The Trouble of Being Born

BEAUMARCHAIS plotted his Figaro as a maze of sexual conflict, class warfare and social satire. For those traveling this labyrinth for the first time the American Rep production offers a speedy tour with plenty of helpful directions. But for those who thought they already knew Beaumarchais' twists and turns from the Mozart/da Ponte opera, Alvin Epstein's new mounting will seem more like an expedition in dramatic archaeology, overturning new treasures and hidden surprises around its corners.

Epstein and Mark Leib, who translated the play, have gone back over every line and scene of the original text, delicately excising those barbs that are simply too topical to appreciate two centuries later but leaving intact the many strands of Beaumarchais' plot. Figaro moves through its intrigues and mistaken identities in a vast double action to teach both the sluggish-witted Count Almaviva and his valet Figaro the uselessness of scheming the pointlessness of jealousy. When Mozart unleashed his inventive genius on the play, these were the themes he focused on, and his opera manipulates musical and dramatic structures towards that overwhelming moment of absolution when the Count begs his wife for forgiveness.

So successful was the adaptation that it elbowed Beaumarchais' prose off the stage. In brushing away the encrustations of age and restoring the original to us. Epstein and Leib have unearthed no new themes; they have instead uncovered a wealth of satiric ornamentation, the angry undergrowth of the author's mind, that either was cut for the opera or lost its punch in Italian.

More than Mozart's the A.R.T.'s Figaro seems a document of the 1780s, a chronicle of crumbling deference, while remaining in many ways an autobiographical play. Leib has taken Figaro's lengthy monologue from the start of Beaumarchais' fifth act and distributed it as a series of prologues for each act. As Tony Shalhoub's Figaro recounts his life-history as a swashbuckler, gambler, poet, doctor, barber--an account filled with the sarcasm of a man hounded by a world he's sure is in the wrong--the audience recognizes the playwright behind his costume.

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL aspect of this production is Leib's nimble translation. It animates potentially deadly 18th-century dialogue with a vigorous, almost athletic wit that each character seems to have borrowed from the author. Beaumarchais' language springs from that same period of transition which in England created a Samuel Johnson--classically balanced sentences informed with a nascent romantic sense of power and purpose. Leib delivers all the author's aphorisms and anecdotes in contemporary, but not vulgarly "updated," English; and a quick comparison between his version of Figaro's monologue and those of other translators--even that of such a luminary as Jacques Barzun--shows the difference:

No, my lord count, you shan't have her, you shan't! Because you are a great lord you think you are a great genius. Nobility, wealth, honors, emoluments--it all makes a man so proud! What have you done to earn so many advantages? You took the trouble to be born, nothing more. Apart from that, you're a rather common type. Whereas I--by God!--lost in the nameless crowd, I had to exert more strategy and skill merely to survive than has been spent for a hundred years in governing the Spanish Empire... (Barzun)

No, Monsieur Count, you won't have her, you won't! Because he's a great lord, he thinks he's a great genius. Nobility, fortune, rank, station all these make him so proud! And what did he do to deserve such advantages? Went to the trouble of being born, that's all! For the rest he's ordinary enough. Whereas I--by God! Lost among the obscure crowd, I've had to deploy more skill and cunning just to survive than it's taken to rule all of Spain for the last hundred years...   (Leib)

Leib's ear for dialogue is keen, his sense of timing acute.

Kate Edmund's set is the other unalloyed success of the evening. A.R.T. subscribers horrified at the high-tech circus of Lulu or put off by the gloomy Brechtian neon of Seven Deadly Sins earlier this year will be happy to hear that Figaro is staged straight, with period costumes by Rita Ryack. But the traditional mise-en-scene does not petrify the show. Edmunds has placed the Countess's bedroom, the courtroom, and the other havens of aristocracy underneath a patently fake proscenium, upstage; in the wings, stretching around the audience are the kitchens, dressing rooms and lofts of the servants; and most of the action, appropriately enough, occurs in the middle ground. Figaro's wedding procession winds through the audience and the several rendezvous in the Count's garden take place under green-and-white nets hung from the ceiling as a sort of makeshift forest. Epstein's staging and Edmunds' design, in other words, are as inventive as Beaumarchais' plot.

For the first time this season, though, the individual A.R.T. performers do not match the precision of the rest of the creative team. Their errors are of emphasis, not conception: Shalhoub's Figaro, feisty and engaging in his monologues, seems too resentful and angry in his battle of wits with the Count--his "high spirits" reach only middling altitudes. As he counters the Count's designs on his bride-to-be Suzanne with plots of his own, he acts more like an lago than a Prospero. Karen Macdonald's Suzanne follows his lead--spleen overbalances sweetness. Harry Murphy's smug Count and Cheryl Ginannini's hoarse, pouting Countess are closer to the mark--he displays all the insight of a brontosaurs, she the passivity of a wildcat. These are Beaumarchais' hollow hulks of aristocracy waiting for someone's axe.

Linda Atkinson plays a strange trick on Cherubino, the page with the hormonal imbalance who shouts his love to every woman he meets and whose boyish-girlish looks in turn enchant all the women around him. Atkinson turns this romantic dreamer with ideals dripping from his doublet into a sort of Dennis the Menace of the ancien regime. At first blush, you can't help wondering how this marginally pubescent page would go about kissing one of his idols--he'd have to spit out his bubblegum first. But Atkinson's verve and charm finally overcome the improbability of her characterization to make it a high point of the production.

The supporting cast works with the same attention to comic detail that enlivened Epstein's baroque production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year. William McGlinn's mincing music teacher. Thomas Derrah's stuttering judge, Chris Clemenson's lumbering clerk and Albert Duclos' staggering, alcoholic gardener together cover the entire spectrum of sycophancy.

THE A.R.T.'S FIGARO is funny enough, in fact, that you have to think hard afterwards to figure out why it's also unsettling. Epstein has managed to underscore the class tensions in the play without turning it into a Marxist dialectic, and wherever Beaumarchais' introduces a didactic speech. Epstein finds ways for his characters to deliver it naturally. Each character, in turn--except the Count--gets to spout off about his oppression; and those who believe women's issues are a 20th-century invention will note that Marceline (Barbara Orson), who starts the play as Figaro's nemesis, offers a sympathetic monologue that we can only call feminist.

It is through little touches and shades of emphasis that Epstein works his interpretation into the grain of Beaumarchais' play. When Shalhoub presents Figaro's epiphanic monologue, he strides from seat-top to seat through the empty first rows of the auditorium, with all the precarious confidence of his social-climbing instinct--then hops down, nods furtively and scurries by the legs of the audience with some submissive mutters of "excuse me." The moment when the jealous Count gives Cherubino an army officer's commission to remove him from the scene--immortalized by Mozart in his mock-heroic, trumpet-and-drum aria "Non piu andrai..."--Epstein appropriates for a bit of grisly realism: Figaro grabs Cherubino by the shoulders and shakes him into an awareness of the horrors of war.

Such serious flourishes enrich this Figaro--without detracting from the abundant comedy, they help recreate for us a sense of why this play was taken up as a banner of revolution across Europe, why it was suppressed by governments as an act of subversion. It's a sense obtainable today neither from the opera--performed extravagantly before wealth audiences--not from the leaden translations footnoted in drama texts. If there are individual lapses in the production, the whole moves unquestionably in the right direction--towards, Beaumarchais, capturing his language, temperament and ideas.