Post by flummery on Aug 23, 2005 21:12:37 GMT -4
Gay City News - The Elephant in the Room - www.gaycitynews.com/GCN9/TheElephant.html
"ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD"
By Jean-Luc Lagarce.
The Elephant in the Room
From France, a play about
AIDS in the time of dementia.
By JERRY TALLMER
The word AIDS never appears in Only the End of the World, but the play by Jean-Luc Lagarce at Theatre 3 opens with the following lines spoken by a certain Louis, or, to be precise—precision being the name of the game here—by actor Michael Emerson:
Later, the following year
I would myself, as well, die --
I am almost 34 now and
it is at this age
that I will die,
the following year.
Lagarce himself, born in Franche Comte, France in 1957, was actually 38 when, in Paris, in 1995, he died of AIDS. Only the End of the World was written in 1990, four years after he learned he was HIV-positive. Lagarce left behind a formidable record unknown in the United States as both a playwright of some 20 works and as director.
Here is a patch of dialogue which, when you read it, with its repetitions within repetitions, may lead you to think you’re going crazy. Louis has returned home for an unexplained visit with his family, after many years away:
SUZANNE [Louis’s sister]: What I don’t understand.
ANTOINE [their brother]: Me neither.
SUZANNE: You’re laughing? I never see you laugh.
ANTOINE: What we don’t understand...
SUZANNE: What I don’t understand and have never understood.
ANTOINE: And probably will never understand.
THEIR MOTHER: [offstage]: Louis!
SUZANNE [yelling]: Yes? We’re right here!
ANTOINE: What you don’t understand.
SUZANNE: It’s not that far away, he couldn’t have visited more often, and nothing that tragic either, no disasters, no treacheries, that’s what I don’t understand, or can’t understand.
“What you’ve stumbled on,” says Michael Emerson, best known for his performance as Oscar Wilde in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and the recent revival of Hedda Gabler on Broadway, "is a passage in the middle of the piece that we [in rehearsals] call The Interlude—a series of short, surreal dream sequences, the sort of walking nightmare Louis might have had. It’s the most challenging part of the play.
“Louis is a sort of ghost, talking to us from beyond the grave. It’s hard to talk about this play,” says the sensible, sensitive actor, “without making it sound like the least fun thing anyone could do. But yes, it’s fun for me, in the same way any classical work is fun.”
Louis in Only the End of the World is another matter.
“Like every character you play, you find sympathy. I see Louis,” says Emerson, who plays him, “as a fragile-looking man in his 30s, highly articulate. The text suggests he’s a writer by trade.
“There’s nothing explicit in the text about AIDS. I like the way Lagarce avoids it. He wants his play to be universal, speaking of the general human condition, disoriented from current events, current issues.
“Another reason AIDS is not mentioned is the setting of the play in the 1980s, when Louis’ illness would be unnamed, unacknowledged within his family.”
Emerson, wryly: “I always thought comedy was my forte, and I seem to do nothing but the darkest plays since I came to New York [from Iowa, in the mid-1970s, and then back again, to stay, in the early 1990s; he lives with his wife Carrie Preston in the West 50s]. Of course Oscar Wilde is both funny and sad, and I sometimes think that humor in dark plays is the best humor.”
Still, all things considered, Only the End of the World is not an easy read.
“And it’s not easy acting, but it’s an extraordinary piece. The difficulty is part of its appeal—not a meaningless difficulty but a complex one. It becomes a kind of verse. As for the repetition, I’ll say it plays better than it reads. Once you knock it around a bit, [Lagarce has] captured the way we talk. Conversation—serious conversation—becomes a struggle for clarity.”
Emerson had never heard of Jean-Luc Lagarce, or of this or any of his other plays, until told about it by Lucie Tiberghien, the French-born dancer / actress /director / choreographer who, with her husband Stephen Belber, came upon a production of Only the End of the World in Paris two years ago.
It is Ms. Tiberghien who has translated it from the French original and directs it here now, with Belber—a Tectonic Company veteran of Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, the piece that explored the murder of Matthew Shepard—who plays Antoine, in a Company Charniäre cast rounded out by Sandra Shipley, Katie Firth, and Jennifer Mudge.
The rain outside our interview has stopped. Emerson does a little catching up. He and Preston, an actress originally from Macon, Georgia, most lately seen in Boys and Girls at Playwrights’ Horizons, have been married since September ‘98. Michael himself, above and beyond Hedda Gabler (which rematched him with Kate Burton–“there was a period when I didn’t do anything [on stage] in New York without her”), has been in a few movies, here and there, but unhappily.
“You work four days, and then one line is left when you see it. Demoralizing. I’m going to try to only do film characters who are too integral to the plot to be cut.” Short pause. “Did I tell you I won an Emmy last year?” It was for playing a serial killer on The Practice (Sunday nights on ABC-TV).
Which brings us full circle to “this play about the thing we all dread and least like to talk about, our own mortality.”
The script, incidentally, is without a single stage direction, not one. That doesn’t displease Emerson. He looks on stage directions as “an over-controlling device on the part of the playwright, unnecessary. I always think it presumptuous,” he says, “when the text tells you how a line should be delivered–‘slyly,’ ‘warmly,’ ‘cautiously.’ “Or, as eight paragraphs above, “wryly.”
“I mean, if they would only stop and think: Who are the great playwrights? Moliere, the Greeks, Shakespeare. Shakespeare doesn’t have stage directions, though sometimes you wish he’d give you a clue. Same thing with this text,” says the actor who has to live in it.
“For me,” says Michael Emerson, “I like to guess at things a little bit. What is opaque, mysterious, for me, about this play is that it’s a slice of someone’s life purposely lacking exposition. We navigate it as best we can. Does that make sense?”
"ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD"
By Jean-Luc Lagarce.
The Elephant in the Room
From France, a play about
AIDS in the time of dementia.
By JERRY TALLMER
The word AIDS never appears in Only the End of the World, but the play by Jean-Luc Lagarce at Theatre 3 opens with the following lines spoken by a certain Louis, or, to be precise—precision being the name of the game here—by actor Michael Emerson:
Later, the following year
I would myself, as well, die --
I am almost 34 now and
it is at this age
that I will die,
the following year.
Lagarce himself, born in Franche Comte, France in 1957, was actually 38 when, in Paris, in 1995, he died of AIDS. Only the End of the World was written in 1990, four years after he learned he was HIV-positive. Lagarce left behind a formidable record unknown in the United States as both a playwright of some 20 works and as director.
Here is a patch of dialogue which, when you read it, with its repetitions within repetitions, may lead you to think you’re going crazy. Louis has returned home for an unexplained visit with his family, after many years away:
SUZANNE [Louis’s sister]: What I don’t understand.
ANTOINE [their brother]: Me neither.
SUZANNE: You’re laughing? I never see you laugh.
ANTOINE: What we don’t understand...
SUZANNE: What I don’t understand and have never understood.
ANTOINE: And probably will never understand.
THEIR MOTHER: [offstage]: Louis!
SUZANNE [yelling]: Yes? We’re right here!
ANTOINE: What you don’t understand.
SUZANNE: It’s not that far away, he couldn’t have visited more often, and nothing that tragic either, no disasters, no treacheries, that’s what I don’t understand, or can’t understand.
“What you’ve stumbled on,” says Michael Emerson, best known for his performance as Oscar Wilde in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and the recent revival of Hedda Gabler on Broadway, "is a passage in the middle of the piece that we [in rehearsals] call The Interlude—a series of short, surreal dream sequences, the sort of walking nightmare Louis might have had. It’s the most challenging part of the play.
“Louis is a sort of ghost, talking to us from beyond the grave. It’s hard to talk about this play,” says the sensible, sensitive actor, “without making it sound like the least fun thing anyone could do. But yes, it’s fun for me, in the same way any classical work is fun.”
Louis in Only the End of the World is another matter.
“Like every character you play, you find sympathy. I see Louis,” says Emerson, who plays him, “as a fragile-looking man in his 30s, highly articulate. The text suggests he’s a writer by trade.
“There’s nothing explicit in the text about AIDS. I like the way Lagarce avoids it. He wants his play to be universal, speaking of the general human condition, disoriented from current events, current issues.
“Another reason AIDS is not mentioned is the setting of the play in the 1980s, when Louis’ illness would be unnamed, unacknowledged within his family.”
Emerson, wryly: “I always thought comedy was my forte, and I seem to do nothing but the darkest plays since I came to New York [from Iowa, in the mid-1970s, and then back again, to stay, in the early 1990s; he lives with his wife Carrie Preston in the West 50s]. Of course Oscar Wilde is both funny and sad, and I sometimes think that humor in dark plays is the best humor.”
Still, all things considered, Only the End of the World is not an easy read.
“And it’s not easy acting, but it’s an extraordinary piece. The difficulty is part of its appeal—not a meaningless difficulty but a complex one. It becomes a kind of verse. As for the repetition, I’ll say it plays better than it reads. Once you knock it around a bit, [Lagarce has] captured the way we talk. Conversation—serious conversation—becomes a struggle for clarity.”
Emerson had never heard of Jean-Luc Lagarce, or of this or any of his other plays, until told about it by Lucie Tiberghien, the French-born dancer / actress /director / choreographer who, with her husband Stephen Belber, came upon a production of Only the End of the World in Paris two years ago.
It is Ms. Tiberghien who has translated it from the French original and directs it here now, with Belber—a Tectonic Company veteran of Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, the piece that explored the murder of Matthew Shepard—who plays Antoine, in a Company Charniäre cast rounded out by Sandra Shipley, Katie Firth, and Jennifer Mudge.
The rain outside our interview has stopped. Emerson does a little catching up. He and Preston, an actress originally from Macon, Georgia, most lately seen in Boys and Girls at Playwrights’ Horizons, have been married since September ‘98. Michael himself, above and beyond Hedda Gabler (which rematched him with Kate Burton–“there was a period when I didn’t do anything [on stage] in New York without her”), has been in a few movies, here and there, but unhappily.
“You work four days, and then one line is left when you see it. Demoralizing. I’m going to try to only do film characters who are too integral to the plot to be cut.” Short pause. “Did I tell you I won an Emmy last year?” It was for playing a serial killer on The Practice (Sunday nights on ABC-TV).
Which brings us full circle to “this play about the thing we all dread and least like to talk about, our own mortality.”
The script, incidentally, is without a single stage direction, not one. That doesn’t displease Emerson. He looks on stage directions as “an over-controlling device on the part of the playwright, unnecessary. I always think it presumptuous,” he says, “when the text tells you how a line should be delivered–‘slyly,’ ‘warmly,’ ‘cautiously.’ “Or, as eight paragraphs above, “wryly.”
“I mean, if they would only stop and think: Who are the great playwrights? Moliere, the Greeks, Shakespeare. Shakespeare doesn’t have stage directions, though sometimes you wish he’d give you a clue. Same thing with this text,” says the actor who has to live in it.
“For me,” says Michael Emerson, “I like to guess at things a little bit. What is opaque, mysterious, for me, about this play is that it’s a slice of someone’s life purposely lacking exposition. We navigate it as best we can. Does that make sense?”