"Cyrano' at the Arden (2nd review)

Cyrano? As in Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand's 19th-Century play (and one of the few, apart from Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, to survive from that century into the 21st)?

Well, theater, like classical music and ballet, is a repertory art, one that lives by sifting and recycling. But why Cyrano?

Philadelphia may fancy itself the Paris of the New World (believe me, there are hardly two more unalike places on earth), but this is very much a French play, steeped in the resonances of the Siècle d'or and basted in the juices of Romanticism. In fact, Rostand's play succeeded by adapting the conventions of French classicism to the Romantic era.

Cyrano— poet, pamphleteer, sometime soldier and scourge of the mighty— is thoroughly a figure of the 19th Century, brilliantly self-satirized by the most famous nose in history after Cleopatra's. The whole play works off the contrast between the mores of a bygone aristocratic society and the anxious self-representation of a bourgeois one.

So how can it play for a kleptocratized, post-bourgeois world such as ours— anxious to be sure, but hardly patient with Romantic poets and Old Regime courtiers?

To win a woman's heart

Granted, we accept almost any nonsense out of Shakespeare; but that's Shakespeare— who, as the critic Jan Kott pointed out long ago, is forever our contemporary. A modern Cyrano— we begin by shortening the play's title, doing away with the hero's patronym— is necessarily an adapted one, particularly for an American audience. The adaptation is the work of director Aaron Posner and playwright Michael Hollinger, who have homed in on the love triangle at the play's dramatic center.

Cyrano (Eric Hissom) has half of what it takes to win a woman's heart— fine words— and his rival, Christian (Luigi Sottile), has the other— good looks. Roxanne, Cyrano's young cousin (Jessica Cummings), sees Christian, a soldier in Cyrano's regiment, from afar, and sparks immediately fly. The makeup of the male animal requires no more, but Roxanne needs to be wooed.

Christian is not without wit, as he demonstrates when he challenges Cyrano with a series of leering references to the one subject that is taboo in the latter's presence: his nose. But that, after all, is a confrontation between men— that is, of insult rather than compliment. Christian is tongue-tied in Roxanne's presence, and she rejects him with disgust.

The price of love

Now, most women find a way past the verbal ineptitude of their suitors; the human race would hardly propagate itself otherwise. But this is 17th-Century France, and the value that a woman of breeding puts on herself (and, consequently, that others do as well) is directly related to the quality of compliment she receives. Roxanne wants to love Christian, but her sense of taste requires dexterity, not mere ardor.

Enter Cyrano, who agrees to be Christian's surrogate, lending him the elocution he lacks. Cyrano is a poet, so this kind of thing comes naturally; but he is also desperately in love with Roxanne himself. He has only to wait for Christian to fail— but Christian is not his obstacle, but rather his only opportunity.

No woman, Cyrano thinks, can accept his physical deformity, and thus only by giving his words to Christian can he express his own feelings for Roxanne. That another man will reap the harvest of his eloquence is the price he must pay for having fallen in love.

Stroke of genius

This plot is as old as the theater; Rostand's stroke of genius was the nose. Women get past ugliness far more readily than men think, and Cyrano's nose is a sexual advertisement. He can wear it as a badge of honor, and the soldier in him might well do so. But the poet cannot.

Cyrano's notion of beauty, his exquisite sense of words and— fatal defect of the classicist— of due proportion, makes his facial member grotesque. He is ridiculous to himself, so how can he not be to others?

This is tragic as well as funny, but Christian's situation is no less so. When Roxanne risks her life to visit him at the front, motivated by the ardent letters Cyrano has written on his behalf, Christian realizes that he has become simply the mask for Cyrano's love, and he goes out to meet death in battle.

This (of course) is the only way to actually display his own love for Roxanne, and at the same time to secure it. Cyrano can now never reveal that the letters were his own without earning Roxanne's contempt, while Christian's death not only seals his secret but certifies its authenticity: It is the truest expression love can make— Romantic love, anyway— and it is the one line of poetry Christian finally has in him.

Wit vs. virtue

Rostand is sending up Romantic sensibility here, while— being still a man of his age— ironically honoring it. Roxanne, who has immured herself in a convent, discovers that Cyrano has been her real lover: too late, for, like Christian, he reveals himself only in dying for her. This is the tribute, alas, that wit pays to virtue, enabling the play to close on a note of sentimental convention.

Like its ultimate but far greater literary model, Don Quixote, Cyrano is a satire whose protagonists are meant to make you laugh, only to provoke tears at the end. Those of Don Quixote, however, are for the absurd fool whose visions make us weep for the world we can never have, while Cyrano's are for love lost to pride and shame.

Cyrano is a theatrical original, but Roxanne is left to bear the weight of a tragedy her shoulders are not designed for. Having misjudged both her suitors and wasted her own life, whom can she mourn now?

Lost context

The Arden's stripped-down cast (nine in all), and an adaptation tightly focused on the core plot, take away some of the spectacle that sets the play in its social and historical context. The loss is significant if perhaps unavoidable, since the play's essential conflict is that between the poet and his society.

Posner's inventive staging makes the most of limited means, and Hollinger keeps as much of the cultural milieu as he can, but it is of necessity thrust into the background or simply obtuse. A 19th-Century French audience, for example, would have understood at once what Cyrano's Gascon heritage means for the construction of his character, but modern Americans don't, nor is there any way to explain it short of pedantry.

Hollinger makes no effort to mimic Rostand's rhymed Alexandrine verse, an homage to classic 17th-Century French tragedians also lost on modern ears. A Richard Wilbur might have brought it off in English, but Hollinger wisely opts for a flexible tetrameter that favors action and moves easily between the colloquial and the eloquent. He makes his own nod to the 17th Century with a couple of quotes from Shakespeare, though I found the one from Henry V a little jarring.

Channeling Robin Williams

Every actor must find his own Cyrano. Jose Ferrer's famous 1950 film version had a bitterness one could taste long after, and I've always thought it carried a touch of its own period, the McCarthy era. Eric Hissom seems to be channeling Robin Williams in his portrayal, even to his vocal inflection. This is not a bad choice, for Williams straddles the line between the comic and the pathetic better than any performer today. It does, however, sacrifice some of Cyrano's toughness, and is close enough to its prototype to be occasionally disconcerting.

Luigi Sottile, in his Arden debut, is fine as the baffled Christian, and shows off some serious stage athleticism too. Jessica Cummings is a fetching Roxanne, and Thom Weaver's excellent lighting makes the most of her stage presence. Dale Anthony Girard's fight sequence is as brilliant and witty as anything you are likely to see.

The Arden was about to mount Cyrano in 1993, when it was preempted by a joint production by the Wilma and Walnut Street theaters. I missed that one, but this version, despite its limitations, has been worth the wait.

Cyrano may not be a great play, but it displays the ambition of one, and, in its hero, the prototypic portrait of the artist at war with society and himself. Even pared down, its epic quality comes through, and its Gallic message remains: Love is the central human misunderstanding.
♦


To read another review by Marshall A Ledger, click here.