Sc4logo-nv5-dk-ccw-377
Scene4 Magazine-The Steiny Road  To Operadom - Karren Alenier -  www.scene4.com
Karren LaLonde Alenier

The Metromaniacs

Playwright David Ives is Gertrude Stein’s kind of writer. Language is his playground. Take The Metromaniacs, which he adapted from Alexis Piron’s  La Métromanie, a 1738 play considered his masterpiece. In the program notes from the world premier production commissioned by Michael Kahn at Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Theatre, Ives confesses, “I’ve fiddled a good deal with Piron’s masterpiece in bringing it into English.”

 

GOSSAMER AND GORGEOUS

 

ArdenForest-cr

 

Like Stein’s work, Piron’s play with its complicated set of characters and their elusive identities is remarkable for how things are said, not what the characters do. Ives said in his notes that Piron’s play is “a comedy with five plots, none of them important, [but] that’s the beauty of the play.” Ives said Piron wanted “gossamer and gorgeousness…rarified air and helpless high-comic passion.” On February 8, 2015, the Steiny Road Poet, who was invited by the Shakespeare Company to participate in their accompanying Poets Are Present program, laughed her head off.

 

Who knew that a contemporary playwright could command such agility in writing entertaining rhyming couplets that acknowledge the past (details from Piron’s era and before) and at the same time pinpoint our contemporary icons without making the audience groan. If there was any groaning, it could only have been from laughing too hard.

 

POINTING AT BRITNEY SPEARS AND VOLTAIRE

 

For example, Steiny chooses two passages that show how clever Ives is with blending past and contemporary icons. The first text is from the protagonist of the play who is a poet not only obsessed with writing verse, but in love with an unknown female poet from the cultural region of Brittany (as mentioned in the second text spoken by Damis’ valet Mondor). A further aside is that Ives has renamed this unknown poet, Mériadec de Peauduncqville. (Her name in French, which carried the burden of harsh sounds—Meriadec de Kersic de Quimper, didn’t translate well.) Peauduncqville plays off the American English word podunk, which indicates a place of insignificance, out-of-the-way, or fictitious. In fact Meriadec and “her” poetry is the creation of Monsieur Francalou. (More on this shortly.)

 

DAMIS

For what great poets have always won:

Glory. You think war’s harder, swords more real?

To wield a pen each day takes arms of steel!

For poets take the field against the best –

Sophocles, Shakespeare, Plautus, all the rest

Who quoted by us now make us seem sages!

I want to write the thoughts of future ages.

So yes, I’ll study law. The laws of art! And pass the hardest Bar: the human heart!

 

MONDOR

Brittany? That’s nowheresville, it’s outer sticks!

The chicks there carry Brittany spears! They’re hicks!

 

What Steiny particularly likes about these passages is how Ives points to Shakespeare who was known for his contemporary jokes as well as his word agility. So just to state the obvious. Meriadec is from nowheresville (as her name Peauduncqville suggests) and she is like our pop singer Britney Spears who hails from Mississippi and became a teenage singing sensation. It’s particularly comic that the poet’s servant is acting more sophisticated than his educated master. Mondor (Michael Goldstrom) knows going to Brittany is not a desirable destination. One other juicy historic detail to know is that Piron based this aspect of his play on how Voltaire (author of Candide) fell head over heals for the poetry of Antoinette Malcrais de La Vigne, known as the Breton Muse, but she was just an invention of Paul Desforges-Maillard. So Piron’s play which might be translated as the poetry craze was making fun of the much more accomplished Voltaire.

 

LEANING ON SHAKESPEARE

 

On a Steinian level, glory (or gloire as Gertrude Stein referred to it) was indeed something that the great Modernist pursued with vigor. To get that glory, Stein surreptitiously leaned on Shakespeare and the Greek philosophers like Sophocles (but this is a matter, you, Dear Reader, must pursue by reading the Steiny Road Poet’s deep analysis of Stein’s love poem Tender Buttons). One additional point before Steiny leaves this passage—take a look at To wield a pen each day takes arms of steel. Here Ives puns in the environs of war. The poet bodily needs very strong arms to write or the poet needs weapons like guns to write. Punning was a technique popular with Shakespeare and with Stein.

 

Due respect must be shown to the actors who delivered these lines. Most of them are experienced Shakespearian thesbians. Therefore, their line delivery, coupled with fascinating body emphasis, was spot on for timing. This pairing of the vocal and body movement allowed for shortening the syncopation gap, that phenomenon named by Gertrude Stein—the time when a line is delivered and the listener understands the thrust of that line. And behind these good players are the accomplished director Michael Kahn, the period movement consultant Frank Ventura, and the voice & text coach Ellen O’Brien.

 

PLAYS WITHIN PLAYS

 

MondorMovesOnLisette-cr

 

Steiny was particularly taken with the performance of Dina Thomas who plays Lisette, the take-charge maid to Francalou’s daughter Lucille (Amelia Pedlow). Steiny loved the way she moved, especially in an early encounter with Mondor, who was trying to put his hands on her in an amorous way. She speaks and moves with authority but also with grace, a fascinating pleasure to watch. As the play begins Lisette and Francalou (Adam LeFevre) are standing with the colorful set (a forest of Eden) built in the ballroom for Francalou’s play, which he hopes will bring Lucille out of her literary ennui—she says whatever to everything and locks herself in her room reading poetry. Lucy-red-dress-crLisette will play Lucy (Lucille) in Francalou’s play and has a costume that duplicates Lucy’s favorite dress. The period costumes by Murell Horton are eye-catching, especially Lucy’s favorite dress which has the front section of the bouffant skirt pulled up above her knees almost like a window shade.

 

The Shakespeare Theatre Company upped the ante on poetry by inviting poets from the greater DC area to sit in their lobby and interact with the audience.

 

IMG_6817-cr

 

What the poets did in the lobby—answer questions, talk about poetry, sell their own books, recite their poetry—was up to them but by 9:30 the next morning, the poet was obligated to send in a poem which would be distributed to that particular poet’s audience. Here is one of the two poems, Steiny sent as a follow up to her residency:

 

    HERD SPEAK: A REFLECTION

     

    Poets love love. We’re sated by what seems.

    Then unlike chatterers who speak in herds,

    We seek the best of all possible…words.

                                            The Metromaniacs

     

     

    Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas spoke in code.

    What is a tender button but a nipple a calf

    knows well on his mother’s udder. Who speaks

    cow in Voltaire’s best of all possible…

    Was it Candide? Indeed, Alice Babette Toklas

    served the best Sunday roast beef she

    eschewed British mutton in favor of Monday’s

    Boeuf Bourguignon cubes of boneless

    meat browned in three tablespoons of lard

    several ounces of salt pork a dozen

    tiny onions a dollop of flour two

    cups of very old dry Burgundy redder

    than blood garlic then a bouquet

    of orange peel bay leaf sprig of thyme

    sliver of nutmeg salt but never never

    pepper. How poets pine among

    pines. How they play at plays.

 

 

Photos by Scott Suchman

inSight

March 2015

Post Your Comments
About This Article Here

Share This Page

View other readers’ comments in Letters to the Editor

Scene4 Magazine — Karren Alenier

Karren LaLonde Alenier's most recent book is The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas. She is a Senior Writer for Scene4.
Read her Blog.
For her other commentary and articles,
Check the Archives
:

Search Karren LaLonde Alenier

©2015 Karren LaLonde Alenier
©2015 Publication Scene4 Magazine

 

The Steiny Road
Scene4 Magazine - Karren Alenier - The Steiny Road To Operadom | www.scene4.com
A complete index of all of
Karren Alenier’s columns
in Scene4 with links.
Click Here for Access

Sc4logo-nv5-dk

®

 

Cover | This Issue | inView | inFocus | inSight | Perspectives | Blogs | inPrint | Comments | Contact Us | Recent Issues | Special Issues | Masthead | Contacts&Links | Submissions | Advertising | Subscribe | Books | Your Support | Privacy | Terms | Archives
Search This ISSUE

Search This Issue

Search The ARCHIVES

Search The Archives

Translate Page

 

 Share This Page

Email

Share in Facebook

Facebook

 


Scene4 (ISSN 1932-3603), published monthly by Scene4 Magazine - International Magazine of Arts and Culture. Copyright © 2000-2015 AVIAR-DKA LTD - AVIAR MEDIA LLC. All rights reserved. Now in our 15th year of publication with Worldwide Readership in 126 Countries and comprehensive archives of 8500 pages.
 

sciam-subs-221tf71
Julius Krinski NUDITY - authorized edition -  Scene4 Books/Aviarpress www.aviarpress.com
Hollywood Red: The Autobiography of Lester Cole  ©2013 Scene4 Books  www.aviarpress.com
Character Flaws by Les Marcott at www.aviarpress.com
Bookends by Carla Maria-Verdino Süllwold - Scene4 Magazine - www.scene4.com
Thai Airways at Scene4 Magazine