Word: lorenzo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...known as “Lorenzo the devil” in sixteenth-century Florence, the hedonistic favorite of the Duke Alessandro de Medici, his cousin and eventual assassin. Never predictable, mostly because he was perpetually drunk and always irreverent, he became a symbol of Florentine decadence, a worthy complement to the debauchery of Alessandro himself...
...could have guessed that precisely three centuries later Alfred de Musset, France’s Shakespeare and George Sand’s hopeless lover, would transform Lorenzo’s story into tragic farce. And even then, no one could have expected that two centuries after that, Lorenzo himself would be transformed—into a skinny, pale, 21st-century girl, with springs in her legs and melancholy eyes...
Scheib says he firmly believes in “tailoring characters to actors,” even if it means not knowing the gender of the lead until auditions are over. So Lorenzo became Kate Walker...
...nothing else, this peopling of the stage is useful for Scheib, who often directs by walking on stage and joining the scene. The action continues, but suddenly Scheib has become a member of the crowd, sneering at Lorenzo, running after the mob, pulling up a chair in the Happy Gardens Chinese Restaurant (a hotbed of Republican agitation against the powerful Medicis). It’s as though once de Musset’s exaggerated characters have figured out who they are, Scheib can calmly walk into their midst, already in character himself...
...Lorenzo never mourns for the decay of Florence, despite the fact that, in murdering the Duke, she does what all the whining Republicans and hopeless exiles never dared. His madness—her madness—comes not out of dogma but out of an intense aversion to boredom. “Maybe I’ll be honest again,” she says, “and I won’t find it boring...