Rumanian Reunion in Minneapolis

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two directors from Bucharest restage Faulkner and Figaro

Minneapolis could be the Midwest's dream of itself. Swaths of verdant farm land radiate from the Twin Cities to outlying towns, like spokes on the wheels of a bicycle built for two. The sleek skyscrapers along Nicollet Avenue support a canopy of planetarium stars in a smogless evening sky. In Loring Park, through which Mary Tyler Moore used to jog on her way to work at the WJM-TV newsroom, thousands of goldfish huddle invitingly in a sculptured pond. On a recent Saturday night, a wagon train of autos streamed into a huge field for the summer's first football game. And across the street from that field, on the thrust stage of the Guthrie Theater, two adventurous Rumanians were toiling to expand the scope of U.S. regional theater.

This is the second year of Liviu Ciulei's tenure as the Guthrie's artistic director; last season his acclaimed stagings of The Tempest and As You Like It helped win the company record ticket revenue and a return to the national spotlight. In 1963 Sir Tyrone Guthrie opened the theater as a home (indeed, a modernist mansion) for the classical repertory. At just that time Ciulei, who was presiding over the renowned Bulandra Theater in Bucharest, hired a university student named Andrei Serban to direct Julius Caesar. With that production, performed in Kabuki style, Serban established his reputation for radical reinterpretation of the classics, and since then he has staged plays and operas in Europe and the U.S. In 1974 Ciulei followed his student to America, where he proved himself a wizardly surgeon among directors, able to cut to the heart of a play or a character without lacerating the flesh of the text.

Now Ciulei has brought Serban to Minneapolis for a Rumanian reunion. Curiously, both directors selected "sequels" for their summer offerings. William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun, which Ciulei has staged, is a continuation of the story of Temple Drake first told in Sanctuary. Serban's choice, The Marriage of Figaro, is the second play in Beaumarchais's Figaro trilogy, preceded by The Barber of Seville and succeeded by The Guilty Mother. The new productions provide an instructive study in contrasts: between dark and light, stark and starkers, funeral and carnival, Southern Gothic tragedy and Age of Enlightenment farce.

In Requiem for a Nun, the past is everything, a guilty past that seeps through the soul's pores like Delta humidity. When Temple Drake was an Ole Miss coed in the 1920s, she and her beau Gowan Stevens met up with a vicious bootlegger named Popeye who abused Temple beyond pain, perhaps into a kind of rancid ecstasy. Eight years later, when Requiem begins, Temple and Gowan are married and have had two children, one of whom has been killed by Nancy, "a dope-fiend nigger whore" who served as the children's nurse. The play, like Oedipus Rex, is a detective story that tracks truths its characters would not reveal to others or themselves.

In Jack Barkla's stage design, Temple's home looks like a high-tech waiting room outside the Second Circle of Hell. The back wall is draped with layers of muslin, on which photographs of a naked, battered woman are projected: a slide show of the brutal male libido and of Temple's nightmare past. At moments of high tension a fluty, electric whine is heard, punctuated by the basso rumble of a telltale heart. The climax is signaled by blinding lights--shock cuts to a revelation.

This is minimalist melodrama, and Ciulei's actors do it full justice. Richard Frank's Gowan has the courtly sarcasm of a "gentleman" who long ago came to terms with the impotence of his spirit. Bill Moor, as Gowan's lawyer uncle, looks like Faulkner and walks with the heavy grace of a decent man who has lead weights on his conscience. Linda Kozlowski is Faulkner's Temple from her smart cheekbones to her chiseled calves; she stands with a finishing-school posture inverted into sexual arrogance. Only the nervous tremolo in her voice betrays her and cues the audience for explosions to come. Ciulei's discreet staging guarantees that they will be heard only in the distance, through the shuttered windows of Southern gentility.

If Requiem works hard to keep its theatrical current at low voltage, Serban's Figaro parades its ebullience as a form of comic shock therapy. On a bare stage backed by sliding panels and a wall of fun-house Mylar, the cast plays out Beaumarchais's delicious romantic satire at Mach 2 speed. Characters whirl about on bicycles and roller skates; one actor executes a belly flop on a skate board as it barrels down a steep ramp. Figaro (Robert Dorfman) does acrobatics on a giant swing, gaily stranded between the lands of Barnum and Dr. Pepper. Marceline (Catherine Burns), a punk Garbo who loves Figaro almost like a mother, gets around in a large shopping cart. Her adviser Bartholo (Henry Stram) is a sprightly "blind" hunchback out of Bunuel. The mad Bazile (Richard Ooms), a Charles Nelson Reilly in whiteface, zooms across the stage in a wheelchair. Of all these precocious children, the most hyperactive is Jana Schneider as Figaro's fiancee Suzanne. She eats money, trills her r's, growls and meows, wriggles her toes and writhes out of her clothes, imitates Jayne Mansfield's squeal and Bert Lahr's whinny. She is the woman as child, the clown as sex goddess. It is a neck-breaking, star-making performance.

This ain't Mozart, folks. But it may be Beaumarchais, who helped liberate 18th century French theater from Alexandrine verse and, in the process, scourged his patron, King Louis XVI. Returning the favor, Louis declared: "If this play were to be performed, the Bastille would have to be pulled down first"--and a few years later the revolutionaries of 1789 came close to doing just that. The Guthrie is sturdier; it is weathering, and flourishing under, the reign of its radical Rumanians. It has also shown that in Minneapolis, Liviu Ciulei can direct an American play with the naturalistic discipline of Elia Kazan, and Andrei Serban harbors the spirits of Tommy Tune and Ken Russell.

--By Richard Corliss

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