to feel along with the characters, to identify with them.  That’s precisely what Brecht didn’t want—identification.  I saw a production of Ghosts at Arena in D.C. in 1997, directed by Liviu Ciulei, in which he tried to turn the play into a Symbolist drama—stuff was hanging from the ceilings.  It doesn’t work—Ibsen’s not a Symbolist, he’s a Realist.  I don’t think you can make those kinds of wholesale shifts in major style without either damaging the play or doing some heavy rewriting/reconceiving.  Turning Ibsen into Brecht is the same thing.  Not all plays are as flexible as the Greeks and Shakespeare—even great classics.  What Shapiro did, from what I can tell, is heighten the Realism in a sense.  I don’t think Shapiro violated Ibsen’s spirit; he took it the next few steps along the continuum.  I’m not sure that’s what Bergman did.  Ciulei certainly didn’t.)

Bergman was also obviously doing something with the color scheme, but I haven’t figured that out yet.  The whole set was green—the carpet, the drapes, the upholstery, the table cloth, the column and sculpture in the background, the lampshades—and the characters seemed to be wearing symbolically-colored costumes designed by Anna Bergman.  The Alvings were in gray—for ghosts, I’d guess.  Oswald even had what appeared to be grayish make-up—for his illness, to be sure, but also ghostly.  Regina’s father (Örjan Ramberg) was in brown, the color of earth, and I interpret that as an indication of his basic goodness and honesty, at least in contrast to the other characters who are all duplicitous and corrupt one way or another (either by their actions or by heredity).  Regine is in various shades of red (though not scarlet), which I take to be an indication of her lustiness and slight shamelessness—but this isn’t at all a secure interpretation because it doesn’t entirely fit.  The one I don’t get at all, not even remotely, is Manders, who’s all in purple (even his hat and shoes!).  Now, purple is the color of royalty or nobility, richness, or passion—none of which fit Manders at all.  But the colors are so clearly selected for a purpose other than just decoration, and purple is certainly not a common color for any man, especially a pastor (he’s not a monsignor or bishop—it’s the wrong denomination; besides it’s a suit, not a clerical robe). 

Still, as I said, Bergman is always provocative, even when he doesn’t work.  I didn’t think the production worked on its own level, but seeing Bergman try to say something of his own through the play was worth it.  I’ll be interested to see what the reviews say.  They may be in today’s papers, since this was opening and the show only plays through the 14th.  (And it was sold out—people were out front looking for spare tickets.  On the other hand, some people left at intermission.)

I didn’t see Shapiro’s Ghosts in ’75—I had only just gotten here and didn’t know what was happening around yet, and I was in grad school at Rutgers in those days, often 10-15 hours a day—but from what I’ve read and seen in photos, whatever liberties he may have taken with the spirit of 19th-century Norway, it was more exciting as theater than Bergman’s take.  And Shapiro, too, was working on something concrete: it wasn’t “Hamlet on roller-skates,” as it were.  (To be fair, of course, not all the critics lambasted Shapiro’s show—but the ones who did were the big names.)

———

The New York Times review of Bergman’s Ghosts was in Thursday’s paper, 12 June.  Aside from anything else, it says that this is supposed to be Bergman’s last stage production.  Ben Brantley’s never really said how he felt about the production.  I mean, it’s fairly obvious, I guess, that he liked it for the most part, but he didn’t actually say so. 

*  *  *  *

THE TAMER TAMED

Royal Shakespeare Company

13 January 2004

While I was in Washington for the holidays last year, I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater of The Tamer Tamed (first published in 1647, but written perhaps between 1609 and 1622), a sequel to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew by John Fletcher (1579-1625).  (Think Lysistrata meets Shrew.  Except that it’s awful.)  There’s a word often used to describe bad theater, and it is very apt for Tamer Tamed: leaden.  It just lay there lifeless.  The RSC tried so hard to animate it—the reviews all focused on the performances—that they ended up looking just manic, as if they were trying desperately to bring a dead body back to life.  There’s not a single line of poetry or even memorable prose; not one attractive, or even sympathetic, character; and a one-joke plot (the women are all denying the men sex) that reduces everyone to a cipher.  I couldn’t even keep most of the characters straight—but that was mostly because I didn’t really care.  Not only wasn’t it funny, it wasn’t even clever.  I repeat a caveat I’ve used numerous times: often an unknown or neglected play is unknown and neglected because it’s bad!!!  Why RSC decided to dredge this one up is a mystery to me. 

*  *  *  *

IMAGINARY INVALID

Comédie-Française

14 June 2004

Well, I’m batting 1.000!  Even the Comédie-Française was a disappointment.  Can ya beat that?  (And, then, why would you want to?)

There was a short article in the “Arts & Leisure” section on 6 June (“An Intricate Malady From the House of Molière”) that pointed out that the company is broadening its base by doing some contemporary stuff and using outside directors.  This guy, Claude Stratz, is Swiss German and it’s his first encounter with both the Comédie-Française and Molière.  This may have turned out to be a mistake—the latter more than the former, perhaps.  I’m not sure what he was up to, exactly, but whatever it was it didn’t really work.

I can’t really say that the play wasn’t funny because I don’t know if it was or not.  (I’ll try to explain this in a mo.)  I don’t know Imaginary Invalid (1673) by heart or anything, but I do know Molière some.  My French isn’t good enough to comprehend the 17th-century poetry without a trot—and the Brooklyn Academy of Music did provide supertitles at the Harvey, but even that was a problem for me—but I can get the gist of what’s going on what with my familiarity with the play and all.  I may have tittered once or twice, but more from a line than anything someone did on stage.

I had two problems even seeing/watching what was going on on stage, as a matter of fact.  First, those supertitles: they’re so high above the stage floor that it’s impossible to read them and watch the stage at the same time.  You have to choose between watching the actors and trying to understand the French, or reading the translation but missing all the action.  (And the supertitles went by pretty fast—I have the impression, too, that the actors spoke fast as well—so trying to glance up and then down doesn’t work at all.  That only ends up being like watching a flick that’s missing some frames while listening to a soundtrack with gaps in it—and the gaps don’t match!  Sometimes—often—I felt like I might as well have stayed home and read the script.  I think I would have preferred either headphone translation, even though that means you can’t hear the actual actors very well, or side titles (which some operas use now instead of overhead supertitles).  Either case would have at least meant I could have kept my eyes on the stage.  

The other problem with seeing the action on stage was that the director had lit the play so dimly (by Jean-Phillippe Roy) that I really couldn’t see very well even when I was watching the actors.  The lighting scheme seemed to be that Argan keeps his house unlit and the only light there is filters through the curtained windows.  Aside from making everything hard to see, this also gives the play a somber feeling more conducive to Macbeth or something Gothic than a Molière farce.  There were, in fact, no colors on the set and few in the costumes (Argan’s wife wears a blood-red dress), either—everything was subdued and grim.  (Both set and costumes were designed by Ezio Toffolutti.)  Umm—comedy anyone?  Ever heard of it?  (I hate to get ethnic here, but maybe asking a German to direct a comedy isn’t such a hot idea.  Name me a German stage comedy, or even a Swiss German one.)

Margo Jefferson in the Times on 11 June said that what was missing was “lightness.”  (I don’t think she had the illumination in mind, however.  But she gets megapoints for having written the only review I ever remember reading that quotes Italo Calvino!  Very erudite.  [See my post “Calvino Is To The Mind What Exercise Is To The Body,” 14 and 17 March 2016.]  I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that when I read the review, and I still don’t after seeing the play, but something was certainly amiss.  I don’t know if the cast was too earnest, or if they were trying to play Realism, or if they were just going too fast to have any fun.  (I don’t mean to place all the blame on the actors—surely it was the director who conceived all this, whatever it was.)  I might have been able to analyze the problem(s) better if I had been able to watch (and see, for God’s sake) what was going on on the stage consistently, but I have already explained why I had trouble doing that.  Even while I was watching (ahem), I kept wondering why I wasn’t enjoying this—what was going wrong.  (The very fact that I was busy wondering this while the play was going on is telling, I think.)  I still haven’t figured it out—maybe because I just didn’t see it—literally.

I hate to stress the non-performance problems, like lighting and supertitles, but I have another complaint that I think contributed to—or exacerbated—the trouble with this show.  It was a full two hours long, but it had no intermission.  It wasn’t a matter of attention span, but of fanny fatigue.  (BAM’s seats, at least at the Harvey, are less than plush.)  And sitting for two straight hours is enervating, even if there are no other problems.  I always figure a 90-minute stretch is about as long as an audience ought to go without an intermission.  (As a result of this three-act marathon—at least as far as I could tell, this was the cause—people started leaving the auditorium about two-thirds of the way through the show.  I don’t know if they left the theater or just had to hit the john and then found seats near the entrances so they didn’t have to pass in front of the rest of us again, or what, but about a dozen or so spectators started moving out from different parts of the theater at about the same time.)

You shouldn’t assume from this that everyone sat stone-faced.  Many in the audience seemed to enjoy the performance, and it was probably too large a number for them all to have been Francophones.  Language, by the way, should not have been a barrier for me.  I have seen many shows in languages I don’t understand at all, like Swedish and Bulgarian and even Marathi (the language spoken in Maharashtra State, India), and have enjoyed them immensely.  Indeed, a Lithuanian play I saw some years ago, The Square by Eimuntas Nekrosius (produced by the State Theater of Lithuania in Vilnius)  was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had, and it remains with me even today as a vivid impression.  Obviously, if there weren’t also something else important missing from Invalid at BAM, the language/translation thing wouldn’t have been a problem, would it?  It loomed larger than it really was, I’m sure, because the production was so lacking. 

I still don’t know what wasn’t working—I can’t pinpoint it, and that bothers me.  Hell, I’ve seen English-language productions that I haven’t understood at all, so language isn’t always the big impediment, is it?  That Bulgarian play, Retro, a comedy (by Russian playwright Alexander Galin presented by the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Sofia) that was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86, had no translation or supertitles (which weren’t yet common), but I “understood” everything that was going on because the acting, which was classic—and superb—Stanislavsky Realism, was so good and clear that the words were virtually unnecessary.  [I think I mentioned this experience in my report “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” republished on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014.]  I can’t remember now if the Marathi performance I saw at TON, Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal (Theatre Academy of Pune), had a translation other than the synopsis in the program (which the Bulgarian play also had) but I followed that, too.  (I seem to recall that none of the Theatre of Nations performances had translations—the organizers decided that the technology was too complex for the many venues, a number of which were either outdoors or in non-traditional theater spaces.  In any case, I don’t recall having had any problems with comprehension at all.  But, then, I could see those shows!)