The Nose Has It

Cyrano de Bergerac By Edmund Rostand Translated from the French by Brian Hooker Directed by Brian Backus At the Leverett House Old Library Through May 3

CYRANO DE BERGERAC IS about the Rennaissance poet, playwright, soldier and all-around wit who was afflicted with a huge you-know-what. In love with his cousin Roxanne, Cyrano ends up aiding his rival Christian in winning her affections by supplying the good-looking but vacant boy with his specially crafted sweet nothings.

Director Brian Backus has attacked Edmund Rostand's classic tragicomedy with a battleaxe, only he seems to hit the wrong parts, at least for this production. Blessed with a cast stronger in comic than tragic talents, Backus unwisely cuts the hilarious first act and plays down much of the humor in favor of the tragic, or in this case, bathetic parts. Alex Roe's Cyrano is the major casualty of this approach, though, to be fair, some of his wounds are self-inflicted. He seems to drone endlessly, eyes glazed and fingers fidgeting, in a voice that ought to earn him the name Cyrano de Sinusitus. But once he's roused from this topor by the approach of a good joke, Roe becomes an adrenalin-charged humor dynamo, leaping and cavorting about the stage. His mad attack upon the lascivious Comte de Guiche (Jeff Rosen) and his introduction to Christian (Ted Dane) are both superb, hinting at a potentially brilliant performance that got sidetracked along the way.

Laura Gonzalez imbues love-interest Roxanne with so much feminine radiance that while she's on stage the audience forgets that nothing really interesting is going on. If anything, Gonzalez makes her character too wonderful. Roxanne is a woman who fails to recognize her cousin's handwriting for several years, let alone his voice under her window. A properly realized Roxanne should exhibit some stupidity or self-delusion, but Gonzalez seems at the verge of publishing her dissertation on Romantic poetry.

Rosen's determinedly two-dimensional de Guiche is the real highlight, not to mention eyesore, of this production. Parading a wardrobe of multi-colored peacockery that would put Prince to shame, Rosen refuses to give in to the air of lackluster seriousness that affects most of the other players. Rosen's de Guiche goes three or four stories over the top, but it makes his verbal contests with the self-effacing Cyrano that much more exhilarating.

In the what-is-he-doing-in-this-play department, Ted Dane suffers mightily as the hopelessly inadequate Christian. That a honey like Roxanne could ever fall for Dane's sniveling wimp of a Gascon seems harder to believe than that Cyrano could ever see beyond that nose of his. Of the supporting cast, Donal Logue as the rightous Captain Le Bret is appropriately stiff-backed, and nuns Jane Avrich and Chalon Emmons scamper and giggle most agreeably during the last scene.

THE ONLY OTHER FLAW left to pick on is the decidely dodgy quality of Cyrano's nose. This may be splitting nose hairs, as it were, but Cyrano's shnozz is so prominent, both visually and symbolically, that its obvious artificiality detracts mightily from the atmosphere of the play. Not only was the seam obvious from my fourth row seat, but it made Roe sound like an extra in a Dristan commercial. During one of the more tedious sections, I started to hope that the nose would fall off and add some needed comic relief, but it never did--another disappointment in a production that never delivers on its obviously enormous potential.