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Eleven Rooms of Proust
About Face and Lookingglass Theatre Company May 10 through June 18, 2000
4039 North Ravenswood at Irving Park Road, Adaptor/director Mary Zimmerman's Eleven Rooms of Proust takes as its source Marcel Proust's seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past, a vast novel of love and self-discovery set in turn-of-the-century France. The production, which takes place in a colossal Ravenswood warehouse, gives scenes and images from the novel a physical life that is undeniably beautiful. But despite a total of four onstage narrators and a handful of recorded voices, Eleven Rooms never succeeds in using the text of the novel to deepen the audience's emotional involvement in what they see. Eleven Rooms is the latest in a succession of Zimmerman adaptations of literary classics: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Arabian Nights, Metamorphoses, The Odyssey. The implicit question every adaptation must answer is: Why put this work on the stage? The former three productions found their answer in creating and imposing their own dramatic structure on sprawling, episodic, and occasionally storyless texts. Zimmerman's Odyssey never found an answer. It followed the story and structure of Homer's poem to the letter, and for all its lovely stage pictures, rarely added its own insights to those of the text. In adapting Remembrance of Things Past, Zimmerman faces greater challenges than ever. At the heart of the novel is an unnamed narrator, a young man from an aristocratic family in France, whom we come to identify closely with Proust himself. The narrator leads us through the intricate spaces of his memory to a deeply personal account of his own loves and others'. The force of the novel's insight, humor, and charm all depend on our coming to know the texture of the narrator's life as intimately as we know our own. Zimmerman's primary challenge is either to find a dramatic place for this narrator onstage, or to give the scenes she chooses an emotional life independent of his presence. From the first scene she takes a disastrous middle ground. Seven of the production's eleven scenes are drawn from the novel's first volume, Swann's Way, in which the narrator learns of and imagines his way through the torturous love affair of a family friend, M. Swann (Kyle Hall/Guy Van Swearington), and Odette de Crecy (Tess Given/Elizabeth Stegall), a fiery young woman of questionable character. In the opening scene of the novel, the narrator remembers himself as a young boy in bed yearning for his mother's kiss, of which Swann's visit has deprived him. The narrator rises to watch his mother from his bedroom window where she sits in the garden with Swann, writes a note to her, and sends it with the family maid in an attempt to bring her to him. The narrator realizes in retrospect that though he thought of Swann–the obstacle between him and his mother–as the enemy of love, at that very moment Swann longed for Odette as desperately as the narrator longed for his mother's kiss. The production takes this scene as its first as well. What we see matches the story–a young boy lies restlessly in the foreground, rises, gazes through a window on his mother and Swann, etc.–and John Culbert's magical light design captures a child's wonder and longing. What we hear, however, in place of the narrator's delicate discovery, is a cacophony of what seems to be a cast discussion of the scene blaring through hidden speakers. Voices awash in echo and volume effects fumble though a paraphrase of precisely what we see enacted before us. We are deprived of both the hushed visual beauty of the scene and the carefully orchestrated and richly detailed insight of Proust's narrative. In subsequent scenes onstage narrators (Geoff Rice and Heidi Stillman) and offstage voices speak long passages directly from the novel, but again the middle ground proves a double failure. While the novel's narrator is a sensitive, insightful man who leads the reader on a journey of discovery that mirrors his own, the production's narrators are characterless mouthpieces in period costume and a spoken soundtrack. We are deprived of the emotional experience of knowing who they are, how they have made their discoveries, what the scenes they narrate might mean to them. It would be a clear compensation if the text we heard shed new light on the scenes–said the unseeable– but too often it only describes what we see. One narrator tells us that Swann looked for Odette at a party, did not find her, and despaired; we see Swann look for Odette at a party, not find her, and despair. In this scene and others Kyle Hall gives his Swann a fine wounded nobility. One wishes one could see it and be moved without being told to see it and told to be moved. Proust's greatest asset is the drama Zimmerman and her designers find in the warehouse itself. After sitting comfortably in the cavernous central hall to watch a number of scenes through the doors of adjoining rooms, the audience follows Swann into a tiny tomblike room to witness his misery at arm's length. A later scene, the most affecting of the evening, crowds the audience so close around the sleeping Albertine (Suzanne Cobb) we hear her breath quicken as her lover (Mark E. Smith) trembles over her. He devours her with a description that is not, for once, precisely what we see, and our excitement matches his own. Throughout the production light designer John Culbert creates shadowy landscapes that locate the scenes somewhere between memory and imagination, often with as little as a single light. In previous productions Zimmerman has developed a rich physical vocabulary of frustrated longing and gymnastic fulfillment which she employs again here. Certain of the dancelike lovers' couplings in Eleven Rooms, beautiful as they are, are all but identical to ones Zimmerman staged in The Odyssey. Zimmerman fails to use this production as the occasion for a fresh encounter with her physical vocabulary. Zimmerman claims in her director's notes that in Eleven Rooms of Proust "...we simply try to provide a few fleeting images and passages which give a sense of the emotional experience of reading this great text." Modest as this is meant to sound, the emotional experience of reading Remembrance of Things Past rests on our intimacy with the narrator and his process of discovery. For all of its narrators, Eleven Rooms never approaches this intimacy. A different production might have tried to create an emotional experience independent of the text. Eleven Rooms never does. To the question: Why put this work on the stage? the production offers no answer.
--Stephen Boykewich |
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