Lantern Theater's "La Ronde'

Literal to a fault

DAN ROTTENBERG

The cold-hearted mathematical case for monogamy (or at least protected sex) goes something like this: Even if everyone in the world waited until age 20 to have sex for the first time (with another virgin, yet), and even if each of us thereafter had sex just once a year with a single new partner, by age 30 each new sex act would expose us to the sexual histories of more than 500 people, some of them carriers of VD or herpes or AIDS or God knows what; by age 40, of more than 500,000 people. On the other hand, if you slept with the same partner (but no one else) every night for 50 years, you’d still be exposed to only one person’s ailments.

But of course the heart pursues its own logic, the sublime pleasure of sexual conquest is hard to resist, and most respectable people delude themselves into believing they’re safe as long as they dally only occasionally, and/or only with other respectable lovers.

Arthur Schnitzler tried to dramatize the problem a century ago in Vienna, where the Hapsburg aristocracy was declining, the industrial middle classes were rising, the working class was growing, and the barriers between these classes were disintegrating within the tight confines of a pretentious imperial capital filled with temptations. La Ronde is a sequence of ten dialogues in which a prostitute sleeps with a soldier, who then seduces a servant girl he meets in a beer garden, who is then seduced by her master’s adolescent son, who then sleeps with... And so the chain proceeds until, after ten such couplings, we are back to the original prostitute who set the chain in motion.

The problem with Schnitzler’s script

Schnitzler’s script created 20 Viennese characters— ten men and ten women— who despite their varying backgrounds share one common characteristic: All hope (consciously or not) that a few moments of dispassionate passion will fill the void in their otherwise empty lives. Since we observe these people only in their claustrophobic moments of meeting and mating— we never see more nor less than two characters on stage at any time— all of them come to seem alike and depersonalized, notwithstanding their protestations of individualism.

Rarely has sex seemed so monotonous and unattractive. (Instead of showing sex hygiene films to soldiers to prevent disease, I’ve often thought, the army should show them La Ronde.) Which of course was Schnitzler’s point: Societies must provide their citizens with some loftier reasons to connect with each other— a task at which the Hapsburg empire, at least toward the end, failed miserably.

Part of La Ronde’s problem is that Schnitzler never dreamed it would be staged. He knew it was too obscene for his time and place. Instead he distributed the script privately to his circle of friends, and it spread via word-of-mouth through the city (even without the benefit of photocopiers or e-mail) pretty much the way that VD did. La Ronde probably worked better as a concept you can think about than as a play you actually watch. Eventually, of course, it was indeed performed on stage and subsequently made into a classic French film directed by Max Ophuls in 1950.

Taking Schnitzler one step further

Now the Lantern Theater Company has taken Schnitzler’s imaginary exercise one step further. In director Charles McMahon’s conception, the characters don’t merely seem the same, they are the same. All ten men and women are played by a single actor and actress (Ben Dibble and Sarah Sanford). It’s an interesting notion, and the Lantern has buttressed it with a fresh translation (by McMahon himself), an imaginatively staged in-the-round set (by Meghan Jones and Janet Embree), a variety of lavish costumes and wigs (by Millie Hiibel) and a wonderfully schmaltzy Viennese score that helps convey the shadowy mood of Vienna as its lights started going out. McMahon and the Lantern crew deserve much credit for re-examining Schnitzler and taking him seriously; this La Ronde reinforces Lantern’s niche as a theater for thinking people. But ultimately their experiment fails, I think, for several reasons.

For one thing, the two-actor concept robs the audience of the sense of discovery that’s a necessary element of Schnitzler’s play. Instead of gradually realizing that all these characters are pretty much alike, we grasp it right from the get-go. For another, while Dibble and Sanford are engaging figures at the outset, they lack the versatility to assume ten different personas each; so instead of anticipating each new character, the audience finds itself anticipating each new costume change.

Clothes on, clothes off

A word about those costume changes: In the conventional La Ronde, the characters spend much of their stage time taking off and putting on their clothes. In the Lantern version, the audience also watches the actors being dressed and undressed between scenes by a wardrobe assistant. This novelty too is intriguing at first but ultimately monotonous. With all the dressing and undressing, not to mention the simulated sex, I found myself worrying more about the two overworked actors (“They have to do this every night?”) than the characters they portrayed. This is not the sign of a successful drama.

It reminded me of the joke about the Arabian sultan who services all 50 of his wives every night. An American theatrical producer persuades the sultan to bring his act to Broadway. But on opening night, the sultan stuns the audience by dropping dead during his third coupling. When the astonished producer asks what went wrong, the dying sultan replies, “I can’t explain it. Everything went so well in the rehearsal this afternoon!”

That could never happen at the Lantern, of course. Those folks would hire a single actress to play all 50 wives. Such an exercise saves a bundle on acting fees, but to what point?