University Team Rescues Forgotten Music Drama By A Master

March 1, 2000

University Park, Pa. --- Penn State faculty, students and staff and State College residents are breathing life into a forgotten music drama by major 20th century artistic talent Jean Cocteau. "Paul and Virginie," a story about love, prejudice, transformation and resurrection was written in 1920, but never made it to the stage -- until now.

"We are engaged in historical recovery, bringing back a play from oblivion," said Robert Edwards, director of the University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, the play’s co-sponsor. "This would be similar to finding a lost Picasso drawing or an unpublished Hemingway story. The Penn State production will introduce the play to the world first at this campus and then in Washington, D.C. and New York City."

"Paul and Virginie" is the centerpiece of a major symposium at Penn State that includes lectures, art exhibitions, concerts, films, featuring the work of Cocteau (1889-1963). While best known to the American public as a filmmaker for "Beauty and The Beast" (1946), he also was a poet, painter, playwright and novelist.

Cocteau and novelist Raymond Radiguet had adapted "Paul and Virginie" from a popular 1787 French novel, but composer Erik Satie had failed to deliver a promised score. After Radiguet and Satie died, Cocteau shelved the play, says George Mauner, Distinguished Professor of Art History Emeritus, who started the whole ball rolling.

Mauner had encountered the play 25 years ago through a graduate student’s dissertation and recently again during planning for the symposium. Through complicated negotiations, he secured permission to produce the play in English, engaged a composer, commissioned and collaborated on an English translation, and assembled a Penn State team to produce it.

"It’s very exciting to watch all the pieces come together as rehearsals begin," notes Mauner, also the institute’s director emeritus. "Three University colleges, several departments, the Institute and other University units have worked hard in a true labor of love for nearly two years to make this happen."

The story is about two young lovers on an island paradise intruded on by a corrupt "civilized" world. "Paul and Virginie is a beautiful love story, offers a plea for racial harmony, and looks at the natural world in opposition to an aristocratic world of late 18th century Paris," says Helen Manfull, the play’s director and professor emerita of theatre arts.

Mauner asked Manfull, an Institute Fellow emerita, to read the script and consider directing the play. "I began to see its incredible potential and possibilities," she said. "The original novel was taught in French schools and well known to school children there. Its popularity had inspired songs, poems and engravings.

"Cocteau’s work veers from realism to comedy of manners to surrealism," she adds. "You can not pigeonhole him or his style. For this production, we settled on a minimalist look that is suggestive and evocative rather than a literal, realistic feel.

"Now, when a forgotten work is surfaced, we have to ask the question, should it have been resurrected?," Manfull says. "In this case, the answer was clearly yes, especially with a newly composed score by Charles Kalman."

This is truly a Penn State family affair. The 17-member cast includes Penn State music and theatre faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, staff and local residents. A first-year musical theatre student, Marc Ginsburg, has the lead role of Paul, and Elisa Matthews, a music graduate student, is playing Virginie.

Other actors include theatre faculty Peg French and Mark Fearnow and music faculty Norman Spivey and Susan Boardman. Theatre faculty Anne Gibson is designing the sets, and Chuck Firmin, the lighting. Other University participants are: Syeed Malik, Gary Abudullah, Doug Meyer, Robin Wray and Peter Wray.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Performing Arts, "Paul and Virginie" will be performed March 17 and 18, starting at 8 p.m. in Schwab Auditorium at the University Park Campus. Tickets are $10 for general public and $5 for students and available at the Eisenhower Box Office, 814-863-0255.

The play then will tour to the Theatre Paul Claudel, French Embassy, Washington D.C, on March 24 and 25, and then to the Florence Gould Hall, French Institute/Alliance Francaise in New York City on March 31 and April 1. The entire project including the symposiuim, the play and the tour, is under the patronage of his Excellency Francois Bujon de l’Estang, the Ambassador of France to the United States.

"The enthusiasm and support from everyone ranging from the University administration and the local community to the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, foundations and private individuals have been very touching," Manfull says. "But it is a little frightening because we feel a tremendous pressure for thie highest possible level of production."

Edwards adds, "We know they will knock them out in Washington and New York. The whole team will be representing Penn State in a way we don’t get to do very often. It’s an extraordinary moment."

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Contact:

Vicki Fong (814) 865-9481 (o)/ (814) 238-1221 (h)