This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD availabe on Amazon.com and FreshwaterSeas.com.
This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD availabe on Amazon.com and FreshwaterSeas.com.
The Mistress of the Inn is like a fine watch. You wind it up; it runs. It builds through rising waves of comic tension to a full-scale near-riot, and then subsides into a gentle, calm, even reflective ending in which all--but one--share in a new understanding of themselves and of love.
The essence of the play is this: love is explosive. You can put a powder charge under somebody's heart and try to blow it sky-high, but you had better watch out if you do, because the shrapnel is as likely to hit you as anybody else. Love is a force, a force greater than any one person who might try to manipulate it, and people in love are out of control.
A woman, Mirandolina, who owns an inn is much sought after by two noblemen: the Count of Albafafioritita and the Marchese of Forlipopopoli. She is also much loved by her manservant, Fabrizio. All three would like to marry her, and she has no intention of marrying any of them; she's having way too much fun being her own woman, the owner of her own successful business, and a free spirit generally.
However, there is a man who interests her--a man who says he will never love any woman, who wants nothing to do with women at all. He is the Cavaliere of Rippafrattata, and she makes up her mind to make him fall in love with her. Mind you, she has no love for him; it's purely a game with her, a test of her emotional manipulative ability.
So she does everything in her power to seduce him. She gives him special treatment in the inn, she cooks special meals for him, she makes sure to find herself in his rooms whenever possible. Finally she succeeds, with the help of some wine and some clever talk, in really capturing his attention. From that point on, the ball is in his court, and he runs with it with all the mad passion of a need long denied.
Finally, it nearly comes to blows between the Cavaliere, Fabrizio, and the other two noblemen. Mirandolina must make a choice: who wil she marry? She chooses the stable, comfortably, and unthreatening Fabrizio, who is, after all, the man her father promised her to. In the process, the Cavaliere realizes how he has been tricked. Bitterly denouncing Mirandolina and all women, he tears off in a fury, never to be seen again.
Mirandolina is left with her new husband, the affection of the two nobleman, and an inn to run. She has learned her lesson--or so she fervently declares, at least. At the very least, she has now made Fabrizio a happy man, and the two noblemen realize it is time to leave her inn; they must seek elsewhere for love.
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Added: 5 months ago
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This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD available through Amazon.com and on Freshwater
This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD available through Amazon.com and on FreshwaterSeas.com.
This play is another treasure well-known in Germany and unknown in the United States. Since it was first performed in the mid-18th century, Minna has been a German ideal of what a woman should be: beautiful, determined, clever, loving and proud, ready to take on the world for her lover and ready to give him his marching orders any time he needs it. It is the time just after the Seven Year's War; Minna, from the Austrian side of that war, is in love with Major von Tellheim, from the Prussian side. He is a man sadly beset by the requirements of honor, desperately convinced that it requires him to give up his Minna. She has no patience with the inhumanity of Prussian honor and determines to teach her man a lesson. As so often happens to those to try that manuever, she winds up learning a lesson herself. Around this couple there is a pleasant and varied group of characters through which Lessing gives us a classic portrait of the interplay of Central European personalities at a transitional time in modern history.
This text is strictly a translation. I have followed Lessing's language speech for speech, remaining true to his thoughts and ideas while gently toning down his style. It is not hard to see past Lessing's style to his successful portrayals of people of deep feeling; I have tried to capture the feeling and texture of the German while moderating his tendency to be a bit inflated for the modern ear. The play is long by modern standards; Lessing's audience liked a play that gave them a good, solid three hours in the theater, but we don't, so I have provided two versions: a full text for the directors who want to do their own cutting and an acting edition that clearly marks where suitable cuts can be made. The playing time of the cut version is about 150 minutes including two intermissions. In both versions, I have taken the liberty of slightly changing the text in two scenes so as to eliminate unnecessary walk-on characters.
The play includes nine named roles; six men and three women. All are good roles. Minna and Tellheim are the leads; Tellheim's servant Just, his sergeant Paul Werner, the Innkeeper, Minna's uncle Count von Bruchsall, and Riccaut de la Marliniere, a dissolute French officer, fill out the men. Minna's maid Franziska and Frau Marloff, the widow of one of Tellheim's officers, are the remaining women. Bruchsall and Riccaut can be doubled. The play can be done in three locales--Minna's rooms at the inn, the public room of the inn, and the street outside the inn. A fair amount of props and furniture are required.
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Added: 5 months ago
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This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD available through Amazon.com and on Freshwater
This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD available through Amazon.com and on FreshwaterSeas.com.
The human soul, tortured by fears and desires that conflict both with themselves and with each other, and which the soul cannot resolve--that is Strindberg's metier, the locale in which he is absolutely unrivalled as a playwright and poet of all that is dark in the human being. In Miss Julie, he brilliantly concentrated his dark vision into a microcosmic sexual encounter between a young woman of minor nobility and a young man who is a servant of the family. His need to rise, and yet to bow, colllides with her need to fall, and yet to command, in the heady atmosphere of Swedish Midsummer Eve, an encounter that leads with cunning inevitablity to her death.
This text is an adaptation, not a translation. Indeed, it is the most radical of the adaptations presented here. I believe that treating this play as Strindberg conceived it, as an exemplar of naturalism conceived as a mechanical reproduction of superficial reality, does his own work a profound disservice. Naturalism is not the cutting-edge esthetic as it was in his time; it is the esthetic the theater must now outgrow and abandon. It is the profoundly emotional, psychologically surreal inner world of Jean and Julie and Kristin that makes this play the unforgettable work that it is. I have therefore eliminated or written around essentially all of the naturalistic mechanics of the play to concentrate entirely on the emotional realities, and I have done something that Strindberg would have done if he dared: The logic of Strindberg's action demands that we follow Jean and Julie into the bedroom, and explore what happens between them there. In 19th-century Sweden, he could not do that. In 21-st century America, we can. In a scene of my own composition, that is what I have done. That being said, I have also taken great care with the Swedish text. Except as necessary to carry out the goals of the adaptation, I have rendered Strindberg's text faithfully speech for speech and wherever possible phrase for phrase.
Miss Julie offers three excellent roles, two for women (Julie and Kristen) and one for a man (Jean.) In order to fill out the evening, and provide a small tour-de-force for the actors, I also provide a translation of Strindberg's short play for two women, The Stronger. It includes the delightful and intriguing idea of one woman who speaks constantly, versus another who never says a word. It works out very well to cast the woman who plays Kristen in Julie as the woman who speaks, and the actress who has so much to say as Julie as the woman who is silent. The actor who plays Jean plays the waiter--another silent character.
Miss Julie moves from a public room in the servant's quarters to Jean's bedroom and back again. The Stronger takes place at a table in a cafe. Only a few pieces of furniture are required, and a few readily obtainable props. The nature of the social interactions involved strongly suggests setting the plays in their original era, the late 19th century.
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A video clip from the stage adaptation of the novel by Bram Stoker by Robert Bethune and P
A video clip from the stage adaptation of the novel by Bram Stoker by Robert Bethune and Phil Hilden.
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This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD available through Amazon.com and on Freshwater
This is an excerpt from the full-length DVD available through Amazon.com and on FreshwaterSeas.com.
In this short clip from our DVD of the classic French comedy, Sylvia discovers who her lover Dorante really is! As the play begins, Sylvia is distraught. As her maid, Lisette, struggles to dress her and arrange her hair, Sylvia tries to think through her problem--what is she to do about a husband? She is very, very doubtful about marriage; the marriages she can observe, in her strictly limited circle, are not happy ones. The men do not show their true faces; they hide behind masks, and the masks they show to the world are deeply fraudulent: the civil, polite, polished gentleman abroad is a silent, bitter, harsh and unloving figure in the home. Lisette does not bother her head about all this; she simply dreams of a man--almost any man!
Orgon brings the news to his daughter that he has arranged a marriage for her, but despite her immediate fears, he assures her that he does not mean to force anything upon her: if she does not like the young man, it's over, no more to be said. He has invited the young man to visit.
That's when Sylvia has her idea. She asks her father to allow her to change places with her maid, so that she can observe the young man, Dorante, when his guard is down. Her father is surprised, but he loves a good intrigue, and he is even more taken with Sylvia's idea because he knows--as she does not--that Dorante has asked to do the same thing: he will arrive disguised as his servant, Arlequin, and his servant will be disguised as Dorante. Dorante's father has advised Orgon of this in a letter, unbeknownst to any of the young people. Orgon spills the beans to his son, Mario, and Mario is delighted to have the chance to wreak havoc in the whole affair.
There is a great deal of comedy that comes out of the working-out of all this intrigue, but along the way, something really rather serious happens: both Sylvia and Dorante find themselves fallling very deeply in love with someone they believe is completely unsuitable--a mere servant. As they reveal more and more of their feelings, they become more and more upset by it, and more and more afraid for their own happiness and, to their credit, the happiness of the other person.
Finally, Dorante can stand it no longer. He is an honest man, and will not deceive someone he cares deeply about. But when he does so, he runs into something else: the fact that none of these people can resist a good masquerade. And shortly thereafter, she takes pity on him and reveals herself to him. Meanwhile, the servants, who both think the other to be noble, have been going through the same process! And the play unwinds in a delightful scene of reconcilation, leading to a dance finale.
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In the classic Greek tragedy, Antigone, by the Athenian playwright Sophocles, a messenger
In the classic Greek tragedy, Antigone, by the Athenian playwright Sophocles, a messenger arrives to tell the assembled people of the community of the terrible things he has just seen-- the death of Antigone and Haemon.
This is a very old video clip from a production done of my adaptation of the play by Creative Theater Group of Goshen, New York. The Messenger is played by Michael Grant.
If you are interested in producing this fine Greek tragedy, look up my website, FreshwaterSeas.com, and you can obtain an electronic perusal copy of the text for free. More information about the text, the play, and performance rights for the text is available there.
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