Astrid Bas Diptych: The Lover and La Musica Deuxième

Astrid Bas: Diptych, The Lover and La Musica Deuxième, faithfully takes some of the most memorable passages of Duras on love, desire, and her youth from The Lover (1984) and pairs it with her play La Musica Deuxième (1985), a piece exploring the end of love as a soon-to-be divorced couple takes leave of one another. Taking the latter play’s title quite literally, Bas’s presentation, performed at FIAF’s Le Skyroom this past Friday and Saturday night,  featured two actors (Bas and Daniel Pettrow) whose words are sometimes joined, often interrupted, and whose silences are startlingly, then soaringly, filled with the sound of a violin, played on stage by Ami Flammer, who enters and exits the stage at critical emotional points in both pieces.

The Lover and La Musica Deuxième both feature a man longing for a woman with physical pain, leading in one case to impotence and in the other, to thoughts of murder— he describes their relationship as “l’enfer.” Both feature a female French lead as object of desire, outwardly detached from her relationship and about to leave, recording—or reciting—her reactions to these doomed affairs with foreign men (one Chinese, one American). Yet it is this effort to convey detachment that causes the audience to feel detached as well:  detached from the characters on stage whose beautiful words fall flat.

For The Lover, Bas is a barefoot young Duras already on stage at lights up. Staring straight ahead, she recites without emotion the powerful lines describing herself at 15 ½, crossing the Mekong, entering the limousine of her future lover and knowing her life will never be the same. The English translation of Duras’s play is projected in white type on the wall behind her, while a red spotlight strikes the actress’s angular face to the right and a blue light is focused at her left. For thirty minutes, she stands still and emotionlessly recites Duras’s lines, eyes fixedly ahead, only shifting the angle or standing at a different point in the stage to let the light hit her thin body at a new angle , the signal she’ll be starting up on a new excerpt from the novel. Red light for scenes of passion, blue light for descriptions of sadness and death. Diptych. Red Blue. Sex. Death and departing.

Flammer periodically joins Bas on stage to play a mournful violin piece after the reminiscence of a tender love scene, or after the narrator describes hearing of the death of her younger brother via telegram. Flammer’s exquisite talent for the violin overcomes the awkwardness of his cues as he sat on stage while Bas’s character stood staring into nothing, lost in her sad memories: perhaps the French don’t have the slang equivalent of “playing the world’s saddest song on the smallest violin.”

Bas puts on a pair of silver shoes and play two has begun. Pettrow hurries on stage to place his coat over Bas’s small shoulders and then walks as far away as possible, talking across the stage to her in English. She responds in French, with the English translations of her replies is broadcast in white type over their heads like speech bubbles in a comic strip. As the discussion becomes more heated—he reveals he almost killed her when she returned from Paris after meeting someone, she confesses that she almost took her own life when he threatened divorce—their faces, carefully controlled at the beginning, become more animated. They are not reciting now, but acting, and the double-effect of hearing two language and reading one on a wall (the translation weirdly broadcasting her ‘thoughts’ faster than she can speak them, while leaving his a mystery) creates a sense of not unpleasant dislocation, focusing the viewer/reader on the nuances of Duras’s language. In a powerful final turn, the woman exits and the man is left alone on stage. He turns to the sound of the violin and makes eye contact with the violinist—recognizing that the moment he just shared with his former wife is already just a memory.

While the strict, highly stylized stage directions placed the words of Duras at the forefront of the performance, they did so to the point of rigidity. Aside from a few clever tricks of staging in the second play, the two pieces would be more enjoyable as a concert or audio recording—or—dare I say it—a novel.

To catch more Duras at a New York City theater near you, check out these plays that are in town as part of the “In the Words of Duras” Festival (February-March 2010)

Christine Letailleur Hiroshima mon amour

Thursday–Sunday, March 4–6 at 7:30pm

Baryshnikov Arts Center

Directed by Christine Letailleur. With Valérie Lang, Hiroshi Ota, and Pier Lamandé.

Hiroshima mon amour tells the tale of the final 24 hours of a passionate, adulterous liaison between a French actress and a Japanese architect.

Irina Brook La Vie Matérielle

Friday, March 5, 2010 at 7pm

Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 7pm

Tinker Auditorium

“You say I idealize women? Possibly. Who can say. What’s wrong with a woman being idealized a bit now and then?” – Marguerite Duras

Celebrated Parisian stage director Irina Brook presents a vivid interpretation of Marguerite Duras’s collection of essays on daily life, La Vie Matérielle, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The production features a diverse ensemble of female performers including Nicole Ansari (HBO’s Deadwood, West End & Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll, Théâtre du Soleil), Obie-award winning actress, director, and writer Winsome Brown, novelist and former editor of French Vogue Joan Juliet Buck who was last seen in the film Julie and Julia, famed British folk-rock diva Sadie Jemmett, and concert violin soloist Yibin Li.

Tags: Duras, FIAF, French, Love, Marguerite Duras, Memory, The Lover, Theatre

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Film & Theatre, The Francophile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.