Fantasy in Serendippo

The King Stag, written in 1762 by Carlo Gozzi in revolt against the realistic naturalism of contemporary theater, is a feast of the imagination with the technique and logic of the commedia dell'arte, Italy's native improvisational comedy. The third Gozzi production directed this year by Andrei Serban. The King Stag is a fairy tale set in the oriental kingdom of Serendippo where the good king Deramo is looking in vain for a worthy wife. His trusted but treacherous minister. Tartaglia, tries to insinuate his own daughter, Clarice, into the king's affections to distract the king from the beautiful Angela whom Tartaglia wants for himself. At the same time, the magician Duandarte, who long ago taught King Deramo the secret of inhabitating the bodies of other people and beasts, is returning to Serendippo in the shape of a parrot. Gozzi's fabulous fantasy concocted with generous helpings of magic and love is--some things are easy to guess--fantastic.

Saving the good wine for last, however, Serban offers as an appetizer to the evening's feast "A Gozzi Surprise," The Love of Three Oranges. A condensed adaptation of the Prokofiev-Gozzi opera of the same name, it is a frantic farce, of unparalleled foolishness, concerning a hypochondriacal prince who will die unless he laughs. In the course of the show, the prince is stranded in a desert with three oranges that turn into three beautiful, but thirsty, maidens. An audience must be snatched up into the realm of such nonsense, but the "Gozzi Surprise," despite the comical efforts of Ben Haley's sorceress and Rodney Hudson's monstrous cook with a 10-foot, lethal ladle, never gets off the ground. Its absurdity remains strangely humorless and merely casts in greater relief the splendour and sublimity of The King Stag.

Everything about The King Stag is enchanting. The Forest of Miracoli, where Deramo goes hunting with Tartaglia, is filled with parrots whose gorgeous plummage creates a fluttering rainbow swirling in the air. Clever back-lighting on a pale skrim projects a prancing menagerie of lions and tigers and bears. A poor of light, lit from below the stage, suggests a woodland stream around which the overhead-lighting throws a sun-dappled forest floor. The fragile nobility of the two stags, with their breathtakingly lovely coats of the palest pastel, steal the forest show.

The costumes, worth the price of admission in themselves, are a cross between commedia dell'arte and Oriental styles, corresponding to no known time or place. Some, like Tartaglia's shimmering, black, bat-winged cape, are sumptuous and frightening. Truffaldino, the simple-minded bird catcher, on the other hand, looks hilariously like Big Bird with a truffle-shaped head. The characters' exotic masks, with their fixed and staring eyes, give even the humans in King Stag an entrancing and surreal beauty. When the characters speak from bodies not their own, as when Tartaglia inhabits Deramo's body to deceive Angela or when Deramo assumes the shape of a ghastly, emaciated, old man, their disembodied voices are piped in, as though from another world. The actors, after the manner of Oriental drama, seem like life-sized puppets, but with the intricate gestures and fluid grace of human voice and movement. The entire cast is superb, from Thomas Derrah at King Deramo to Lynn Chausow as Clarice with her Little-Bo-Peep voice and Christopher Moore as Leandro, who loves Clarice and makes every entrance head-over-heels.

Like any great fairy tale, The King Stag includes not only sweetness and beauty but suffering and evil as well; the texture of daily life exaggerated in imagination. And for all the bewitching "superficiality" of the beautiful, masked characters, the play champions the spititual truth which magic and appearances sometimes hide; the beauty of Deramo's soul that shines even from within the grotesque, old man, and the ugliness of Tartaglia's soul that even Deramo's majestic form cannot conceal from the heart of Angela.

The King Stag has a meaning too. It ends when the magician Duandarte, like Shakespeare's Prospero before him, lays down his magic wand and returns to life among men and natural phenomena--but not before saying that, finally, the best fantasies do not escape reality but return to it refreshed with the hope that the ordinary can be wonderful. And he is right. When you leave the Loeb, the streetlights--well, at least the stars--will seem to wink at you.