Cyrano de Bergerac
Edmond Rostand, author of the 1897 “heroic comedy” Cyrano de Bergerac, was in a sense the Ronald Reagan of fin de siecle France. Like many Americans of the 1980s, the French of the 1890s suffered from a kind of present shock and needed a hearty dose of nostalgia to recapture their national pride. Rostand gave it to them.
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Rostand sat down to write Cyrano de Bergerac with much the same nostalgia for “simpler” times that Reagan’s handlers must have felt when they composed his acceptance speech for the 1980 Republican National Convention–the one he concluded by asking the crazed delegates and media whores to join him in a moment of silent prayer, as though he were presiding over an elementary school assembly circa 1955. “I wrote Cyrano for pleasure, happily and with love,” Rostand said in 1913, “and also, I admit it, with the idea of fighting against the tendencies of the time. Tendencies which, to be truthful, infuriated me and revolted me.”
In short, Cyrano de Bergerac is a marvelously complex and engrossing piece of theater, as appealing to the starched conservative as the starry-eyed dreamer. Rivendell Theatre Ensemble’s staging, on the other hand, is not complex or engrossing. Somehow the play’s poetry got left out of this production. The rapturous spell that Rostand casts in his tale of unrequited love never materializes onstage. And without that resplendence, Cyrano seems positively inert.
This production, by contrast, is outrageously American, so practical and straightforward that there’s little hope any romance will develop. As critic Nicholas Cronk wrote, “Cyrano in prose would be unthinkable.” Rivendell has done the unthinkable.
