
I've been in Minneapolis for a few days working on behalf of the Dramatists Guild. A trip to this city for a theatre professsional would not be complete without a visit to the alarmingly gorgeous new facility that is home to the Guthrie Theater.
Coming back to the Guthrie after having spent a summer at the Minnesota Opera, brought back memories of what remains to this day one of the top five theatrical experiences of my life. It was 22 years ago, in the summer of 1987 that I bought a ticket to see a play I had read a few times, discussed in a theatre class, possibly done scenes from as well, but had never seen staged. The play was Moliere's Misanthrope and the production was directed by Garland Wright at the Guthrie Theater.
Mr. Wright took the audacious (and brilliant) risk of setting the play during the French Revolution at a time when updating the classics to modern dress was all the rage but no one (that I know of) had thought to update a classic by a mere century or so. This production was so moving to me because it managed to combine grand spectacle with the tiniest and truest detail of human nature observed. Upon entering the theatre, one saw a thrust stage covered from head to toe with a deep blue cloth that almost took on the feeling of an ocean. There appeared to be waves here and there, its peaks and valleys shading the blue darker here, lighter there.
As the strains of an air by Rousseau filled the hall and the house lights came down, in one 3-second "whoosh" the entire expanse of blue cloth began to flutter and disappear before our eyes, being pulled down through a tiny hole in the center of the stage revealing what had been underneath all along: the ornate Louis XIV-esque parlor of a grand Paris home.
The final image of the windows being shattered as an actress cowered in the darkness alone in her abandoned expanse, praying that the angry mob would not break through has stayed with me for years.
All of this came back more vividly as I described it to a colleague who had innocently asked if I'd ever been to the Guthrie before.
I'd always remembered that there had been some controversy surrounding Mr. Wright's departure from the Guthrie in the late 1990s and I had a vague notion that he may have moved to New York to work at Yale or Julliard or perhaps direct on Broadway. But there my memory failed me and I suddenly found myself hungry to see what this theatrical genius might be cooking up today.
And in the age of Google, it didn't take long for me to find the disappointing news that he had died of cancer in 1998, less than 2 years after leaving the Guthrie. So I will not again have the thrill of experiencing one of his masterful productions. It's a selfish kind of mourning, I know, and has nothing to do with the man himself, but I'm sad all the same.
But it's a bittersweet sadness because I still cherish the gift I stumbled upon on a hot summer night in 1987 at the tender age of 21.