|
|
 |
The production is directed by Daniel Yurgaitis, NSU Director of Theatre, and the scenic and lighting design is by Larry Wild, NSU Technical Director. The production stage manager is Nancy Hyams and student DeWayne Davis contributes the sound design. The play will be performed in-the-round from February 19 through 22 at 7:30 pm nightly.
Tickets will go on sale in the NSU Bookstore beginning Monday, February 10th. Tickets are also available by mail. For additional information, contact the bookstore at (605) 626-2655 or the NSU Theatre Department at (605) 626-2563.
 de Molière |
Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in Paris is 1622, he was the son of the court upholsterer. Educated at a Jesuit school, Jean-Baptiste declined to take up his father's vocation, flirted briefly with the study of law, and finally fell in with a troupe of players. For the next thirteen years, the troupe would perform throughout provincial France in skits that Jean-Baptiste freely adapted from the popular Italian comedies and French peasant comedies of the day. When the troupe arrived later in Paris, these theatrical pieces were polished and expanded into the plays that have come down to us. Early in his career (and in order to distance himself from the family name), Jean-Baptiste adopted the name Molière.
In 1658, his troupe came to Paris and had a chance to appear before Louis XIV and his court in the guard room of the old Louvre. The performance began with a short poetic tragedy of Corneille, a mistake since the broad comedic style of the troupe was ill suited to tragedy. But, when Molière introduced a farce of his own creation, The Doctor in Love, theatrical history (as well as the career of Molière) was made and the troupe was taken up by the court after which soon followed great public acclaim.
During the next fifteen years (until his death from overwork), Molière poured out a stream of 27 plays, acted in them, directed them, and choreographed them. Molière combined many of his plays with the music of Lully and ballet dancing as well, in the hopes of achieving a unification of all the theatre arts in a form which did not continue after his death, but flowered again in opera 125 years later and in American musical comedy 300 years later. His plays created a whole new genre of theatre that not only attacked the gallants and blue-stockings of the salon set, but also nobles, priests, doctors- in effect everybody afforded a target for his wit.
Molière enjoyed such royal support that on several occasions when new plays of his were having their premieres at court, Louis XIV participated in them, acting small roles and in some cases dancing in the ballets. Such was the king's affection for Molière that he took on the role of godfather to Molière's second child.
Molière's output continued unabated until his death following a performance of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid (1673) and it was ironic that a play dealing with a hypochondriac who felt sure he was dying would be Molière's last great role. During the fourth performance of the play, Molière fell into a convulsion and died later that night. He was denied the sacrament of the Church, and grudgingly allowed Christian burial. During the following century his bust was placed in the Academy, and a monument erected over his grave.
Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921, was educated at Amherst College and Harvard. At Harvard, he became associated with the Poets' Theatre of Cambridge, and he sought to write a full-length play in verse. Dissatisfied with his efforts, Wilbur decided to learn more about dramatic structure by making a verse translation of Molière's The Misanthrope. This translation was first presented at the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, and then in 1955 in an off-Broadway theatre, where it attracted much acclaim for its grace and wit. The success of this venture led to an invitation to write lyrics for a new musical by Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman of Voltaire's Candide. The 1956 musical would turn out to be a failure, but Wilbur's lyrics would reappear in the successful (and rewritten) revival on 1973 (with a lyric assist from none other than Stephen Sondheim).
Wilbur's career would continue to flourish after 1956, when his book of poems, Things of This World was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award for poetry in 1957.
The verse translation of Molière's The Misanthrope was revived again successful in New York, while his verse translation of Molière's Tartuffe was being produced throughout the US. Wilbur would enjoy another notable success with a verse translation of Molière's The School for Wives on Broadway in 1971. Continuing with his translations of the works of Molière, The Learned Ladies (Les Femmes Savantes) was published in 1977 and received its New York premiere at the Roundabout Theatre in 1982. Of this production, the New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich wrote that "Molière has no better American friend than poet Richard Wilbur."
Wilbur has gone on to translate Jean Racine's Andromache, which premiered at the University of Maryland in 1981. Wilbur has written six books of poetry, winning another Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for New and Collected Poems.
Wilbur's awards have included the Prix de Rome, American Society of Arts and Letters (1954); the National Book Award (1956); the Pulitzer Prize (1957, 1987); the Millay Prize Award (1956); a Ford Foundation Fellowship (1960); the Bollingen Translation Prize Award (1963) and Brandeis Creative Arts Award (1971). In 1987, Wilbur was appointed the second poet laureate of the US (following the retirement of Robert Penn Warren).
In his introduction to the acting edition of The Bungler, Wilbur has an answer for the question of why this play, which Victor Hugo considered the best of Molière's comedies, is so little know:
The answer, I think, is that (apart from comic timing, wit, and poetic genius) the virtues…are not those of Molière's major phase. The Bungler does not depict the manners of Molière's society. It does not create complex characters… It has not artful plot structure as The Misanthrope no thematic weight as in The Learned Ladies. What The Bungler is, is a zestful and sustained performance in the vein of the commedia dell'arte.
"The English speaking world's neglect of The Bungler is most curious, given the mountains of Molière scholarship and the important role the work played in the French playwright's life. Staged in Lyon in 1655 and two years later in Paris, the comedy is Molière's first full-length work. It's success in the provinces brought the playwright's "Illustrious Theatre Company" back to the French capital, from where they had fled twelve years earlier in bankruptcy. The Bungler was Molière's first foothold in his climb toward the summit of royal favor and Parisian celebrity; and it remained a staple of the repertoire and a favorite acting vehicle for Molière himself and French performers following him. The script- composed as the playwright and troupe lived in the countryside- displays a fresh, direct imprint of commedia dell'arte on Molière's drama. But four centuries of English speakers have had almost no exposure to the work, save for John Dryden's very freely adapted Sir Martin Mar-All of 1667, popular in seventeenth century London, but hardly an enduring favorite from the Restoration. No new English version of The Bungler has been published in more than century.
Luckily for us (and also for Molière) we have Richard Wilbur to help reintroduce The Bungler. Wilbur has revolutionized Molière in English with his versions of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, The School for Wives and others. The ease with which he converts the French Alexandrine into English iambic pentameter, and the creativity and verbal dexterity with which he makes the couplets rhyme, help make Molière's texts alive and playable in our tongue; this latest translation is no exception. Wilbur's rendering of The Bungler masterfully captures Molière's poetry and comic spirit."
"From Farce in the Age Bourgeois to Farce Molièresque: The Structure of Generic Change"
by Lewis A. M. Sumberg
"By his own admission, Molière seems to have attached himself to no single period nor source… At the same time, we know that the influence of the commedia dell'arte on Molière was at least as great as that on other playwrights of the era, including Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. We should suppose that the contemplateur, ever on the lookout for new material, had ample opportunity to study the art of the Italians comedians during his several sojourns in Lyons, where a sizeable Italian colony flourished since the fifteenth century, and through which the commedianti often passed on route to Paris. It would appear that Molière's schooling in the art of improvisation (the selection and ordering of the sequences of individual episodes for a given performance)- a mighty step forward for French farce- dates from this period."
"The Italian influence is manifestly present not only in Molière's comedies, but in many of his farces and farce comedies… L'Etoudi ou les Contretemps (1653, Lyons) is a slavish imitation of Nicolo Barbieri's L'Inavertito, overo Scapino distubato e Mezzetino travagliato, first performed as improvisation, but later committed to writing."
"Molière is the first French dramatist to use the paradox of illusion and reality to express a sophisticated world view. His work transformed a dramatic device into a powerful statement of belief in man's ability to create his own universe. The distinction between illusion and reality forms the basis of theatrical experience, implicit in all drama, and explicit at certain moments in dramatic history… Early French drama and the commedia dell'arte also offered on occasion primitive plays within plays… (but) it was Molière used the play within a play to create a new perception of reality."
"The seventeenth century had a real passion for the theater, perhaps because everyday life was itself so theatrical… Everyday etiquette and politer circumlocutions veiled genuine feelings. High titles and great offices were costly, empty charges. Versailles was a gigantic theater, the monarch its chief actor, the Hall of Mirrors its symbolic deception. People from all walks of life went often to the theater, and in real life frequently acted as if they were playing roles. The reality of this theatrical illusion was prevalent in human activities and is mirrored in Molière's theater. His audience liked to recognize on stage representations of characters and situations familiar to their daily life, yet they wished the theater to be far enough removed from the reality they knew to be comic."
"At first, like his predecessors, Molière uses (the play within a play) principally as a theatrical device to amuse, with only accidental deeper import… it first appears in L'Etourdi (1658). Mascarille (his name means, appropriately "little mask") is a valet serving the love of his master Lélie for the beautiful Célie. The servant piles playlet upon playlet, creating illusions almost more quickly than they can be dispelled… Mascarille tries to induce others to play roles, but is continually foiled by the honest naiveté of his master. Lélie …is always the spectator, so the audience is never completely deluded by Mascarille's playlets. Lélie tries time and again to join in his valet's illusions, but is incapable of it; he has an indirect role, and rather than acting in Mascarille's spectacles, he reacts to them from the outside. This helps the spectator to remain very certain as to the line between illusion and reality… In the end, Lélie wins Célie, not through any of the increasingly theatrical machinations of Mascarille, but by virtue of his honesty and inability to feign. All of Mascarille's schemes are pointless; the goal is reached without him. Lélie, completely open and truly incapable of deception, cannot function in a world of illusion, but triumphs with the weapon of truth… Despite the possible significance of the victory of naiveté in L'Etourdi, the real function of these playlets is dramatic and not ethical."
"Molière's readers will recall that his first major original play, L'Etourdi, had the good fortune not only to please its initial audience in Lyons in the mid-1650's but also to succeed well enough later in Paris to become a repertory staple for Molière's company during its early years there. As was to be customary in the composition of most of his later comedies, Molière was indebted to a number of other contemporary or near-contemporary authors- in this case, Italian, Spanish and French- for elements of plot and character used in L'Etourdi. However, one device that does not appear to be borrowed is the valet Mascarille's disguise as a Swiss innkeeper in one of his frustrated attempts to advance his master's campaign to win a beautiful slave girl away from her presumptive owner. (Henry Carrington) Lancaster notes the significance of this novelty (in his book A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, Part III: The Period of Molière 1652-1672 published in 1936): 'It is in his role that Molière first makes use of a foreigner's French, disguising Mascarille as an innkeeper from German-speaking Switzerland. In doing so he was probably imitating the accent of Swiss he had encountered at Lyons. L'Étourdi is the first seventeenth-century play of any importance in which this comic device is employed, though dialectic and Latinized French had been used before.'"
"The Blunderer is generally believed to have been first acted at Lyons in 1653, whilst Molière and his troupe were in the provinces. In the month of November 1658 it was played for the first time in Paris, where it obtained a great and well-deserved success. It is chiefly based on an Italian comedy, written by Nicolo Barbieri, known as Beltrame, and called L'Inavvertito, from which the character of Mascarille, the servant, is taken, but differs in the ending, which is superior in the Italian play. An imitation of the classical boasting soldier, Captain Bellloroforte, Martelione, and a great number of concetti, have also not been copied by Molière. The fourth scene of the fourth act of L'Etourdi contains some passages taken from the Angelica, a comedy by Fabritio de Foraris, a Neopolitan, who calls himself on the title-page of his play 'il Capitano Coccodrillo, comico confidante.' A few remarks are borrowed from la Emilia, a comedy by Luigi Grotto, whilst here and there we find a reminiscence of Plautus, and one scene possibly suggested by the sixteenth of the Contes et Discours d'Eurtrapel, written by Nöel du Fail, Lord of la Hérissaye. Some of the scenes remind us of passages in several Italian Commedia dell'artes between Arlecchino and Pantalone, the personifications of impudence and ingenuity, as opposed to meekness and stupidity, they rouse the hilarity of the spectators, who laugh at the ready invention of the knave, as well as at the gullibility of the old man. Before this comedy appeared, the French stage was filled chiefly with plays full of intrigue, but with scarcely any attempt to delineate character or manners. In this piece the plot is carried on, partly in imitation of the Spanish taste, by a servant, Mascarille, who is the first original personage Molière has created; he is not a mere imitation of the servants of his contemporaries, but is a lineal descendant of Villon, a free and easy fellow, not overly nice in the choice or execution of his plans, but inventing new ones after each failure, simply to keep in his hand; not too valiant, except perhaps when in his cups, rather jovial and chaffy, making fun of himself and everybody else besides, no respecter of persons or things, and doomed probably not to die in his bed. Molière must have encountered many such a man whilst the wars of Fronde were raging, during his peregrinations in the provinces.
There were too many incidents, which take place successively, without necessarily arising from one another. Some of the characters are not distinctly brought out, the style has often been found fault with, by Voltaire and other competent judges, but these defects are partly covered by a variety and vivacity which are only fully displayed when heard on the stage."
"L'Étourdi or The Bungler, an early Molière comedy, his first in verse, is a hoot, a nutty 17th century sitcom about a manservant, proud of his gift for dissembling and manipulation, trying to help his dimwitted master win the girl of his dreams away from the rich old man to whom she is indentured, as well as a variety of other suitors... As a tour de force of cleverness and wit, it was nonetheless Molière's first recognizably great work… and has never until now been performed in verse in English in the United States. Using a mischievous new translation by the poet Richard Wilbur, the premiere production at the Long Wharf Theater…is great good fun and should open the gate for the play to be presented with the regularity it deserves."
Bruce Weber, The New York Times
"Anticipation is one of a theatergoer's delights, though it would be hard to match the 350 years one had to wait for a chance to see Molière's first comedy, The Bungler (L'Étourdi), in an English verse production… You'd have to wait many a season more for any Molière to match it in sheer comic exhilaration… it's comic riches should not be missed"
Chelsey Plemmons, News-Times (Danbury CT)
"The play has some splendidly antic elements."
Markland Taylor, Variety