The Lively ART: Twenty Years of the American Repertory Theatre: A Treasury of Criticism, Commentary, Observation, and Insight from Twenty Years of the American Repertory Theatre - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

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.

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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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,...