The Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis is moving toward its 25th anniversary this season with a familiar quest for renewal and rejuvenation.
The nation`s largest resident theater, the Guthrie also is one of the most famous. Officially opened with glittering civic ceremonies in 1963, it was the first such nonprofit house to be built from the ground up as an instant institution; and its artistic director was Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Stratford Festival of Canada and a leading prophet of repertory theater.
Through the years, however, the Guthrie has gone through a seesaw series of leaderships that have left it victim to wildly variable cycles of success and failure. Last season, a transition period between artistic directorships, was particularly lean, and this year, the subscription rolls are down to about 13,000 persons, a small audience core for a theater with 1,441 seats to fill.
Nevertheless, there is hope and at least a whiff of triumph in the air at the Guthrie. For its 1987-88 season, the theater has a new artistic and administrative team that is addressing many of the Guthrie`s perennial problems, and, more important, it has a pair of classic plays in repertory that are full of life and invention.
Both works–Moliere`s ”The Misanthrope” and the Eugene Labiche-A. Delacour ”The Piggy Bank” (La Cagnotte)–are classic French comedies, and both have been staged–in a gesture aimed at resoundingly announcing his arrival–by Garland Wright, the Guthrie`s new artistic director, who, at 41, already is a veteran of the resident theater movement. (Wright, in fact, had staged earlier versions of the two plays in separate productions at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.)
”The Misanthrope,” a major production that would proudly grace any stage, is the more spectacular offering, but both works have been felicitously cast, directed and designed, indicating that Wright`s tenure in Minneapolis is off to an imaginative start.
The stunning impact of his ”The Misanthrope” has been achieved by the relatively simple method of advancing the play`s action by a little more than 100 years, from Moliere`s 1666 to the period of the French Revolution, and specifically to the late summer of 1792, on the brink of the September massacre of members of the clergy and nobility, and five months before the execution of King Louis XVI.
By creating this scene, Wright has turned Alceste, the misanthrope, into a gloomy prophet, his railings against ”this bitter world where vice is king” made more pointed by the knowledge that this world of the aristocracy will soon be erased in the revolution`s deluge.
Not a word of Richard Wilbur`s translation has been changed, but the play`s ironies have been underlined and its historical and social implications strengthened by the brilliant design of the production.
Alceste, the harbinger of the new age, is dressed in plain gray, in the severe style of a late 18th Century neoclassic painting by Jacques Louis David, while Celimene, the enchanting, frivolous creature he loves in spite of himself, is seen first in a powdered wig, pretty in pink and pastels, as if she had stepped from a delicate watercolor by Antoine Watteau, the painter of courtly and pastoral scenes from the old era of Louis XIV.
Celimene, vain creature, becomes the symbol of a decadent, dying age. Glamorous on the outside, she strips off her wig and gown in a dressing room scene and is reduced to a spindly, short-haired woman in a plain white slip. Later, as Alceste prepares to abandon her for a solitary life and as her lovers confront her with the scandalous letters she has written about them, she stands alone in a blood-red gown, surrounded by looming figures in black. Outside, the revolutionary ”Marseillaise” is being sung, and the rumble of cannon that has been heard throughout the evening increases in frequency.
The production`s final few seconds, Wright`s imposition on the play, are brilliant theater invention and bring the great comedy to an unexpected, yet wholly right and just conclusion.
Wright`s concept, placed in a neoclassic setting, works superbly on the Guthrie stage, but equally impressive are the high standards of performance, led by Daniel Davis and Caroline Lagerfelt as Alceste and Celimene, and the cast`s clarion articulation of the Moliere-Wilbur verse, which captures both the music and the sense of the play`s speeches.
The bourgeois comedy of ”The Piggy Bank” has been staged by Wright in a more conventional manner for the Guthrie. Fast farcical pacing, broad caricature and handsome production values are generously employed in the tale of a group of peasants from the provinces who use the cash kitty from their weekly card game to travel to Paris for a whirlwind visit of comic
complications.
The result is not as awesome as the singular accomplishment of ”The Misanthrope,” but it forms an excellent repertory companion for the Moliere play, and it entertains satisfactorily in its own right. It is cheerful, inventive entertainment, presented in the Guthrie`s customarily lavish style; and, using most of the actors who also perform in the Moliere comedy, it is played with zest and good humor.
One of Wright`s paramount concerns at the Guthrie is the building of a first-rate acting ensemble that would help make such events as ”The Misanthrope” commonplace. That`s a goal held by many previous Guthrie directors, as well; but this season Wright and the Guthrie`s new executive director, Edward Martenson, have taken some pragmatic steps to realize it. They`ve increased the number of employment weeks for their actors and raised the average salary for actors by about 10 percent. One way of gaining an actor`s loyalty, Martenson realizes, is ”to earn it.”
Another way Wright has begun making life at the Guthrie more rewarding for the actor (and eventually for the audience) is the creation of a workshop laboratory (to begin soon), ”much like a research and development center (in which) actors, writers, directors, teachers and scholars will explore new ways of working theatrically.”
By job attrition in the administrative end of the Guthrie operation and by a reduction of the performance season, Wright and Martenson have managed to stay within their $8.5 million budget and still pour more money into their vision of an actors` theater.
Eventually, in an effort to relieve the Guthrie of a prolonged season, Wright expects to reduce the playing schedule to a period of six productions offered from May through December. Martenson and his staff, meanwhile, will be exploring means beyond standard subscription sales of reinvigorating the theater`s box office.
For the rest of this season, the Guthrie will offer five more shows.
”The Misanthrope” and ”The Piggy Bank” will continue in repertory through the end of July. They will be followed by straight runs of the following: Euripides` ”The Bacchae,” staged with a multiracial cast by former artistic director Liviu Ciulei, opening Aug. 21; Federico Garcia Lorca`s ”The House of Bernarda Alba,” staged by Les Waters (who directed Michael Weller`s ”Ghost on Fire” at Goodman Theatre this year), opening Sept. 25; Georg Buchner`s ”Leonce and Lena,” directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, opening Oct. 23; the traditional ”A Christmas Carol,” Nov. 27; and Wright`s production of Shakespeare`s ”Richard III,” opening Jan. 15.
It`s a season in which both the avant garde and the surefire are shrewdly mixed. Now, after returning from a short vacation after his double opening, Wright must start to map out the line-ups of the next two full seasons for his proposed ”finest acting ensemble in the country.”
In the meantime, and at the very least, he can take great satisfaction in having offered, with ”The Misanthrope,” a production that admirably and most excitingly fills the Guthrie stage.
