Great stories never die. They get reborn on stage. Part of Shakespeare's genius, as any good reader of the "Sources" section of Signet editions knows, was to find the dramatic in someone else's plot. An academician will tell you there is universal meaning and appeal in great works of art. As if to test that definition, playwrights have frequently adapted recongnized greats to new settings and genres. This spring Harvard dramatics offers all kinds of adaptations: Antigone is transported to a troubled Latin American nation and "Wherefore art thou" is put to music. Adaptations are a recognized art form. As T.S. Eliot said, "The immature artist borrows, the mature one steals." The trick will be for each playwright and production staff to make the story their own.
The only theater offering at Harvard this week is an adaptation along the lines of The Belle of Amherst, Julie Harris' recent critically acclaimed adaptation of Emily Dickinson's poems. In a one woman show, Margaret Wolfit, a British actress, conjures up the characters in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, focusing on the intelligent woman's predicament in Victorian society. Performances are tonight, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm on the Loeb Mainstage. Tickets $6.50.
Mark Twain is not foreign to the stage. Hal Holbrook, as a predessor of Julie Harris, has been translating Twain's tall tales to a theatrical setting for years. The impact of the People's Theater of Cambridge's current production of Six Twain Tales is not then in the originality of adapting Twain but in the range of emotions the six tales explore. From the wry humor of "Hunting the Deceitful Turkey" to the broad comedy "Mrs. MacWilliams and the Lightening" to the lyricism of life on the raft (before the steamboat intrudes) in that famous nineteenth chapter about Huck and Jim, the People's Theater shows that Twain, like most everyone else, is not as simple as he seems.
If Hasty Pudding stays true to form, it will be presenting another adaptation of itself February 25 through March 30th.- Talented leads, unshapely calves and borrowed gags are the hallmarks of a Pudding show. Don't think that a chorus line in drag means a slapdash show. Pudding productions are often the slickest in town. The director, designer and leading man (aren't they all leading men?) are veterans of last year's show.
Once upon a time you might have thought that Sophocles wrote Antigone to describe the peculiar burial practices in ancient Greece. But in the new version of the play, The Passion of Antigona Perez by Puerto Rican Luis Rafel Sanchez, which director Vincente Castro brings to the Loeb Mainstage March 3-6 and 9-12, the determined girl who wants to bury her dead brother becomes a symbol for all those who resist repressive regimes. Creon appears not just as a stubborn ruler but as the biggest, most demanding dictator of them all. Even the Greek chorus has a place in Sanchez' stark setting as the journalists and mob who report and intensify the action.
Remember those hundreds of pages of moralizing on fate and history at the end of War and Peace which you were always tempted to skip, preferring to have Andrei's death scene with the grieving Natasha at his bedside go on and on? Well, in the adaptation of Tolstoy's epic novel which visiting director Norman Ayrton is staging in the second mainstage slot this season at the end of March, the romantic glow doesn't fade because the moralizing comes first. In the stage version the voice of Tolstoy has been fleshed out as a narrator who in the opening minutes of the play, introduces the characters and soliloquizes on the main themes. And don't worry that the vision of Napoleon's troops setting fire to St. Petersburg as the Russian troops fight and die in the snow will break the back of even the Loeb's large space and advanced technical equipment. Ayrton has been conducting a production seminar for the entire cast in order to prevent any catastrophes. With this class and the expertise of professionals Bill Rynders designing the set and Marcia Dixcy Carr the costumes, this version should succeed in compressing the agonies of War and Peace into two and a half hours even better than the Monarch notes.
The scandal of London in the 1920s was the young poet Edith Sitwell. She paraded around town dressed in exotic costumes and wearing gigantic sapphires on her fingers. She wrote "positively outrageous poetry" and she went around discovering poets, like Dylan Thomas who were even more scandalous than herself. According to director Peter Sellars '80 Facade," An Entertainment' the sparkling musical parodies which William Walton wrote for Sitwell' poetry has "no plot, no characters." Then why did Sellars decide to stage this extravagant new production of poetry puppetry, mime and dance and why did the Loeb (whoever is actually running it these days) decide to let him? "It was just irresistible," Sellars says. At its first performance in 1923, Facade causes such a ruckus that the fire department was called in. It's not yet certain that when the "entertainment is performed April 14-17 and 20-23 things will be that much calmer.
What Zefferelli and Prokoviev did to Romeo and Juliet, Vincenzo Bellini did earlier. Bellini, an Italian composer of the early nineteenth century, found arias where Prokoviev later discovered pas de deux. The opera, I Capuletti e I Montecchi, according to Loeb p.r., is marked by "intriguing departures from the original plot to produce a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's timeless theme," The Capulets and Montagues return to their original Italian from Shakespeare's English in the early May production at the Loeb.
If a law student spending his first summer in a law firm finds the work not as interesting as he supposed, he might sit and moan that he should have pursued that dream of being an artist in Paris after all. But if the law student is named Tom Fuller '74 and if he has played the lead in the Gilbert and Sullivan shows for years then instead of idling away his time with wishful thinking, he sits down and writes a play. Softly Speaking, to be performed at Kirkland House March 3-5 with music by Gerald Moshell is the product of Tom Fuller's law firm summer. It's about a Victorian gentleman thief who goes to a country house to steal jewels and runs off with the daughter of the aristocrat who owns the estate instead. Although Softly Speaking stands apart as one of the few originals in a season of adaptations, at least in name, Fuller's play has a decidedly Gilbertian air.
"This is the winter of our dicontent,' The Shakespearian line keeps pounding in the brain as one watches the aging Henry II of The Lion in Winter try to hold together the tenuous union of twelfth century fiefdoms he had built. But with one son unable to understand why a house must be undivided and with the other wickedly conspiring with his mother to usurp all, King Henry doesn't have much of a chance from the start. By staging the production in late March, the Leverett House drama society is only readapting an adaptation, known better as the movie version with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn as Eleanore of Acquitaine, the independent-minded queen, to the setting for which it was originally intended.
Aristophanes' The Clouds, to be presented at Winthrop House in mid-April may finally persuade you that the ancient Greeks were not made of marble. As raunchy and satirical as any modern extravaganza, the play treats Socrates unmercifully. You might want to lasso a fiver into attending it with you, but most of the humor needs no exegesis.
If you've been keeping a tally, you might notice that musicals will be in abundance as much as adaptations this spring. A Little Night Music counts twice. Based on Smiles of a Summer Night, an almost forgotten Bergman movie, the musical by Stephen Sondheim was successful on Broadway a few years ago. Sondheim's slick sophisticated version won't remind anyone of Cries and Whispers or The Passion of Anna.
If you can't wait to hear iambic pentameter in three-four time, keep your ears perched for trilling fairies. The Lowell House annual Opera, this year is A Midsummer Night's Dream. Watch out for donkey's ears.
Across the street at Adams House there will be yet another production of Night's Dream. So far it is the only Shakespeare-without-orchestra scheduled for the spring. However, because the play is being produced by the people who presented Begger's Opera last year, the play will surely be embellished with jugglers, tumblers, and cavorting imps.
Patience, the spring Gilbert and Sullivan production to be performed late in April, is certainly no adaptation. The cute couplets, scores of love sick maidens, and happy endings could only have sprung from the brows of the illustrious two. Yet Patience, like any true G & S, is a satire and in this operetta what is being so obviously but fondly mocked is the aesthetes who so carefully buttoned their sleeves in Victorian England. Banthorne, the hero, is a parody of Oscar Wilde or Swinburne; Patience is the name of the simple village milkmaid he adores.
If your taste runs to the modern (and possibly morbid) you should check out the first play at the Ex this semester (Feb 24-26), Beckett's Play and Come and Go. The former is about three dead people in funeral urns; the latter is about three living women. Directing a play, one has to worry about the element of surprise; the audience must not think it knows how the play is going to end. Nancy Kreiger, director of the Beckett plays wants as "naive" an audience as possible. She's going to stick the "perimental" back onto the end of the "Ex" by trying what she says directors have never tried before.
The second Ex slot will be filled by the first English production of the Austrian play, The President. Written in 1971 by Thomas Bernhard and translated by director Gizelle Faulkenberg's mother, the play is about the assassination of a dictator and the breakdown of human relationships. Traditional Austrian themes of decadence done a la Beckett.
Hawthorne's plot from Rappaccini's Daughter grows into Octavio Paz' own fantasy and philosophy at the Ex March 24-26. Director Antonio Dajer has talked over the play with Paz himself who is currently on leave from Harvard. Dajer '78, will be translating the work himself.
While at Harvard and in Cambridge, productions are using adaptations of other forms of art, in Boston, Travesties is stealing from life itself. Not literature or film but history is re-written when Lenin, Tristan Tzara, the Dadist and James Joyce meet in a library in Zurich. Their fictive joint story is told by a character who himself re-writes the story as he goes along. Tom Stoppard's scintillating play, studded with allusions to the radicals' works, which never did as well in New York as it deserved, is playing at the Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street, beginning Feb. 189.
