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[Theater reviews]

Moličre’s man
Darko Tresnjak wrestles Amphitryon

BY CAROLYN CLAY

Not a fan of easy pickings, Darko Tresnjak knew he wanted to direct Amphitryon from the minute he cracked the spine of the script. “In a play like this, you read the first stage direction, ‘Mercury sits on a cloud, Night comes in a chariot, they have a conversation.’ Wonderful! Great! From the moment I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m hooked.’ But how on earth are we going to do that?”

Not to worry. Tresnjak, a 35-year-old Andrei Serban–trained director of theater and opera who grew up in Yugoslavia and the United States and Poland and who has worked as a professional dancer and puppeteer, likes a palette as wide as his background. For his first college directing assignment, he chose a play with a cast of 28; his Williamstown Theatre Festival staging of Thornton’s The Skin of Our Teeth last summer featured 48. On both theatrical and operatic stages, the director, only four years into a snowballing career, has mounted the fairy-tale works of 18th-century Italian fabulist Carlo Gozzi. Now, for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, Tresnjak steps up to Moličre’s 1668 comedy set in Heaven and Thebes, in a 1994 vers libre translation by Richard Wilbur. “Working on a large scale,” he says, “is something I’m incredibly comfortable with.”

Amphitryon — in which the god Jupiter takes the form of the title character in order to obtain the sexual favors of his wife, after which no one seems quite sure of his or her identity — does not field a huge cast. But it is a formal, fantastic work rooted in classical myth and marked by a Baroque sensibility. Tresnjak’s mission: “to convey a complicated story as clearly and as charmingly as possible.”

“The thing I really adore about this play is that you can’t really call it a comedy,” he says. “And, frankly, that worries me a little because people associate Moličre with laughter. But I think this is a tragicomedy. Underneath the surface, it is an incredibly serious piece, and the ending is bittersweet at best. On the one hand, it’s cloaked in fantasy, in this lush setting. You have these deities who come down to earth. It’s a physical piece; there’s slapstick. But at the same time, it’s a piece about social injustice and servitude and about being angry at one’s place in the universe.

“The other big theme is the difficulty of marriage. We have two couples in the play: newlyweds who experience jealousy and discord for the first time.” Those would be Amphitryon and wife Alcmena, who is duped into bed by Jove. “And then we have an older couple, who have been married for 15 years and whose sexual passion has, to a certain extent, curdled.” These are Amphitryon’s servant, Sosia, into whose shoes Jupiter’s servant Mercury steps, and Sosia’s unhappy wife, Cleanthis, who can’t decide which Sosia is the colder fish.

“I just find Moličre’s reach in this piece extraordinary,” Tresnjak enthuses. “And when I think about Moličre and what it must have meant to him in his career, I feel it must have been incredibly liberating for him to write it, because he was dealing with so much censorship. The king protected him, but the Church went after him, especially around this time with Tartuffe. He wasn’t allowed to do the version that he wanted. So he writes a play about injustice, about man’s relationship to gods. But he chooses Greek and Roman gods that at that time people didn’t believe in. And I think there’s as much bite and, if anything, more rage in this piece than in others. I think that, underneath, all Moličre is deadly serious. The comedy is delightful, but it has a sharp purpose. And in this, he might have just gone, ‘Jupiter and Mercury are not going to punish me for writing this.’ I think it must have been very liberating.

“The other thing is, when I read a play, if I have any interest in it, I find out right away because I get images in my head. What that means is that the designers that I work with have to have a certain amount of confidence because I will tell them, ‘Here’s something that really moves me. Are you okay with that?’ And the first thing I told [set designer] David Gordon was this image I had of levels, because you have the gods, the pecking order within the god world, and then you have the humans and the pecking order within the human world. So it’s almost like you have four levels of servitude.”

Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin, who has been Tresnjak’s Williamstown colleague for the past five summers, describes the younger director’s sensibility as Eastern European. “It’s somewhere in the background,” Tresnjak acknowledges. “But at the same time, I dream of doing Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.” Indeed, he compares Amphitryon, with its crass male manipulation of a trusting woman, to the Neil LaBute film In the Company of Men. Trying to corral his particular aesthetic, he adds, “I was in rehearsal, and I said, ‘Well, you know, my sensibility is somewhere between Peter Brook, Bob Fosse, and Benny Hill.’ I think of myself as more American than anything else.”

The Huntington Theatre Company presents Amphitryon at the Boston University Theatre March 9 through April 8. Tickets are $12 to $55; call 266-0800.

Issue Date: March 8-15, 2001

 





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