Liviu Ciulei, installed amid great excitement five years ago as artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, is resigning his post at the end of this season, leaving behind him a farewell production of Shakespeare`s ”A Midsummer Night`s Dream” that provocatively illustrates the qualities of theatrical daring that typified his work at the Guthrie.
When Ciulei, a Romanian expatriate, arrived at the major resident theater outpost of the Guthrie in 1980, he already had acquired a reputation in the United States as a designer and director of great skill and inventiveness in giving a contemporary sensibility to the classics. He confirmed that reputation immediately on his arrival at the Guthrie, redesigning the thrust stage of the 1,441-seat house and launching his first season with a stunning production of Shakespeare`s ”The Tempest.”
In addition to staging his own productions of ”Twelfth Night” and a two-part ”Peer Gynt,” Ciulei turned over what he called the Guthrie`s
”magnificent theater machine” to the directing talents of other innovative directors, including those of his fellow Romanians, Andrei Serban and Lucian Pintilie, as well as such prominent American experimentalists as Richard Foreman and Peter Sellars.
The results were mixed. Some productions, such as Foreman`s ”Don Juan,” by Moliere, Serban`s ”The Marriage of Figaro” and Pintilie`s ”Tartuffe,”
went on to or are scheduled for other presentations in other cities. And most of them, such as Sellars` combination of Maxim Gorky`s ”Summerfolk” and Gershwin songs in ”Hang On To Me,” drew national attention.
At the same time, these works, bold and unusual as they were, did not take in the box-office income that had been hoped for them. ”Hang On to Me,” partly because of its long running time, lost many customers, and
”Tartuffe,” which later burned up the box office at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., failed to catch fire in Minneapolis.
Along with Ciulei`s brand of theater, meanwhile, the Guthrie continued to present popular, large-scale musicals (”Guys and Dolls” and ”Anything Goes”) and much more traditional stagings of plays, such as the productions of ”Great Expectations” and ”Cyrano de Bergerac” that are sharing the stage with ”Dream” in repertory in the current season.
Ciulei, a courtly man who chooses his words carefully, today calls this kind of scheduling ”eclectic,” forced on him by financial considerations. Others have called it ”schizophrenic,” believing that it split the theater between two poles of theatrical presentation. Whatever the word, it wasn`t working, and Ciueli, facing declining audiences and an increasingly unfriendly board, decided to resign rather than confront anew the push-pull pressure that such a mixed bill represented for him.
”I am proud,” he says, ”of opening the way to a more contemporary possibility of making theater for a mainstream audience. I believe in challenging art, and I wanted to bring the Guthrie in performing arts up to what the Walker Art Center (the theater`s neighbor, noted for its enterprise in exhibiting contemporary works) is doing in the visual arts.
”What I was trying to do was to deflower a kind of cultural virginity, though I found here a most patient and understanding audience, eager to learn. But shifting back and forth between the work I was doing on one side and the styles of different periods on the other side was, I think, not healthy, and I only broke the surface of my own theater efforts. I`m sorry, too, that I was never able to establish a second space here. Every factory needs a research laboratory to prepare its product, but we could never open that laboratory here for our actors and our audiences.”
Ciulei has agreed to stay on until the end of the Guthrie season next March 22, and he will help plan the 1986-87 season while a search committee looks for what probably will be a director of more conservative and traditional tastes. He may return next season to direct one play at the Guthrie, but, he adds, ”If the new director doesn`t want me, that`s his right.”
Since announcing his resignation from the Guthrie, Ciulei says, he has turned down an offer from the Goodman Theatre to become its artistic director, partly, he says, ”because I need some time to define myself again.” However, he will be coming to Chicago to direct two operas (perhaps including Tchaikovsky`s ”Pique Dame”) for Lyric Opera in coming seasons, and he will no doubt find many offers to work in other resident theaters.
Meanwhile, he has left the Guthrie with a ”Dream” to remember.
The Ciulei ”Midsummer Night`s Dream” announces its striking contemporary approach from the first look at its setting and from the first sound of Philip Glass` recorded music. Instead of elaborate costuming and lavish settings, this production presents flowing robes in stark blacks, whites and reds, and a stage and backdrop covered with shiny red vinyl. The red, Ciulei`s chosen ”color of passion,” dominates the design by Beni Montresori. It is supplemented on key occasions by a huge moon that appears in the rear stage and a plexiglass platform, raised and lowered on winches, that serves both as a bed for the fairy queen Titania and as a stage for the theatrics of the comic rustics.
Ciulei`s exploration of the comedy`s text focuses on the subjugation of women by men in Athenian society. This is made clear immediately, before a word of the play is spoken, when a black Hippolyta (Lorraine Toussaint), glaring defiantly and wearing a mannish haircut, is carefully stripped of her black leather Amazon`s uniform and re-adorned with a flowing white gown in preparation for her marriage to Theseus, duke of Athens (Gary Reineke). This rough male-female relationship is further stressed when Oberon, king of the fairies, forcefully presses the love potion into the eyes of Titania, producing a violent physical reaction from the sleeping queen.
In the romantic attachments of the two young couples and in the farcical playmaking of the rustics in their version of ”Pyramus and Thisbe,” this rugged tug of war between men and women continues, in diplomatic debate and in physical confrontation.
This desire to shake up a play that can be too smoothly prettified produces some fresh portrayals, such as Harriet Harris` earthy Titania, and it propels the play with fierce energy throughout its three hours` playing time. But the forceful approach often robs the comedy of the melody of its poetry, and it turns up some curious characterizations, such as the cynical punk girl Puck of Lynn Chausow. Ultimately, the attack is undercut by the airy spirit of the play itself.
For all its problems, however, this ”Dream” is a thoughtful, frequently spectacular work of theater. From its vinyl and plastic settings to its rough- and-tumble battle of the sexes, it has rethought a much-performed play through modern techniques and contemporary attitudes. It suggests that the ”Dream”
may indeed be ”bottomless,” full of disturbing possibilities previously untapped, and at the same time it offers the audience an entertaining spectacle on its own terms.
It is certainly more exciting than the two traditional stagings with which it is playing in repertory.
”Great Expectations,” originally adapted by Barbara Field from Charles Dickens` novel for a Seattle children`s theater, is a three-hour, cut-rate
”Nicholas Nickleby”-type presentation that offers a simple, storybook telling by 11 versatile, hard-working actors in several roles. Soon after its closing at the Guthrie on Sept. 1, it is to take off on a long tour that is set to bring it to several Illinois communities this winter.
”Cyrano,” in a 3 1/2-hour marathon using the old Brian Hooker translation of Edmond Rostand`s drama, originally was to have been staged by Serban, but was turned over to Canadian director Edward Gilbert when Serban withdrew from his commitment. The production, for all its physical activity, is depressingly drab, with Jack Wetherall giving a surprisingly defeatist, almost querulous portrayal of the great romantic hero.
The Guthrie does not lack for physical resources, as its ”Dream” once again proves, and despite Ciulei`s frustration in being unable to sustain an acting ensemble during his stewardship, the theater still attracts players of particular merit, both in leading roles–Harris in ”Dream” and ”Cyrano,”
Mitchell Lichtenstein as Pip in ”Great Expectations,” and Peter Francis-James (whose Oberon is the most eloquent speaker in ”Dream”)–and in supporting parts–David Pierce, Richard Iglewski, John Towey, Richard Ooms and Allen Hamilton.
What it lacks–based on this visitor`s impressions–is the thrust of a singular artistic vision that can give urgency and importance to a theater`s work. That vision may be conservative or radical, but it should not be homogenized in a ”one for them, one for me” selection of material to present before its audience.
Ciulei had such a vision, and wherever he goes, he will be remembered for the startling and often refreshing productions he presented at the Guthrie. He may have been the right man in the wrong job at the Guthrie, where his view of theater faced rejection from within and without the theater.
It is now the job of the Guthrie–and of any other theater in search of a new director–to find the person who has such a burning vision of theater, and who can communicate that vision to his audience.
