Greek to him

Paul Schmidt retools The Bacchae for the ART

by Scott T. Cummings

In the line-up for the 19th season of the American Repertory Theatre, which gets under way this week, Shakespeare has one play. So do fellow theatrical heavyweights Molière, Euripides, and Bertolt Brecht. Paul Schmidt has two -- in a manner of speaking.

Schmidt is one of America's foremost translators for the stage. And in an ART season sprinkled with venerable classics and world premieres, he will provide a bit of both. His translations of Euripides's The Bacchae and Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities will receive their premieres at ART this season: The Bacchae, directed by ART associate director François Rochaix, leads off the season, and the Brecht follows in February, in a production by leading American director Robert Woodruff.

Paul Schmidt knows his way back and forth between the study and the rehearsal room. His success as a translator stems from his dual status as master linguist and experienced playwright and actor. Although Russian is his principal language (he holds a PhD in Slavic Literature from Harvard and taught Russian literature for years at the University of Texas and Wellesley), he also works in French and German, some in Italian, and now in Greek. As an actor, he has performed with the Yale Repertory Theatre, the New York Theatre Workshop, Mabou Mines, and the Wooster Group.

"When you're translating for the theater, it all depends on your ear," he explained over lunch a few weeks ago. He had come to town for a few days to check out rehearsals but ended up staying more than a week, fine-tuning much of the text in response to the work in progress. "I can sit at home and fiddle with the Greek, but the real work doesn't begin until you start working with actors. They get up on their feet with the text and start talking and you hear things you didn't hear before and you're able to adjust on the basis of that. It is not that you're writing for specific actors, but when you actually hear the physicality of the text or see what type of gesture or movement they want to make on a specific line, it influences your perception of how that line should sound."

The Bacchae is his first translation of a Greek tragedy for professional production. "The Greek plays are this enormous challenge for a professional translator," he admits. "How do you actually go about re-creating this thing which has such a history and comes laden with so much complicated information? Of all the Greek plays, I think The Bacchae is the most fascinating. It is such a stunning take on the world and on what happens when you deny the irrational side of your mind. Particularly, it's about a man denying the feminine side of his nature and what the consequences of that can be. I don't know if that's too simplistic, but that's the heart of the matter."

The Bacchae tells the story of Dionysos, the god of the vine, wine, and intoxication, who returns to his Theban birthplace to demand recognition. He drives the women of Thebes mad with his spirit; they abandon the city and take to the hills of Mount Kitharon for a Dionysian bacchanal. When Pentheus, the young king of Thebes and by lineage the cousin of Dionysos, tries to restore order, he finds the new god from the East a formidable opponent. Tragedy ensues.

Tragedy of the Greek variety has enjoyed a higher profile at the ART since François Rochaix arrived on the scene from his native Switzerland a few years ago. Rochaix followed his 1994 postmodern rendering of Aeschylus's Oresteia with an ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training workshop production this past spring of Euripides's The Phoenician Women and The Madness of Herakles. Now comes The Bacchae. "The Greeks invented everything, all the basic allegories of thought we use today. It's all here," insists Rochaix with sincere enthusiasm. "I am experiencing it all over again with The Bacchae. It is an extraordinary tool to think about who we are and where we are today. I can say, in a provocative way, that it is the most modern theater I can do."

Yet for all the play's intrinsic merits, Rochaix has specific personal reasons for tackling The Bacchae at this time. Back home in the Swiss wine-growing regions surrounding Lake Geneva, he's the artistic director of the 1999 Fête des Vignerons (Wine-Growers Festival), a vast folk celebration held only once a generation in honor of the region's vinicultural tradition and, by extension, of Dionysos himself. The week-long festival will include music and theater performances, parades, pageants, and other mass spectacles, including a bacchanal involving 400 women. "I thought I should do the original one at least once," Rochaix says with a smile. "And since I am doing the festival with Jean-Claude Maret as set designer and Cathy Zuber as costume designer, I thought it would be great for the same team to do The Bacchae here."

Oddly enough, when the curtain goes up on the ART Bacchae, it will be the third production of the play in Cambridge in a month's time. Cambridge Rindge and Latin School has a production that closes this weekend. The Office for the Arts at Harvard and Radcliffe sponsored a production at the Agassiz Theatre a few weeks ago. What accounts for this Dionysian convergence? Millennial anxiety? Fascination with gender roles? The search for new gods and new absolutes? This year's Beaujolais Nouveau? Whatever it is, Dionysos, the god of ecstasy, of otherness, and of theater itself, is well served on Cambridge stages this fall.

Scott T. Cummings explains the art of translation.