Production Proposal v.1: FIGARO REFIGURED

Beaumarchais meets Mozart on the SOS stage – November 2009
Production proposal: Virginia Reh and David Vivian

Introduction

This project is to be a “marriage” of the Beaumarchais play and the Mozart/Da Ponte opera. It is a collaboration between DART and Music. The production will examine the intersection of the lyrical with spoken text. Similarly it will examine fusion and hybridization in the scenographic gestures.

The play

Beaumarchais’ play The Marriage of Figaro has been the subject of much study and controversy over the years. On one level, it is an entertaining comedy of the 18th century. Beaumarchais was quite intentional in the dramatic critique of the society of time, examining class inequalities, outmoded social conventions, censorship and other aspects of pre-Revolutionary France. As a result he faced a wall of censorship in France and abroad. The play is considered a milestone in the development of theatre, focusing as it does on a lower class hero. It is also repeatedly hailed as a call to revolution. After a reading of the play in 1781, Louis XVI banned the play as subversive. After many rewrites and interventions it finally opened in 1784 at the Comédie Française and ran for an astonishing 8 months. The play traveled quickly across Europe. Less than two years later Da Ponte turned it into a libretto for Mozart and the opera was able to open in Vienna, despite the fact that the play had been banned in Austria.

The play has all but disappeared from English-speaking stages, while the opera is performed constantly around the world. The production will examine its theatrical strengths and its contemporary relevance.

The concept: creative and production approach

The creative team is seeking to invest our production of the story of Figaro with the risqué shock elements of the play and the opera that are often absent from contemporary presentations. We are still wrestling to find the ‘right’ metaphor for the dangerous revolutionary heart of the two originals. The development of the production concept will demand research into the original texts and the nature of the changes and interventions that preceded the first performance. The Beaumarchais text will be taken apart and reduced to its essence, probably significantly reordered. Selections will be taken from the opera to further elaborate and intensify the action. There is the possibility that the lyric performance may inhabit a space of journalistic comment upon the spoken performance.

The production performance concept proposes that the major action will be carried by the actors of DART, while the singers will function more as commentary and reflection. The music will be performed live with the collaboration of colleagues in the Department of Music. At this time we are imagining a very limited instrumental accompaniment reading from an existing arrangement. We continue to discuss the exact instrumentation. The collaboration with the Music Department is not completely a new departure for us, but one that will certainly be more intense and extensive. At the same time, the involvement has to be moderated in some way to meet our learning and production parameters.

Much of the rehearsal time with singers will be separate from that of the actors. The music work will usually take place in Music spaces. The director’s work with singers will take place in DART spaces. As the concept is that singers will be stationary much of the time and/or removed from the actors, the two groups will be called to rehearsals together proportionate to the time they actually physically intersect onstage.

The production is conceived to be performed in the Sean O’Sullivan theatre following our regular production practice. Actors will be auditioned at the end of the D3 session of 2009. Dart students will be required to demonstrate a (variable) singing ability. The Music Department will also be conducting auditions at the end of D3.

Opportunities

The production will offer learning opportunities to DART acting and production students. The demands of the language and style are consonant with third year acting studies. Dart students will have an opportunity to explore the demands of lyrical theatre production. The production will also manifest performance and production arts as a potentially subversive or creative influence in a society, thereby addressing the theoretical and historical examination of theatre in literature and praxis courses. Both the Director and Designer are imagining 3P97 opportunities for assistance in the direction and design of the production. Given the unique demands of a co-production with the Music Department we are currently discussing the engagement of a student Music Manager to provide support and organizational leadership as a new member of the production team.

This will be an opportunity for our students to work intensively with students and others from the Music Department. The time is certainly right within the MIWSFPA for this level of collaborative work.

Figaro is certainly recognizable to general audiences and should be acceptable to school audiences as well. Furthermore we find ourselves in an era of unprecedented interest in opera and lyrical theatre.

Challenges

The production requires double casting: each character is played by both an actor and a singer. There will be 20 to 22 performers in total. The Music students may not be able to fill all the roles, so there may be participation of others: perhaps some faculty, recent grads and some local singers. This is a valuable component of the production proposal. Our students can certainly benefit from working side by side with professional and other practicing artists. The participation of these artists will provide both mentorship opportunities and a community connection on the Sean O’Sullivan stage. This cannot come at a better time.

Clearly there are budgetary challenges to this production. Costuming that many performers requires careful examination. Though the scenographic concept is being conceived with an eye to meeting our regular budget and resource envelope we are also pursuing additional resources for our modest production. The extra costs of working with conductor, coaches, instrumentalists, rehearsal accompanist(s) cannot be borne by our department alone. The Music Department has agreed in principle to absorb much of this cost, through staff and faculty positions and other budgetary juggling.

From the Director

I am drawn to the dangerous elements of the piece. By now my colleagues must sense my fascination with plays that deal with the tumultuous side of French history and culture. I am also extremely interested in the intersection of music and text. The opera is stunningly close to the play in its text. This is somewhat unusual until one realizes how lyrical the play itself is.

I will confess to being on a journey of discovery. The need to explore a particular dramatic work calls to me. I don’t initially intellectualize the why and wherefore. It was so with Ring Round the Moon and with Marat/Sade. Here at Brock each time I have started from a base of looking for shows which might be accessible to our students’ skills and development and which would provide a reasonable gender balance. I will confess that the gender balance in this project will not be as favourable as I have striven for in the past. (DART performers: 4 female/7male; MUSIC 5 female/6 male). We are, however, at this point in our enrolment, particularly blessed with a bumper crop of male actors.

As with the two shows I have already staged Figaro demanded my attention and I knew in the instant that Figaro called out that it had to be some sort of marriage of the play and the opera. This production is at the core of my research in lyric theatre and explores that important threshold of lyric and spoken. In Ring Round the Moon, I incorporated most of the score, having dances set to the music. Marat/Sade is hybrid lyric/text piece. The cast sang and played “instruments”. Figaro is the next step in my exploration.

From the Designer

My work of the last few years has explored the potential for scenography to articulate the ephemeral and material construction of otherness, the examination of cultural/historical/technological commodities that buttress closely held moral, economic and political values, and the exploration of marginalized environments of both refuge and subterfuge. Initial research into the play, the opera, and the history of their production sustains a production concept that will closely follow my recent scenographic production-as-research. This production represents another opportunity to explore hybrid late 20th-century cultural experience.

Two recently seen productions - Le Mariage de Figaro (Beaumarchais) at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal and a staged production of The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart) at the Julliard School of Music in New York – provided contemporary readings that have stimulated our discussions about the period, geographical and architectural-settings of the popular story, the assumptions of gender, sexual orientation, and political motives of the characters.

Early in our deliberations about Figaro we determined that we desired to establish an environment of sexually- and politically-charged risk where vice and lust generate immediate aesthetic currency and permeate dominant conservative cultural practice. To this end the creative meetings have explored assorted social-geographic themes of the late 20th century as potential cultural settings for the production. These are only preliminary conceptual notions and they demand further investigation through director-designer collaboration.

The scenographer proposes to conceive of a series of thresholds and reveals (an essential requirement for the narrative) that inscribe the play in a familiar late 20th-century genre of satire. In our production the exquisite lyrical form of Mozart’s composition will be projected into contemporary expressions of neo-classicism and latent revolutionary tendencies. Elements of burlesque and travesty may be employed in the design.

The designer has begun an online journal to record his initial creative explorations. As per our regular production schedule we are imagining a crystallization of the scenographic concepts across the spring and summer of 2009 and leading towards approval of final designs in August, 2009.