Word: figaro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
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...
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...
...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...
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...