Word: leib
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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...
...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...
...some students at its announcement as a threat to undergraduate access to the Loeb Drama Center, the arrival of Brustein and his professional troupe seemed to cause no immediate friction with students. The four ART shows--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Terry by Terry(a new play be Mark Leib), Happy End, and The Inspector General (directed by Peter Sellars '80)--fared well both at the box office and with critics...
...play that consistently demands attention could ever be too long; as if some of the most fundamental questions for art in our times, even if they are more immediate to undergraduates, could ever be monopolized by them. It's that kind of obtuse criticism that can keep a Mark Leib from ever earning a living in America, that kind of blockish stupidity that makes Broadway an artistic Petra. Terry was an extraordinarily risky play for the Rep to choose, an unknown work by an unknown playwright which, as they probably knew, merited the risk. A play like Terry by Terry...