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A TASTE OF WIT: Kostopoulos, Bihr
and Sarah Moser in Freed’s Restoration Comedy, opening July 27.
Katie Pfeiffer |
A long-married man reminisces with his wife
about the night they met—where they were, what she
wore, the streets they walked. She remembers, too, but
differently. Perhaps, she suggests, he is recalling “another
night, another girl.”
A wealthy businessman, complacent and magnanimous, takes
a beggar into his home. But the beggar is an arsonist, one
of a team determined to burn down the homes of the rich.
And somewhere in Athens, a young wife stops buffing her
nails and decides to stop a war.
Welcome to the Stanford Summer Theatre, now in its eighth
year. These three snapshots recall past offerings: Harold
Pinter’s sketch Night, part of the 2005 Pinter Festival;
Max Frisch’s postwar Biedermann
and the Firebugs, performed in 2002; and artist-in-residence Amy Freed’s
modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in
2003.
Freed’s work is featured again in this summer’s
festival, Wicked Wit: Rakes and Rebellion in the Restoration.
She directs her play Restoration Comedy, a retelling of
two late-17th-century classics, Colley Cibber’s Love’s
Last Shift and John Vanbrugh’s Relapse, or Virtue
in Danger. The Pigott Theater production, running July 27
through August 13, stars Jenn Erdmann and Stanford lecturers
Jeffrey Bihr and Kay Kostopoulos in a familiar tale where
a long-abandoned wife, in disguise, lures her philandering
husband back into the marriage bed. A rare production of
Molière’s Don Juan (one of the playwright’s
uncharacteristic ventures into prose) follows in the Prosser
Theater from August 17 through August 27. As always, the
festival features a concurrent film series and a daylong
symposium, combining education with entertainment.
But there’s a new
twist this year. According to a press release, “To
rival the deviance and delights of the [Restoration] period,
SST inaugurates its own form of theatrical debauchery: Pay
what you like for any performance! SST is now priceless!” The
notion has met with some success in the alternative theater
scene.
“The idea is to reinvigorate the idea of theatergoing,
and to try to draw in those who simply wouldn’t or
don’t
think of going to the theater—ever,” says drama
and classics professor Rush Rehm, PhD ’85. “The
idea is to attract new audiences, and keep the loyal followers.”
Rehm
is the theater’s originator and director. Ed Iskandar, ’04,
co-director of this year’s festival and director of
Don Juan, describes Rehm as “obsessively detailed
and compulsively brilliant—the kind of exacting collaborator
that you need to keep the net taut around the unharnessed
potential of a production.”
“Rush is trying to do something wonderful here—get
live theater on campus,” says Freed, a Pulitzer finalist
who wrote Freedomland and The
Beard of Avon. “It’s
a big undertaking,” she says, but
an important one. “The theater in America right
now is under such pressure economically and commercially
that it may not survive unless universities step up to the
plate. I’m a passionate believer that we should be
doing something at Stanford.” Freed points to the
disappearance of smaller Equity theaters: she remembers
five or six when she came to the Bay Area in the 1980s;
they’re gone now.
Rehm has worked to fill the gap.
While planning the season in 2000, he was surprised to
learn that Waiting
for Godot hadn’t been performed in the Bay Area
for more than a decade. Samuel Beckett is “the greatest
20th-century playwright, so he asks to be done,” Rehm
asserts. He took advantage of an exceptional configuration
of talent available that summer—Bay Area actor
Geoff Hoyle, the Polish actor Jarek Truszczynski, LeCoq-trained
Geoff Sobelle, ’98, and director Aleksandra Wolska—and
played Pozzo himself, demonstrating another talent.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in
the academic world who is such a fine actor,” Freed
says. “He has that rare combination
of great intellectual passion and a full-hearted emotional
and theatrical instinct.”
 |
REHM: Drumming up new audiences.
Chad Bonaker |
Last year’s festival
broke new ground as perhaps the only occasion when Pinter’s
work as a playwright, screenwriter, actor and political
activist have been considered together. The timing seemed
prescient: within a few months, the playwright received
the Nobel Prize for literature.
Pinter responded warmly
to Rehm’s choice in a letter. “I’m
moved to know that you’re embarking on this Festival.
It’s also good to know that you exist! We clearly
have a great deal in common.” (An activist, like Pinter,
Rehm spent time in a Santa Clara jail following his participation
in a 2003 war protest.)
Rehm took a somewhat circuitous
route to both theater and political activism. He was born
in the Panama Canal Zone and grew up in Peru, Maryland,
Alabama, Florida, Texas, California, Washington, D.C.,
and the Netherlands. “My father and
his father were career military men, so I was raised all
over.”
An Army ROTC scholarship brought Rehm to Princeton,
where he became political, he says. “I realized I
didn’t
have a clue about the colonial history of Vietnam, or much
else beside, including U.S. imperialism, so I dropped my
ROTC scholarship at end of second year and became quite
active in the antiwar movement,” which had him
speaking at many East Coast colleges.
He clearly had tons
of energy—his nickname “Rush” (short
for Maurice) is telling—but how to channel it? He
wanted to be a football player and even played it freshman
year “without
much success.” Then he took up pottery, becoming assistant
to the master ceramist Toshiko Takaezu. The ’60s were
exciting times for Princeton’s creative arts programs:
an “artistic explosion” brought Toshiko
there, as well as dancer/choreographer Ze’eva Cohen.
Eventually Rehm became involved in theater through the
classics. “My
interest in the classics happened to be the plays in English.
That led to me learning to read the plays in Greek, then
to translate from the Greek.” His senior thesis was
a translation
of Euripides’ Electra, and he went on to classical
studies in Melbourne, Australia, with Fulbright and Sachs
scholarships.
Rehm connects everything, including the Greeks,
to his political interests. In Radical
Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Duckworth, 2003), he writes: “The
1991 Gulf War may have seemed to Americans like a video
game, and to postmodern theorists like a virtual campaign,
but not to the 200,000 Iraqi conscripts mowed down by the ‘turkey
shoot into the desert,’ nor to the hundreds of thousands
of civilians who have died since because of the US-driven
sanctions. . . . Greek tragedy reminds us that humans live
real lives (the only ones we have) and die real deaths,
no matter how hard we try to deny it. Those hard truths
provide the inspiration for tragic performance.”
He’ll
have a hard time bringing politics into the bawdy world
of Restoration comedy—or will he? Freed points
out the feminist dimension: this was the first time women
were seen on the stage. They were “wonderful women—articulate,
sexy, amoral. Innately, the theater was the celebration
of women,” she says.
And this year’s name-your-own-price
policy strikes a democratic blow in a world where ticket
prices are skyrocketing, audiences dwindling and theaters
disappearing. “All
one can do is hope,” Rehm says about the future of
theater. “Maybe
if we hold onto it and don’t sell it out, others will
come and support it.” |
