Marivaux and Wadsworth

During rehearsals, Artistic Director Loretta Greco reconnected with adaptor and co-translator Stephen Wadsworth to discuss the continued resonance of Marivaux.

Loretta Greco (director): You have such a deeply rich and nuanced understanding of humans trying to make their way in 18th Century Europe.  What is it about this period which speaks to you so personally?  

Stephen Wadsworth (adaptor): For the longest time I didn’t know.  It was an attraction that started when I was a child.  The aesthetics of these plays, and the operas and oratorios of Handel –– all written in the same three decades (1715-1745) –– drew me inexorably, it was a kind of home I’d never experienced in life, or a space in which my soul, my thoughts, my heart could expand without condition. I came to realize, years later, that I was turning to the early Enlightenment because it was the true godmother of our country, and the stronger my doubts and fears about the state of American democracy, the stronger my need to return to its foundational thinking and feeling.  JFK was assassinated when I was ten, and it went on from there –– MLK’s death, Vietnam, Watergate, and so on.  All these events upset me and tested the resilience and integrity of American democracy, and I kept turning back to America’s gestation and roots.

Wadsworth: What draws you to this play and what do you find unique to this playwright? 

Greco: I am always in search of writers who are risk takers – whose work alters us in the course of the experience — who can be in active pursuit of the serious, asking the essential questions of what it is to be alive today while also having a delicious sense of humor and play in the process.  Somehow from 1732 through your buoyant, rigorous, and loving adaptation, Marivaux is reminding us that risk — that change is paramount to growth — without it we grow static and certain and cease to evolve!  The play dares its characters and us to risk EVERYTHING for the chance to be prodded and altered — to live our best most true, complicated and fulfilled lives. He explores this wild span from exhilaration to agony through sublime and ridiculous means.  The idea that Marivaux is more interested in the wisdom of uncertainty in  promoting the what if’s of risk – in ultimately asking more questions about what it is to be human — rather than providing answers feels so profoundly of the now  for me is an exceptional gift — in exploring and wrestling with the play and I hope in receiving it.

Greco: How did working on Marivaux change you as an artist?

Wadsworth: I had made singing translations of several operas, but The Triumph of Love was the first play I turned into English.  Marivaux’s mercurial language, and the way it flowed in French, seemed to give me a lot of space to experiment and close in on what he was actually saying.  He was a generous and patient collaborator.  I translated three of his plays between 1992 and 1997, and I found my feet as a writer for the theater.  I can remember when just the word ‘Marivaux’ felt like a window to some ravishing expanse.  When I jumped out that window, I found his aesthetic––witty, ironic, suggestive, glistening––barely masked an unremitting but compassionate picking over of human weakness and aspiration.  I recognized this peculiar duality, it was somehow like me.  Marivaux inspired me not to stop perceiving when my heart broke, to perceive weakness with ever greater and truly empathic understanding, and to do that for people––as writer and director, but also as a man.  I am now also an educator, and I often think of a vision I used to have while working on these plays, of walking past an open door and glimpsing Marivaux in a room in a chair at a table (I saw his back).  He let me see him, see his vision, he led by example.

Wadsworth: What political wisdom, if any, do you find in The Triumph of Love? Does it offer advice to those with political power?

Greco: One of my favorite moments in the play comes at the end of Act II.  Hermocrate, our immoveable philosopher has been blindsided to love and in a moment of discovery, exclaims  ‘How weak we are.  We are so weak.’ It is a shocking revelation that brings him down from his lofty solo position of privilege, of certainty, of wisdom– to cojoin with the rest of humanity in a moment rich in humility—and maybe even with a subtle dose of humor in how late breaking this revelation arrives.  It offers him a chance to recognize humanity’s common frailties, hopes, and dreams and with that new lens to proceed anew, enlightened with compassion. Marivaux offers the foundational import of questioning – of change– of the balance of reason and emotion and the power of love to make us whole throughout, but for me this reminder of our common humanity and the revelatory power of humility, humor, and compassion seems particularly apt advice to those in power today.

Greco: Love presents itself in a myriad of guises to shake and prod the characters towards their truest selves throughout the play.  Would you share one of the many ways Love has triumphed in your own life?

Wadsworth: Well this gets at another gift of Marivaux and Handel.  My childhood and trust were stripped from me as a child in acts of unspeakable cruelty.  I was naturally drawn to theatrical expression, first as actor, then as director and writer––to start the search for a path away from what had happened and toward something, well, else.  The pure beauty of these works was like a call from the elsewhere, and serving their worlds brought me to maturity as an artist and (closer) as a person.  In the act of theater, and specifically during my Marivaux years, I found family, freedom, trust, unconditional love…and indeed eventually a partner in life and love.  And those were things I spent much of my life thinking I would never have.