Quote of the Day (Simone de Beauvoir, on ‘Authentic Love’)

“Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other: neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world.”— French existentialist philosopher, social theorist, novelist, and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), The Second Sex (1949)

This Day in Theater History (Novelist Balzac Scores Stage Hit at Last, Posthumously)

Aug. 23, 1851—Honoré de Balzac might have been dead for a year and five days, but he achieved the stage triumph he’d been craving for nearly three decades at the Gymnase Theatre in Paris with the comedy Mercadet.

I am far more familiar with the novels and short stories that comprise La Comédie humaine, a wide-ranging, interwoven panorama of French life in the first half of the 19^th century, than with Balzac’s plays.

Astonishingly, he did not confine his energies to the more than 90 novels and dozens of tales for which he is best known, but also turned out six major plays, along with a verse drama from his early 20s, Cromwell, that should probably best be termed “apprentice fiction.”

(Oh, I almost forgot: in his 20s, to keep the financial wolves at bay, he churned out essays and journalistic pieces, many under pseudonyms, and at the time of his death he also left 46 works unfinished. And I thought Hemingway was bad!)

What audiences saw 175 years ago in Mercadet wasn’t Balzac’s first crack at this material. It had first emerged from his busy pen as Le Faiseur (“The Speculator”). It must have been something of a mess, because it fell to Adolphe d’Ennery to act as what we might call a “script doctor” today.

You might call d’Ennery Balzac’s counterpart for the stage, as he was sole or co-author of more than 280 plays—except with this difference: he knew how to keep and even boost the totals he made from his work. 

He certainly had a good idea of how to fix Le Faiseur, whittling it down from five to three acts, retitling it, and making it easily the biggest theater success of Balzac’s career (though even in this instance, it was only a moderate success).

Let’s give Balzac some credit instead of ridiculing him for his lack of stage success in his lifetime. First, he took great pleasure in adding drama to his fiction.

In a February 1934 French Review article with the intriguing title “Balzac Precursor of Eugene O’Neill,” the French and Italian literature scholar Hermann H. Thornton observed, “Only the most literal-minded compiler of literary manuals could fail to see in him a dramatic author of the first rank,” pointing to his tendency to demarcate scenes, to read his own work aloud, and to speak “with excellent diction.”

Moreover, he hasn’t been the only novelist who’s had trouble in turning from fiction to the footlights.

Though John O’Hara wrote the “book” portion of the classic Rodgers & Hart musical Pal Joey, that show lopped in its initial 1940 run—and his other unproduced dramas (collected in the 1961 collection, Five Plays) have, to my knowledge, been barely remembered, never mind staged, since the pugnacious author wrote them.

Charles Dickens’ attempt at amateur theatricals led not to major London stage success but to a clandestine love affair with a teenaged actress (as I explained in this post from 18 years ago).

And I can’t neglect to mention Henry James—whose Guy Domville was such a crushing fiasco that it ended after a half-dozen attempts his desperate hope for a London stage hit, as I related in this post.

Stage flops were not the only thing that James and Balzac (worshipped as “the father of us all” by the American expatriate) had in common: they were both obsessed by what James called “the money passion.” 

It seems that, though D'Ennery streamlined the novelist’s script, he didn’t strip away its devastating satire of post-revolutionary French bankers and mountebanks who will let nothing stand in the way of profits—including a roguish, inveterate speculator of a father who is out as much for his own creature comforts as for his daughter’s dowry.

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Discussing Yourself)

“By publishing and indicting my imperfections I may teach someone to fear them. The parts that I most esteem in myself derive more honor from self-accusation than from self-commendation. That is why I so often return to self-accusation and linger over it. Yet, when all is said and done, you never talk about yourself without loss. Self-accusations are always believed, self-praise never is.” —French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Essays, Book 3, Chapter 8, “The Art of Discussion,” translated by New Zealand-born philosopher and historian Jonathan Bennett (1930–2024)

Quote of the Day (Francois Mauriac, on a ‘Close Correspondence Between Individual and Collective Crimes’)

“The mystery of evil—there are no two ways of approaching it. We must either deny evil or we must accept it as it appears both within ourselves and without — in our individual lives, that of our passions, as well as in the history written with the blood of men by power-hungry empires. I have always believed that there is a close correspondence between individual and collective crimes, and, journalist that I am, I do nothing but decipher from day to day in the horror of political history the visible consequences of that invisible history which takes place in the obscurity of the heart. We pay dearly for the evidence that evil is evil, we who live under a sky where the smoke of crematories is still drifting. We have seen them devour under our own eyes millions of innocents, even children. And history continues in the same manner. The system of concentration camps has struck deep roots in old countries where Christ has been loved, adored, and served for centuries. We are watching with horror how that part of the world in which man is still enjoying his human rights, where the human mind remains free, is shrinking under our eyes.”—French novelist (and lifelong Catholic) Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech, delivered on Dec. 10, 1952, in Stockholm, Sweden

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Hobbies)

“A man who has no hobby does not know all the good to be got out of life. A hobby is the happy medium between a passion and a monomania.”— French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), “La Grande Breteche,” in Scenes From Private Life (1830)

Theater Review: Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid,” Presented by the Red Bull Theater

Argan, the title character in the Red Bull Theater’s The Imaginary Invalid, gives a whole different dimension to the term “health nut”—a hypochondriac whose ailments require three physicians and so many magic elixirs of dubious benefit that he’s lucky any one of these doesn’t kill him.

Fortunately, this Off-Broadway adaptation of the uproarious 1673 comedy by the French genius actor-playwright Moliere—playing at New World Stages at 340 West 50th Street through Sunday—will relieve the symptoms of any audience member who’s badly in need of laughs.

The Red Bull, in existence for roughly two decades, takes its name from a leading playhouse of Shakespeare’s time that sorely tested the patience of the Stuart monarchy—and, while delving into the Bard and his contemporaries through fully mounted plays as well as staged readings, will also venture elsewhere in the realm of classical theater, as, to great effect, here.

Working from a new translation by Mirabelle Ordinaire, Red Bull artistic director Jeffrey Hatcher has streamlined Moliere’s three-act structure to 80 minutes without an intermission, rendered in colloquial English.

At the same time, Red Bull artistic director Jesse Berger has put together a show that remains true to the spirit of the original, including elements that appear repeatedly in Moliere’s work: a screen where characters hide and eavesdrop; doors opened and slammed as characters chase each other on and off stage; a saucy maid far smarter than her deluded employer; a daughter and her boyfriend who must convince her father not to give her away to a loathsome suitor; and, presiding over the madcap household, a paterfamilias not only cuckolded (and about to be swindled) by his much younger wife, but in the grip of an absolutely unreasoning obsession.

Moliere used his last farce to poke at a longtime bugaboo: quack doctors. (He suffered his fatal illness mid-performance in the lead role, leaving many in his audience, much like Redd Foxx, thinking that coughing blood was part of his act.)

Creating a massive opening for such medical mountebanks is the aging Argan (with veteran stage, film, and TV comic actor Mark Linn-Baker as masterful with dialogue as with demanding physical comedy). So convinced is Argan that lack of feeling in his buttocks foretells worsening health that he requires the strenuous ministrations of a trio of doctors (all played, hilariously, by Arnie Burton, who deftly differentiates each).

Argan’s plan: marry his daughter Angelique to a doctor so he’ll have free healthcare for the rest of his life. The problem is that the lucky fellow (played with panache by Russell Daniels), the son of one of Argan’s current physicians, is an unprepossessing specimen—dressed in a child’s sailor uniform barely able to contain his porky physique, and even less skilled (and far more squeamish) than his father about the healing arts.

The cast not only maintains a breathless pace but obviously delights in feeding off each other’s energy while playing this assembly of deceivers, both well-intentioned and, in the case of the doctors and lawyer on hand, out-and-out charlatans—sometimes even breaking character by dissolving in laughter onstage at another character’s antics. In addition to the above-named actors, also worthy of note are:

*Sarah Stiles, stealing scene after scene with merely a sly grin as the servant Toinette;

*John Yi, lending musical accompaniment as well as generating chuckles as Angelique’s handsome but dim-witted suitor, Cleante; and,

*Emily Swallow as Argan’s gold-digging second wife.

In the enormous enemy dispenser brandished in this farce, properties designer Laura Page Russell has fashioned the New York theater world’s most explosive weapon of mass eruption.

I have favorably reviewed other Red Bull productions before, notably Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. But none were as rollicking from start to finish as this one.

I was thrilled to watch this theater group for the first time since the pandemic. Argan is the type who today would be gulled by Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, not to mention new medications approved by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s FDA.

Rather than sink into dismay over the fools and frauds who are multiplying in the current political environment, the Red Bull has adeptly supplied appropriate therapy in the form of Moliere’s boisterous mockery.

Quote of the Day (Moliere, With a Romantic Young Woman's Notion of Courting)

MAGDELON. “Father, my cousin here will tell you just as well as I that marriage must never come until after the other adventures. A lover, to be agreeable, must know how to utter fine sentiments, breathe from his heart things sweet, tender, and passionate; and his suit must follow the rules. First he must see, in church, or on a walk, or at some public ceremony, the person with whom he falls in love; or else be fatally taken to her house by a relative or friend, and leave there dreamy and melancholy. For a time he hides his passion from the beloved object, and meanwhile pays her several visits, in which some question of gallantry never fails to be brought up to exercise the wits of the company. Comes the day of the declaration, which should ordinarily be made in some garden walk, while the company has moved on a bit; and this declaration is followed by instant wrath, which shows in our blushes, and which, for a time, banishes the lover from our presence. Then he finds a way to appease us, to accustom us imperceptibly to his talk about his passion, and to draw from us that admission that pains us so. After that come the adventures, the rivals that cross an established inclination, the persecutions of fathers, the jealousies conceived over false appearances, the laments, the despairs, the abductions, and what follows. That is how things are done with elegance; and those are the rules that cannot be dispensed with in proper gallantry. But to come point-blank to the conjugal union, to make love only by making the marriage contract, and to take the romance precisely by the tail! I repeat, Father, nothing could be more mercantile than such a procedure; and just the picture it gives me makes me nauseated.”

GORGIBUS. “What the devil is this jargon I hear? That’s the grand style all right!”— French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Ridiculous Precieuses, in Tartuffe and Other Plays, translated by Donald Frame (1967)

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Hatred, ‘A Vice of Narrow Souls’)

“Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny.”—French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), The Muse of the Department (1843)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on ‘The Paradise of the Rich’)

“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” — French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), The Man Who Laughs (1869)

Quote of the Day (Victor Hugo, on the Upper and Lower Classes)

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”—French novelist-poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Les Miserables (1862)

The image accompanying this post shows Fredric March as Jean Valjean, sentenced to prison for stealing bread to feed his starving children, in the 1935 film adaptation of Hugo’s novel.

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on ‘Memory’s Pictures’)

“How paradoxical it is to seek in reality memory's pictures, which must always lack the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being perceived by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed….The places that we have known do not belong only to the world of space in which we locate them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the remembrance of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1870-1922), Swann’s Way (Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time), translated by C.K. Moncrieff (1913)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Truth, Freedom, and Justice)

“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.” —French novelist, essayist, and playwright—Nobel Literature laureate—Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Three Interviews,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1970)

The loss to the world when Albert Camus died in an automobile accident 65 years ago today is incalculable. At only 46 years old, he was still in the prime of his career.

His death came at a tricky time for the novelist: France’s divisive, debilitating attempt to crush the independence movement of the colony where Camus was born and spent his formative years, Algeria. As a pacifist, he was so anguished by the Algerian War that he said it affected him “as others feel pain in their legs.”

Like his counterpart across the English Channel, George Orwell, Camus issued a clarion call for liberal democracy when it was threatened by totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right. The successors of these two writers are issuing their own warnings about similar perils that confront our age, but so far they are going unheeded.

Maybe it’s time to re-read Camus, to understand, as he demonstrated in his postwar novel The Plague (much discussed at the outbreak of COVID-19), that withstanding pestilences, whether the medical or political kind, requires eternal vigilance lest they return, but ordinary people must maintain their resistance, no matter how great their weariness.

(For a more extended overview of how Camus balanced political activism with engaging with time “on the smallest and most personal scale,” see Maria Popova’s June 2024 post from her blog “The Marginalian.”)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, With Don Juan on How ‘To Do Anything I Want With Impunity’)

“If it happens that I am discovered, without my lifting a finger I’ll see the whole cabal espouse my interests and defend me in spite of and against anyone. In short, this is the real way to do anything I want with impunity. I shall set myself up as a censor of the actions of others, judge everyone harshly, and have a good opinion of no one but myself. If once anyone has offended me the least little bit, I shall never forgive, and shall very quietly retain an irreconcilable hatred. I shall play the avenger of Heaven’s interests, and, on that convenient pretext, harass my enemies, accuse them of impiety, and contrive to turn loose against them some undiscerning zealots who, without knowing what it’s all about, will raise a public outcry against them, load them with insults, and d—n them loudly by their own private authority. That’s the way to take advantage of men’s weaknesses, and for an intelligent mind to adapt itself to the vices of his day.” —French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), Don Juan, or, The Stone Guest (1665), translated by Donald Frame, in Tartuffe and Other Plays (1967)

In writing a play for his time, Moliere ended up creating a seriocomic parable for all times—but one that seems especially prescient for this troubled season in American history.

I couldn’t help sharing the astonishment of the spineless but sensible servant Sganarelle, who, after warning his master about a fearsome moving and talking statue that represents doom, hears Don Juan blithely reply, “hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues.”

Every line in the above quote feels as if it could have been said now about a national figure who, whatever his other qualities, surely knows how to “take advantage of men’s weaknesses.”

(The image accompanying this post shows Andrew Weems as Sganarelle and Adam Stein as Don Juan in a production of Don Juan, which played in The Old Globe Theatre of San Diego from May 8 to June 13, 2004. It was directed by Stephen Wadsworth.)

Quote of the Day (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on Walking)

“I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”—French political philosopher and memoirist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), The Confessions (1782)

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Happy People)

“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.”— French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), Père Goriot (1834)

Quote of the Day (Jean Anouilh, on ‘The Tribe That Asks Questions’)

“Why do you want me to be quiet? Because you know that I am right? Do you think I can't see in your face that what I am saying is true?... I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl….We are of the tribe that asks questions, and we ask them to the bitter end. Until no tiniest chance of hope remains to be strangled by our hands.”— French dramatist and screenwriter Jean Anouilh (1910-1987), Antigone (1944), adapted from Sophocles’ tragedy, translated by Lewis Galantiere, reprinted in Jean Anouilh: Five Plays, Volume 1 (1958)

I confess that, in the last few weeks, I have watched the tumult on college campuses nationwide with deep misgivings, and particularly at my alma mater, Columbia University.

I have wondered about the damage to institutions and to the general image that higher education presents to a segment of the public that, more than at any other since the Second World War, suspects such schools as being inimical to their way of life.

I have questioned how the message that most students are probably trying to convey—the humanitarian problems faced by the people of Gaza—with the anti-semitic fringes distracting from their discourse.

I have thought about school administrators—well-meaning, often inexperienced, and caught between opportunistic right-wing Capitol Hill members and students with demands frequently difficult to satisfy.

And I wonder about the students themselves—how much their idealism mixes inextricably with willfulness, even ignorance, about consequences.

At one point outside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall a couple of weeks ago, a news segment featured a female protester, shouting rapidly and furiously. In all her stridency, the young woman reminded me of the image of a similar one from a play I had seen on public television a half century ago, in my teens: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.

When French audiences first saw the play staged in the midst of World War II, they interpreted the mortal-stakes conflict they were watching as analogous to their own, with Antigone standing in for the Resistance movement; her uncle Creon, the ruler of Thebes, for the Nazi collaborator Marshal Petain; and the guards for the German occupying forces who were "just following orders."

But, in a manner stronger than what I found on the printed page for this play—and even more than Sophocles’ Greek tragedy that started it all—the performance of Genevieve Bujold (in the accompanying image) in the title role, one year after the end of the Vietnam War, must have brought to mind for TV viewers of the time the fierce passions that many protesters in the conflict displayed.

Motives, emotions, and issues of right and wrong were far more clear cut in World War II than they would be in the domestic protests over Vietnam, mirroring the ambivalence in the Anouilh text.

This Antigone was every bit the “tense, sallow, willful girl” introduced by the Chorus and embodied by both Bujold and the young woman I saw on the news. Stubborn, obsessed, she resists the entreaties of Creon (played by Fritz Weaver) and her more conventionally beautiful but less passionate sister Ismene to obey Creon’s edict that the body of her brother--who led a rebellion against the state--be left on the battlefield to rot.

Typically, in her youthful zealotry, she bursts out to Ismene:

“The first word I ever heard out of any of you was that word ‘understand.’ Why didn't I ‘understand’ that I must not play with water-cold, black, beautiful flowing water-because I'd spill it on the palace tiles. Or with earth, because earth dirties a little girl's frock. Why didn't I ‘understand’ that nice children don't eat out of every dish at once; or give everything in their pockets to beggars; or run in the wind so fast that they fall down; or ask for a drink when they're perspiring; or want to go swimming when it's either too early or too late, merely because they happen to feel like swimming. Understand! I don't want to understand. There'll be time enough to understand when I'm old...If I ever am old. But not now.”

“If I ever am old”—she can’t see beyond the present moment, and if it means living in a world she can’t abide, she’ll have none of it.

Creon, who years before had “loved music, bought rare manuscripts, [and] was a kind of art patron,” has been forced, with the deaths of his brother-in-law Oedipus and the latter’s sons, to practice “the difficult art of a leader of men.” But, like college administrators the last several weeks, he has come to see order as the overriding consideration of what he oversees, leading to a fate he can’t escape.

Creon tries to disabuse Antigone about “the kitchen of politics,” but it doesn’t work. What matters are the dictates of her conscience: “Tell me: to whom shall I have to lie?” she asks Creon. “Upon whom shall I have to fawn? to whom must I sell myself?”

In the clash between reason and passion, authority and conscience, Antigone and Creon drag not only themselves but those around them to disaster. Nothing else is possible when authority won’t answer the unyielding “tribe that asks questions.”

Quote of the Day (Michel de Montaigne, on Humor)

“Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.”— French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Democritus and Heraclitus,” in The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, edited by William Hazlitt, translated by Donald Frame (Everyman Library, 2003)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Music, ‘The Expression of an Unknowable Reality’)

"Music is the expression of an unknowable reality. This reality makes do with a single translation, the most beautiful and the noblest of all. The translation, Music, allows us to form, with the feeble elements at our disposition and by the route of our imperfect minds, an ideal world, which is particular to each one of us, which differs from one person to another.”—French Nobel Literature laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Essay on Music,” in Cahiers II: Youthful Writings, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1976)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on Reason Vs. Love)

“Each day my reason tells me so;
But reason doesn't rule in love, you know.”—French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (1666)

The image accompanying this post, from a 2013 production of The Misanthrope at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre, features Erik Hellman as Alceste, Moliere’s title character, and Grace Gealey as Celimene, the coquette who distracts him from reason.

This will not be a Happy Valentine’s Day for Alceste!

Quote of the Day (Moliere, Letting a Narcissist Speak for Himself)

“I'm clever, handsome, gracefully polite;
My waist is small, my teeth are strong and white;
As for my dress, the world's astonished eyes
Assure me that I bear away the prize.
I find myself in favor everywhere,
Honored by men, and worshipped by the fair;
And since these things are so, it seems to me
I'm justified in my complacency.”— French playwright, actor, and poet Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, AKA Moliere (1622–1673), The Misanthrope (1666), translated by Richard Wilbur (1955)