The Lively ART: Twenty Years of the American Repertory Theatre - Hardcover

Jan Geidt; Arthur Holmberg; Lynn Kasper

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566632447 ISBN 13: 9781566632447

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 1999

Synopsis

The resident repertory company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, affiliated with Harvard and known as the American Repertory Theatre, has long been considered one of the country’s most innovative cultural resources. The quality of its productions and the issues it has raised about the nature of the creative life have distinguished it among American theatre groups. Here is a treasury of criticism, reflection, observation, and insight from the ART’s post-production symposia, and pre-show talks, illustrated with photographs and drawings from ART archives. The notable contributors include a great many brilliant poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, scholars, lawyers, theatre directors, designers, and clowns, many of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners. Whether Susan Sontag reflects on Milan Kundera’s Jacques and His Master, or Jonathan Miller on Sheridan’s School for Scandal, or Jan Kott on Hamlet, or Carlos Fuentes on Calderon’s Life is a Dream, or Derek Walcott on his musical Steel, or Harold Bloom on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabbler, or Anatole Smeliansky on Bulgakov’s Black Snow, the discourse is heightened and passionate. The book also includes revealing interviews with major theatrical figures—Dario Fo, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Andrei Serban, David Mamet, and many others—and lively articles from the ART’s founding artistic director Robert Brustein, its managing director Robert J. Orchard, and a variety of literary directors and dramaturges. In all, The Lively A.R.T. is a bountiful theatre experience, better than two on the aisle.

About this title

About the Author

Arthur Holmberg is the ART’s literary director. He has also written The Theatre of Robert Wilson, acted as U.S. editor for The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, and published articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, American Theatre, and other periodicals.

From the Back Cover

The resident repertory company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, affiliated with Harvard and known as the American Repertory Theatre, has long been considered one of the country's most innovative cultural resources. Here is a treasury of criticism, reflection, observation, and insight from the A.R.T.'s past twenty years, gleaned from its newsletters, conferences, post-production symposia, and pre-show talks, abundantly illustrated with photographs from A.R.T. archives. The notable contributors include a great many brilliant poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, scholars, lawyers, theatre directors, designers, and clowns, many of them Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Erotic Dreams

by Arthur Holmberg

Is sex an anti-social instinct? A Midsummer Night's Dream forces thequestion upon us. Like all good dreams, this play sticks its nose intothe dark corners of the libido. What it finds there has varied wildly indifferent eras, different societies.

    Even for a play by Shakespeare, Midsummer has had an unusuallycheckered production history. Originally performed, in all probability,at a noble wedding, by the end of the seventeenth century thetext had become a pretext for baroque stage machinery: amidst dragonsand Chinese gardens, some incidental lines from Shakespeare. Inthe nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn's music took over, and theballetic tradition of romantic sylphs flitting about a wedding-cakestage persisted obstinately until just the other day.

    Harley Granville-Barker dragged the play kicking and screaminginto the twentieth century with his ormolu fairies, and Peter Brook'sacrobatic circus production of 1970 delivered the coup de grâce tothe tradition of moonlit arbors and grottoes. Now Alvin Epstein hasleft his mark on the play, changing the way the text looks, sounds,and feels. Epstein's production jolts us into new perceptions ofMidsummer's complexity and beauty.

    His production fuses, miraculously, the bright, shimmering surfaceof the play with its dark undertones, pushing textual ambiguitiesabout the tortured nature of love to the point of undecidability. Canthe sex and aggression the sweet young lovers stumble over in thewoods be channeled into the holy sacrament of matrimony? Yes,maybe, this production says; but then again, maybe not. It is throughhis scenic daring that Epstein signals his agreement with MarjorieGarber, who argues in her critical study Dream in Shakespeare thatthe play finally gives primacy to "imagination over reason."

    The fairies hold the keys to the kingdom of dreams, and Epsteinhas found an inspired way to actualize Titania and Oberon and theirspritely retinues. What does a fairy look like? No one has ever photographedone, and Tinkerbell has joined the romantic sylphs in thetrashcan of theatre history. Epstein eroticizes these airy nothings, givingthem beautiful bodies of flesh and blood. This uninhibited celebrationof the play's sensuality?and an attendant willingness toplumb its shadowy, menacing depths?carries us beyond Brook to adistinctively American vision of Shakespeare's fantasy.

    Epstein's Midsummer, first mounted during Robert Brustein'stenure at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1975, was restaged at theAmerican Repertory Theatre in 1980 as its first production in its newhome in Cambridge. Rather than basking in the glow of a beneficentmoon, Epstein's production inhabited the dark side of that satellite.Designer Tony Straiges's eerie, lunar landscape was dominated by agiant sculptural scoop, and subhuman fairies slithered to and froacross it like misbegotten reptiles, slimy, scaly, evil. In contrast tothese lizards of night, creeping through the sewers of sex, Oberonand Titania were tall, chiseled creatures in fleshtone tights, glorificationsof the body in motion. Sliding down the scoop, playing sexualtag, or blessing the mortal nuptials, they charged the stage witherotic energy. The beauty of their sexual love, expressed throughmovement, finally triumphed over the anger, jealousy, and aggressionthat had separated them.

    "I wanted to create the impression of nudity," Epstein says of hisvisual concept, "because Oberon and Titania are forces of nature,and forces of nature don't wear clothes. I studied with Martha Graham,and for me the body in motion is one of the most powerful wayshumans communicate. Dream is a physical play about physical realities.Any director who tackles it must find a way to physicalize thecomplicated poetry and emotions."

    In his efforts to do that, Epstein turned to Henry Purcell's 1692score for The Faerie Queene, interrupting Shakespeare's play withmusical interludes. This postmodern layering was his way of questioningthe play's meaning; harmony answered discord.

    "You can't reduce this play to any one meaning," the directorelaborates. "Love in the play unleashes destructive forces. On theother hand, the lovers yearn for harmony and order. Purcell's musiccounterpointed the cruelty of my production. The music is elegant,formal, controlled, while everything in the woods spins out of control.The music reminded the audience of the desire to regain harmony."

    In this American Dream, the body in motion becomes a primarymeans of theatrical expression. Music and dance weave through thedramatic structure (in contrast to eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryproductions, in which music dominated the play). Epsteineroticizes the body and pushes his sexual explorations to the point ofmenace. He seizes upon the possibilities of the nocturnal world ofspirits to explore Freudian depths and Jungian reflections, and heplays a dark reading of the play off against a bright one.

    "There will always remain two interpretations of A MidsummerNight's Dream: the light and the somber," writes Shakespeare criticJan Kott in The Bottom Translation. "And even as we choose the lightone, let us not forget the dark one."

    Epstein's production refuses to choose between the two. It dramatizesboth possibilities, sounding ominous notes of carnality andmortality beneath the beauty and laughter. And, opening up theambiguities of Shakespeare's text to the point of undecidability, it suggeststhat ambivalence might be the best response to love.

The above piece was excerpted from a longer article Mr. Holmbergwrote for American Theatre (April 1989) in which he analyzed othermajor productions of the play: Mark Lamos's at the Hartford Stage(1988), A. J. Antoon's at the Public (1988), and Liviu Ciulei's at theGuthrie (1985). The A.R.T. production and Mr. Holmberg's notes on itand responses to it occurred several years before he had any professionalconnection to the theatre.

THE INSPECTOR GENERAL

A Note on the Translation ofThe Inspector General

by Sam Guckenheimer and Peter Sellars

Gogol provides a special problem for the translator, as his charactersfrequently speak ungrammatically, mispronounce words, choose thewrong words, or invent new ones, stumbling over themselves in desperateattempts to communicate. In this language, sound becomeshighly important?the speeches are peppered with snores, buzzes,coughs, and sneezes, which merge into a more phonetic than denotativepattern.

    Gogol's intention is facilitated by the qualities of his nativetongue. Russian, at the time of his writing, was less than a hundredyears old as a standardized literary language, with six cases, no articles,a flexible yet innately convoluted word order, continuous juxtapositionof consonants, and unlearnable stress. The author's use oflinguistic peculiarity we have tried to render in the closest possibleEnglish equivalent, without conversion of Gogol's rough idiom into aglib adaptation. Russian expressions have been imported wholesale,such as "both have fallen finger-first in heaven" (translated elsewherewith "you're both talking through your hat," and "you're way off, bothof you") or "it turns on its moustache" (previously rendered as "theyare noting it"). Our approach has been a stubborn literalism with adash of imagination.

    Certain connections defeated us, when English couldn't approachthe density of Russian. For example, Khlestakov calls Osip a"crude animal." In doing so, he uses a word whose first two syllablesmean stomach, and thereby he unwittingly reminds himself in mid-insultof his gnawing hunger. Hunger as Khlestakov's dominant urgerecurs in his ecstatic cry "Labardan!" To him, this fish embodies ecstasy,hardly conveyed by the English, "Salt cod!"

    The Russian director Meyerhold compared Gogol's language withthat of Mayakovsky: "Certain passages produce a remarkable impressionwhen you read them?it isn't prose, it isn't verse, but some newlinguistic formulations This new linguistic formulation is what wehave tried to capture. Gogol knows our problem:

With a profound knowledge of the heart and a wise grasp of life will the word of the Briton echo, like an airy dandy will the impermanent word of the Frenchman flash and then burst into smithereens; finickily, intricately will the German contrive his intellectually gaunt word, which is not within the easy reach of everybody. But there is never a word which can be so sweeping, so boisterous, which would burst out so, from out the very heart, which would seethe so and quiver and flutter so much like a living thing, as an aptly uttered Russian word! [Dead Souls, Chapter 5]

THE INSPECTOR GENERAL

A Note on Names in Revizor

by Donald Fanger

Gogol's genius in naming characters is on a par with that of Dickens.Like his English contemporary, he exploited the radical associationsof his language with perfect tact and lively suggestiveness; in Revizor(The Inspector General) he gives us the Russian counterparts,linguistically speaking, of Twist, Gamp, Chuzzlewit, Dedlock, Veneering,Cratchit, Micawber. The names of Gogol's personages, in otherwords, establish a certain comic level of response (as does the mechanicaldoubling we find in the hyphenations of Skvoznik-Dmukhanovskyand Lyapkin-Tyapkin, the generational repetitions inAnton Antonovich and Luka Lukich, the near identity of the twoPeter Ivanoviches or Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky). They do not characterize,hence they do not invite simple translation. A Russian, recognizingin Zemlyanika the ordinary word for wild strawberries maywell try to repress the recognition; certainly he will seek plain meaningin it at his own peril. With this much by way of warning, some ofthe etymological presences latent in Gogol's cast of characters maybe indicated.

    Skvoznik suggests an inveterate rogue?also, incongruously, adraft; Dmukhanovsky, a vaguer matter, may suggest self-importanceand is indisputably, demeaningly comic when pronounced. Khlopovcomes from the onomatopoetic word for bang, slap, clap, or clatter.Lyapkin-Tyapkin inverts tyap-lyap (slipshod or slapdash), with furtherovertones of spanking and stupid speech before the hyphen and takingor stealing after it. Whipping and swilling lurk in Khlestakov?aname that, Nabokov assures us, "conveys to the Russian reader an effectof lightness and rashness, a prattling tongue, the swish of a slimwalking cane, the slapping sound of playing cards, the braggadocio ofa nincompoop and the dashing ways of a lady-killer (minus the capacityfor completing this or any other action)." When the Germandoctor's surname, Huebner, emerges in Russian transliteration asGibner, it does so bearing suggestions of death and destruction.There is lullaby in Lyulyukov; Rastakovsky is Mr. Such; Korobkintakes his name from korobka (box) and is not far from korobit (to jaror grate on); there is a twisted ear in Ukhovertov, a whistler in Svistunov,a button in Pugovitsyn (alongside a shadow of intimidation),and Poshlyopkina might be Englished as Spancks. As for Derzhimordathe policeman, his name is an ominous injunction involvingthe way your mug or kisser should be held.

    These are (to cite Nabokov again) "nightmare names," nicknamesin fact "which we surprise in the very act of turning into familynames." Such metamorphoses are part of the central action inGogol's writing. His hero is language.

GROWNUPS

Feiffer on Grownups

by David Edelstein

Jules Feiffer sees his impulse to write plays as an extension of the onethat made him a cartoonist?to create scenes. One of his scripts,Hold Me!, contains actual translations of cartoons to the stage, andtwo of his plays?God Bless and White House Murder Case?are,according to Feiffer, enlarged political cartoons. Grownups is adeparture?a painful, though still comic, treatment of domesticity, adisturbing look at three generations of a family whose members pulleach other apart.

    "In Grownups I have tried to write about the minutiae of life,"he says, "the day-to-day pettiness that drives people up the wall?thematerial that is almost never treated except in situation comedies. Weare trained by sit-coms to laugh at stuff that in fact drives us crazy;we're educated by television and before that by radio to swallow thethings that are really serious in life, that really frustrate us, that reallydrive us wild, the situations to which we overrespond because the incidentsare rarely as strong as the emotions they pull out of us. Theseemotions are so strong that we don't know how to deal with them, sowe mock them in our entertainment."

    In Grownups, a decision to allow a little girl to stay up andwatch Charlie's Angels becomes a political struggle between father andmother; a visit from meddling parents, a painful test of endurance;and a character's inability to finish an anecdote without being interrupted,the sad reflection of a life without recognition. "It's not a playabout good guys and bad guys," Feiffer stresses. "The characters arecreatures of frustration. They are holding onto their lives and by savingthemselves, destroying all those around them."

    Feiffer wrote the first draft of Grownups in 1973 but was notwilling to have it produced then. "Robert Brustein disagreed from thebeginning and wanted to do it back then?he was very enthusiastic.But I just put it away and forgot about it. When I looked at it again, Idecided he was right."

    Although Grownups is personal, Feiffer stresses that all his playsare. He cites as an example Knock Knock, which opened on Broadwayin 1976. "It was generally reviewed as a far-out farce and escapistentertainment, but I consider it a serious play and verypersonal.... I don't write autobiography, though," he says. "I'venever known how to do that, because whenever I start to write anythingthat really happened to me, I lose control of it. I have to inventsituations and then characters to go forth and enact an emotionaltruth."

    Feiffer will stay with the company in Cambridge for the durationof the rehearsal period. He believes it is his responsibility to assist thecast and director. "When things are going well you feel kind of dopeybeing around ... but there is always a crisis." Feiffer has found himselfbecoming less and less possessive of his plays the longer he worksin the theatre. He is able to put more trust in the instincts of the directorand cast than he did with his first play, Little Murders. In hisnotes to the published version of that play, Feiffer writes, "the author,while always correct in his intentions, is sometimes mistaken aboutthe means to fulfill them."

    Next he plans to write a political play. "I feel it's time, "he says,"but I still don't know what it will be about. I've always been interestedin this fragmented land of ours. I wrote about that in LittleMurders, but it's become even more splintered since then, and I'd liketo be more specific about it."

SGANARELLE

Seeking the Source of Farce

by Andrei Serban

Like the colleagues of my generation, I looked at Artaud as a prophet.He inspired in me the magic of a theatre that goes beyond the rationaland the psychological. Later, assisting Peter Brook, I witnessed inpractice that the essence of theatre is not in narrative nor in literallanguage.

    My own experience in Greek tragedy convinced me that the theatreevent should not illustrate the text but that performance must bea creative art in itself, as Grotowoski suggested. It should be true forfarce as well as tragedy, since they are closely connected. For instance,in my production Fragments of a Trilogy, I used the incantationof Greek and Latin sounds to stimulate the imagination of theactor to transmit to the audience a primitive human reaction. Thesame reaction was sought in the Molière farces. It is known that inthe commedia dell'arte the performers did not rely on words. A groupof actors with a scenario prepared by themselves, freely improvisinglines, movement, and sound in shifting tempos, were reaching at theroot of our art. In the same way, we found in Molière's early farcesthe best material for our purpose. If Greek tragedy used the archaicelements of sacred origin, in comedy we illuminate the opposite: theparody of the sacred in the cosmic force of farce.

    "The Flying Doctor," "Sganarelle," "The Forced Marriage"?one-actsketches of a young Molière, who like the young Mozart was creatingfrom instinct canvases of pure transcendence?became in ourhands a collage for the actors to improvise upon and to reinventthe commedia but with respect for tradition. This was physicaltheatre, wild and explosive, a challenge to taboos, a violation of theaccepted stereotypes of the classical style. For example, in "The Doctorin Spite of Himself," we used an invented language (replacingthe translation of the text in good Artaudian fashion), but this chaoticpattern of sounds did not correspond precisely to the detailed situationsin the play. Rather, it brought to light the subconscious energyhidden in the comedy. The attempt was to search for a made-up,ersatz theatrical language that asked: What is human, immediatelyrecognizable? In farce, ever since Roman comedy, there has beena recognition of our ancestral foolery, perpetuated through to ourdays.

    We were experimenting with a new vocabulary, imagining a situationsimilar to the young Molière, learning the discipline of the oldcraft while inventing spontaneously this new theatre.

Copyright © 1999 American Repertory Theatre. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-56663-244-7

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566632447
• ISBN 13: 9781566632447
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320