2007-2008 Season: The Triumph of Love

Cal Shakes Associate Dramaturg Dan Venning talks with Lillian Groag

DAN VENNING: What about Pierre Marivaux and The Triumph of Love excites and attracts you as a director?

LILLIAN GROAG: All plays are language but in Marivaux it’s all about the words they say to each other and their implications. His plays are always about love, and about falling in love, to be exact. And the process is complicated, difficult, dangerous and anything but easy. There is an underlying cruelty in Marivaux’s theatre which is seldom seen in our own and which reflects the ruthlessness of Eros. In spite of the very beautiful settings and their semi-fairy-tale contexts, this theatre never romanticizes “Love.” A master of delicate irony (as all his “descendants” in the theatre delineated as well: Musset, Giraudoux, Anouilh), he shows that love triumphs, but that the cost is high indeed.

 

DV: Did you have any particular philosophy when you were adapting the text? Were there any particular challenges in adapting The Triumph of Love?

LG: Yes. A good translation for the theatre is never literal. It's always an adaptation. What works in our language does not work in another and all audiences have changed throughout the centuries. The first difficulty is, of course, the commedia dell'arte characters, Arlecchino and Dimas. For these there was only a basic blueprint in the text, because the Italian actors that Marivaux used improvised onstage; they didn't give the same performance twice in a row. The other characters are scripted, but still, we think, not entirely because, I understand, there was always improvisation by the leads as well. Particularly from Arlecchino and Dimas the performances were always improvised (this is what the Italiens, Marivaux's actors, did) with verbal riffs and lazzi (physical gag routines) that could never be taken down on paper. To render a version of this is nearly impossible as we don't come from that tradition, and therefore it's a foreign thing for our actors regardless of ability and aptitude for farce. So how do we activate this very vital factor in Marivaux’s theatre? How do we develop lazzi (physical turns) and jokes that were not put down in the script?

The Dimas character is written in fully countrified speech. That's his point of departure. He uses false declensions and malapropisms. To translate countrified language into another is the translator's nightmare. The second we "countrify" a character he immediately becomes "regional" and, in our case, we begin to hear Texas(?) Oklahoma(?) Kentucky(?). There is no such thing as a general "hick" accent. How do you find the tone for the constant joke that Dimas is from the "deep" country? So that's a tremendous hurdle to breach and we had to just find it. For the rest of it, Marivaux, like Molière, wrote in modern French.

 

DV: The Triumph of Love incorporates many elements of the Italian commedia dell'arte, such as the characters Arlecchino and Dimas. How do you plan to translate these traditional elements and make them speak to a twenty-first century American audience that isn’t necessarily familiar with these figures?

LG: I don't believe in talking down to an audience, and I don't believe in "bringing forward" material that was written two hundred years ago. I think that we should all get a cultural passport and "visit" some of those places. It's more interesting for me to do that than to take [material] out of time and context. Nothing easier than to contemporize, and there are a lot of laughs that you can get by using today's jargon. I'd rather not. I think we have a plethora of plays that are written today that are very funny (or not), and if we want to hear that ... well, there they are. I'd rather an audience enlarge their context by visiting the eighteenth century and those places that seem so far away — but, in fact, are not. It's a lovely experience when we see a play done in "period" costume and in a setting that goes far back in time — in this case, the palace-fairy-tale setting. (Marivaux, appropriate to his time and place, is not a realist, and the onus is on the spectator to work through the metaphors.) And we, hopefully, come to the conclusion that our “romantic-erotic” feelings, and their tribulations and deadly traps, were ever the same. All those people long dead 250 years ago felt what we feel and articulate those emotions in the same way, and sometimes, as in Marivaux's case, with a chilling accuracy that would make us shudder.

-Dan Venning
Article originally appeared in California Shakespeare Theatre’s program