ARTicles vol. 6 i.1a: Mozart & Company

The first two productions of the A.R.T.’s 2007-08 season are a double bill – two wonderfully inventive “opera-plays” from our friends at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. You probably remember our earlier collaborations with this unique and virtuosic company from Minneapolis: The Miser, which was among the most successful productions in the A.R.T.’s history; our adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika; and Jeune Lune’s chamber version of Carmen, which opened our 2005-06 season with sold-out houses.

Don Juan Giovanni and Figaro, our latest collaborations with Jeune Lune, combine elements from both The Miser and Carmen. Both feature a central performance by the astoundingly versatile actor Steven Epp, who extends his journey into French classical comedy that began with his sniveling, hissing Harpagon in The Miser; both include the golden-voiced, gorgeous principal singers of Carmen, including Christina Baldwin (who played Carmen), Jennifer Baldwin Peden (Micaëla), Bradley Greenwald (Don José), Momoko Tanno (Mercedes), and Dieter Bierbrauer (Morales).

These latest productions bring together the two streams of the Jeune Lune company, the actors, trained in the rigorous physical style of the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, and the young opera singers, who, under the guidance of Artistic Director Dominique Serrand, are superb actors in their own right. But although Don Juan Giovanni and Figaro are at times reminiscent of Carmen and The Miser, they are in truth quite new. They combine two masterpieces of French comedy with two Mozart operas, to create a form of theatre that I’ve never seen before. They are neither pure opera, nor are they exactly plays or musicals. The relationship between music and spoken text seems both natural and complex, and I think Dominique, who directed and co-authored both productions, has invented a new and powerful genre. There is no word for it, so we’re calling it an “opera-play.”

The two Jeune Lune opera-plays are separate productions, but you’ll get the most from them if you see them both, because they create a kind of dialogue with each other. Both are performed on essentially the same set by a single cast of actors and singers, accompanied by a piano and string quartet; both extend Dominique’s innovative use of video that we first saw in Amerika; both explore a complex master/servant relationship, with Dominique playing the aristocrats and Steven Epp both servants; each production is created as a conversation between a Mozart opera and a related French play. But the two productions treat the marriage of play and opera in very different, and equally fascinating ways, and we strongly encourage you to try them both.

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Don Juan Giovanni

The first production interweaves Molière’s tragicomedy Don Juan (1665) with Mozart’s mighty opera Don Giovanni (first performed in 1787.) Both are versions of the legend of Don Juan, the infamous Spanish lover, who seems to have first appeared in an early seventeenth-century anonymous Italian play called L’ateista fulminato (The Atheist Struck by Lightening), quickly followed by Tirso de Molina’s justly more famous drama, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest).

Don Juan quickly became a literary archetype, who subsequently appeared in plays, novels, operas, poems, and films by Goldoni, Byron, Hoffmann, Pushkin, Dumas, Baudelaire, Richard Strauss, Shaw, Bergman, Jarmusch, and most recently Patrick Marber, to name but a very few. The legend varies widely, but the fundamental story remains the same. Don Juan is the world’s most successful lover, who leaves a trail of abandoned mistresses behind him everywhere he goes. He is usually accompanied by a disapproving servant, known as Leporello, Catalinón, or Sganarelle, whose name reminds us that the story was frequently borrowed by the actors of the commedia dell’arte. Don Juan continues his carefree existence, ever more sure of his invincible sexual prowess, claiming divine strength, and mocking the existence of God. But his nemesis arrives in supernatural form; Juan encounters the stone statue of a Commander (sometimes the devil in disguise, sometimes the Don’s own dead father) whom he cavalierly invites to dinner. The statue duly arrives at Juan’s house, eats with him, and asks to shake his hand, whereupon Don Juan is dragged down to the fiery pit of hell, leaving his servant alone on earth.

The two most best-known versions of the Don Juan legend are Mozart’s opera, with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, and Molière’s play. Both were groundbreaking in their time; some critics, including Søren Kierkegaard, have argued that Don Giovanni is the most perfect opera ever written, and Molière’s Don Juan was banned as an apparent attack on the Catholic church, and only revived fourteen years after the playwright’s death.

Molière and da Ponte’s renditions differ widely; indeed they come from quite different traditions of the Don Juan material. Molière wrote his comedy for his troupe of commedia dell’arte performers, and the play leaves much room for the dazzling physical routines associated with that style. Da Ponte, on the other hand, based his version on the text of a puppet play from northern Italy, and the narrative, particularly in the second half, is quite different from Molière’s.

Many of the Don Juan stories take place on the road, as the roué and his servant journey from town to town, wreaking havoc wherever they go. Dominique Serrand has turned this traveling into the central theme of his Don Juan Giovanni. The opera-play is a road trip across a great, unnamed country, which seems at times to be France, Spain or Italy, and sometimes looks remarkably like contemporary America. Don Juan and his Sganarelle are taken more or less exactly from Molière, though here they live not in a palace but in a car, a real car that careens around the stage, serving variously as a place to hide in, a dance platform, a dangerous weapon, and eventually a metaphor for the current state of the world.

While driving on the road, the Don and Sganarelle literally bump into a pair of shady characters who seem only to sing, and only in Italian. They look rather familiar – in fact, they look remarkably like the Don and Sganarelle. They are, in fact, Don Giovanni and Leporello from Mozart’s opera. The four continue on their journey together, sharing adventures and echoing each other’s lives. Episodes from Molière’s play merge seamlessly with scenes and arias from the opera, and the two genres complement each other with remarkable grace and humor. Serrand and Epp, who co-wrote the adaptation, make full use of the differences between the two narratives, and the evening is also rich in contemporary and political references. Part all-American road-movie, part funhouse sideshow, Don Juan Giovanni is a wonderfully inventive retelling of one of the greatest stories of world literature.

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Figaro

Like Don Juan Giovanni, Figaro depicts the complex relationship between a master and servant – but there the similarity ends. While the Don Juan material is essentially a study of sexual politics and intrigue, Figaro, particularly in the original play by Pierre Beaumarchais, takes class and revolution as its central subject.

Beaumarchais wrote a trilogy of plays about Figaro the barber and his relationship with his patron, the Count Almaviva. The first two, Le Barbier de Séville (The Barber of Seville – 1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro – 1784) were immensely popular when they were first performed in Paris; indeed the premiere of Le Mariage was so packed that three members of the audience were crushed to death in the crowd.

The first two Figaro plays derive much of their comic energy from the class tension between Figaro and his master, and The Marriage of Figaro in particular is often read as a precursor to the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789. Beaumarchais tried to recapture his former success by writing a third play, La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother – 1792) which takes place twenty years after the earlier plays. Napoleon was said to admire it, but it never attained the popularity of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, in part because its plot is complicated and its tone less buoyant, and also because Paris had inexorably changed, and audiences had no time for the fantastical exploits of an aging aristocrat and his wily servant.

The opera-play Figaro uses The Guilty Mother as a frame through which we view Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro. Serrand and Epp have reimagined the Count and Figaro in hiding in Paris, while the revolution rages around them. Old habits die hard, and the Count still tries to treat Figaro as his servant, but the power dynamic has shifted, and the household is constantly threatened by a small-scale revolution of its own.

While in Don Juan Giovanni the two sets of characters, operatic and dramatic, exist side by side, in Figaro the relationship is not concurrent but historical. The present-day Count and Figaro (or “Fig,” as the Count calls him) are played by actors – Serrand and Epp – but when they remember the past, it materializes in fragments of opera from The Marriage of Figaro. Thus past and present haunt each other – Fig and the Count are shadowy witnesses of their former lives, and the ghosts of the past are forever flitting around their current situation. It’s a beautiful and subtle relationship, made all the more poignant with exquisite sequences of live video, which can bring moments from the past to stunning new life. In Don Juan Giovanni, conversely, the video belongs not to the past but the present, conjuring up atmospheric details from a contemporary American road trip.

When I saw Figaro in Minneapolis earlier this year, I found it to be incredibly moving. Serrand and Epp’s portrayal of the Count and Fig, a master and servant locked in an eternal co-dependency, is by turns brutally funny and horrifying. The two of them live in a time warp, stuck between the excesses of the past and the freedom and terror of the future, frozen on the cusp of a great historical shift which, once past, will transform the world forever. The production is also a subtle but brilliant commentary on the state of American freedom; Fig seems aware that the birth of French democracy is causing ripples in the colonies across the Atlantic, though he’s not quite sure where, or what, America is. “We gave them democracy, and what did we get in return?” he complains. “The potato!”

Both Figaro and Don Juan Giovanni are wonderful adventures in theatrical invention. Each juggles two very different genres, and creates a new form in doing so, though in two very different ways. Each manages to tell two stories at once – or rather three, because they also tell a story of our contemporary world, as well as the historical past. Together they form an irreverent homage, a celebration of the genius of Mozart, Molière, and Beaumarchais, but a double bill that belongs very much to our own time. I hope that you’ll join us in welcoming these two great productions, and our friends from Theatre de la Jeune Lune, back to the A.R.T.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Acting Artistic Director.