| Peter Sarsgaard to lead Martin Crimp's version of Molière's THE MISANTHROPE, with Juliana Canfield, Julie Halston, Reg Rogers, Robert Sella, more | |
| Posted by: Official_Press_Release 07:13 pm EST 02/04/25 | |
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| RED BULL THEATER Continues the New Season of Revelation Readings with THE MISANTHROPE by Molière A Version by Martin Crimp Directed by Marc Vietor Featuring Graham Campbell, Juliana Canfield, Gregory Connors, Julie Halston, David Pittu, Reg Rogers, Peter Sarsgaard, and Robert Sella LIVE IN-PERSON ONLY Monday, February 17th Florence Gould Theater at the L'Alliance New York Red Bull Theater (Jesse Berger, Founder and Artistic Director; Martin Giannini, Executive Director) today announced the cast for the next offering of Revelation Readings season: The Misanthrope by Molière, a version by Martin Crimp, directed by Marc Vietor. This will premiere Monday February 17th (7:30 PM) at Florence Gould Theater at the L'Alliance New York (55 East 59th Street). This reading is produced in association with L'Alliance New York. For tickets and more information, visit redbulltheater.com/the-misanthrope. Acidly blunt, misanthropic and judgmental, Alceste and Celimene have coincidental natures, but express them in fatally contrary ways. Is unsparing honesty always a virtue? Is love blind or does it willfully close its eyes? Molière's masterpiece is a dark comedy depicting the inevitable combustion of two extraordinary lives in a society of liars. Mr. Berger says, "As we continue our happy partnership with L'Alliance New York, and plan for our spring production of Moliere's last great comedy, The Imaginary Invalid, it seems only fitting that we should share a raucous Revelation Reading of what many consider to be Moliere's masterpiece to the stage: The Misanthrope in a new version by Martin Crimp. Featuring an estimable cast of some of New York's finest actors under the inspired direction of our long-time collaborator Marc Vietor, this is a rare chance to hear this romantic tragicomedy light up a cold winter's night with the heat of passion and wit." The cast will feature Graham Campbell (Broadway: Appropriate - Second Stage Theatre); Juliana Canfield (Red Bull Theater: Titus Andronicus; Broadway: Stereophonic - Tony Award nomination; Off-Broadway: Fefu and Her Friends, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box - Theatre for a New Audience); Gregory Connors (Broadway: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window; Off-Broadway: Coriolanus - Public Theater, Pre-Existing Condition - Connelly Theater); Julie Halston (Broadway: most recently: Our Town; Tootsie, On the Town, You Can't Take It With You - Drama Desk & Outer Critics Circle nominations, Twentieth Century - Outer Critics Circle nomination, The Man Who Came to Dinner; Off-Broadway: The Divine Sister - Drama Desk nomination; Breaking the Story - Second Stage; The Babylon Line - Lincoln Center Theater; The Tribute Artist, You Should Be So Lucky - Primary Stages; Red Scare on Sunset, The Lady in Question, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom; Off Broadway Alliance Legend of Off Broadway Award); David Pittu (RBT: Doctor Faustus; Broadway: The Front Page; Is He Dead? - Tony & Outer Critics Circle nominations, Never Gonna Dance; LoveMusik - Tony, Drama Desk & Outer Critics Circle nominations, The Coast of Utopia; Off-Broadway: Girl from the North Country - Public Theater; Equivocation - Manhattan Theatre Club/Outer Critics Circle & Lortel Award nominations; The Heir Apparent - Classic Stage Company; The Room/Celebration - Atlantic Theater/Drama Desk & Lortel nominations; Big River, It's a Bird… It's a Plane… It's Superman, Bells Are Ringing, Of Thee I Sing - City Center Encores!); Reg Rogers (RBT: The Alchemist, The Miser, The Relapse; Broadway: Merrily We Roll Along - Lortel Award nomination; Tootsie, The Royal Family - OCC nominations; The Iceman Cometh, A Free Man of Color, Present Laughter, The Big Knife, Holiday - Tony and Drama Desk nominations; Off-Broadway: Look Back in Anger - Classic Stage Company, Bach at Leipzig - New York Theatre Workshop, The Dazzle - OBIE and Lucille Lortel Awards; most recently, Little Shop of Horrors); Peter Sarsgaard (Broadway: The Seagull; Off-Broadway: Burn This - Signature Theatre; Hamlet, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya - Classic Stage Company; selected films: Dead Man Walking, Boys Don't Cry, Garden State, Kinsey, The Dying Gaul, Green Lantern, Lovelace, Jackie, The Magnificent Seven, The Batman, September 5; TV credits include hosting "Saturday Night Live"); and Robert Sella (RBT: The Mystery of Irma Vep - Drama League Award nomination, The Rover; Broadway: Sylvia - Outer Critics Circle nomination, Flying Over Sunset, My Fair Lady, Cabaret, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Sideman - Actors Equity Clarence Derwent Award; national tour: Angels in America; West End: Edward Albee's The Lady from Dubuque with Dame Maggie Smith; Off-Broadway: Five by Tenn - MTC; Boys and Girls -Playwrights Horizons; Stuff Happens - Public Theater/Lortel Award nomination). ABOUT THE PLAY The Misanthrope is considered to be Molière's masterpiece — the playwright himself declared he would never be able to write anything better. He started writing the play in 1664 at a time of personal and professional crisis. A religious cabal had succeeded in forbidding the performances of Tartuffe; his health was already starting to decline sharply; and his wife Armande's infidelities tortured his jealous soul, leading to an anguished breakup. Molière poured his personal woes into his play, which he also hoped would be sufficiently successful to compensate for the financial loss his company endured after the Tartuffe debacle. The Misanthrope was premiered at the Théâtre du Palais Royal in June 1666; Molière played the honest-to-a fault, antisocial Alceste, and his wife Armande played his witty and ruthless paramour Célimène. Performed over thirty times in its opening run, the play was not a complete failure — but it was far from the major success Molière was hoping for, and was seldom to be remounted by the company during his lifetime. The audience was put off by the seriousness and austerity of a comedy that made people laugh only "in their souls," as a contemporary critic described — a far cry from Molière's previous (and forthcoming) popular comedies. Indeed, The Misanthrope offers the best example of the way in which Molière transformed French comedy. Instead of basing his comedy on the traditional Italian and Spanish models, peopled with stock characters involved in complicated, twisted plots, Molière used the model of French tragedies, which explore the subtle inner workings of human nature. As the full title The Misanthrope, or the Cantankerous Lover indicates, Molière did conceive the play as a comedy, and we know he performed Alceste as a comic character, one whose idiosyncrasies — stubbornness, prejudice, excesses, and refusal to conform to either common sense, reason or social conventions — were made to be ridiculed. However, following the French tragic model, Molière built the play's entire plot around the main character's psychological quirks. He also imbued Alceste with a very personal anger and bitterness, and clearly deplored the moral and social circumstances that spurred Alceste's extreme reactions. The Misanthrope thus comes across as a fascinatingly complex, tragic character study, embedded within a comedy of manners replete with colorful characters — the ridiculous marquis, the heartless coquette, and the unfulfilled prude, to name but a few. Molière took great pains to polish the play's verses as well as its overall construction, and emphasized the social and artistic role played by language, from the fawning emptiness of the marquis' boring and flat verses to Célimène's hilariously scathing and mean witticisms. By contrast, Alceste's multifaceted personality and his formidable text (both in quality and quantity of lines) has allowed for a wide range of interpretations throughout the centuries, from highly comic to utterly tragic, showing the play's versatility and continued relevance to each historical moment in which it is performed. ABOUT THE ADAPTATION Martin Crimp's version of Molière's classic updates the play by bringing it into a contemporary London world of theatre and media moguls, giving it a sublime, carefully balanced blank verse language that is enjoyably savage. The misanthropic, ruthless Alceste is in love with Jennifer, but is constantly being thwarted by various male callers. Starting by mocking critic-turned-playwright Covington, Alceste soon extends his scathing satiric attack to the whole media circus that encircles him. Retribution comes with Jennifer's final rejection of him. ? ABOUT THE P LAYWRIGHTS Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in 1622. Under the pseudonym MOLIÈRE, he and Madeleine Béjart created a theatre troupe in 1643 called "The Illustrious Theatre." Their first shows were failures, and Molière was thrown into debtor's prison. Upon his release he went on the road as the troupe's director, principal actor, and occasional playwright. In 1658 the troupe successfully mounted its first performance in front of King Louis XIV, and in 1659 The Affected Young Women launched Molière's career as a playwright. Molière and his players became the King's troupe in 1665, but some of the more religiously or socially virulent plays were not well received. Tartuffe (1664) and Dom Juan (1665) were both forbidden, and The Misanthrope (1666) enjoyed only mild success. That same year Molière wrote The Doctor In Spite of Himself, his most elaborate attempt to date at criticizing the medicine of his time, albeit in a farcical setting. The play was a big success, and from then on Molière focused on comedies up until his very last play, The Imaginary Invalid (1673), in which he played the lead role and derided, one last time, his contemporaries' blind faith in what was then (and arguably still is) a very inexact science. During the fourth performance of the play Molière started coughing blood onstage; he finished the performance and died a few hours later. In 1680, by order of the King, his troupe was merged with two rival troupes to form the Comédie Française. Martin Crimp, born 1956, is a British playwright whose 1997 play, Attempts on Her Life, established his international reputation. His plays range from elliptical dramas of contemporary life - Definitely the Bahamas (1987), Dealing with Clair (1989), The Country (2000), The City (2008), Men Asleep (2018) - via the two satirical ‘entertainments' Attempts on Her Life (1997) and In the Republic of Happiness (2012) - to re-imaginings of Greek classics - Cruel & Tender (2004) and The Rest Will be Familiar to You from Cinema (2013) - the French language premiere of this play presented at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers and the Festival d'Avignon (2019). Recent notable productions include When we have sufficiently tortured each other - 12 Variations on Samuel Richardson's ‘Pamela' (2019) at London's National Theatre, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac (2022) in London and BAM in New York, and a revival of The Country at the Théâtre du Rond Point, Paris (2023). His first encounter with composer George Benjamin led to the ‘lyric tale' Into the Little Hill (Festival d'automne, 2006), followed by Written on Skin (Festival d'Aix en Provence, 2012), Lessons in Love and Violence (Royal Opera House, 2018), and Picture a Day Like This (Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2023). Among other musical collaborations are the song-cycle Zauberland (Bouffes du Nord, 2018) with Bernard Foccroulle - and lyrics, drawn from his plays, for Roald van Oosten's 2012 EP, "100% Happy." Martin's first solo show as writer and performer, Not One of These People (2022), opened at the Carrefour International Theatre Festival in Québec City before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre in London and Montreal's USINE C, followed by performances at the International Festival of New Drama at the Schaubühne in Berlin. In 2020 Martin was awarded the Nyssen-Bansemer Theatre Prize. ABOUT THE DIRECTOR Marc Vietor is an actor, audiobook narrator and theater director. He has narrated more than 300 books for which he has received numerous awards including an Audie and seven Earphone Excellence Awards. He's worked as a theater director at Bucks County Playhouse, Red Bull Theater, NYU Tisch Graduate Acting Program, and Yale. His production of The School For Scandal for Red Bull at the Lucille Lortel received the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Revival in 2017. As an actor he's worked on and off Broadway at Mint Theater, HERE, NYSF, Old Globe Theater, Roundabout, Huntington Theater, Actors' Theatre of Louisville (Humana Festival), Arena Stage, Westport Country Playhouse, Ravinia Music Festival, O'Neill Center, Kennedy Center, South Coast Repertory, Prince Music Theatre, Long Wharf, Hartford Stage, TFANA, Royal Shakespeare Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Sundance Theatre Lab. He's a graduate of Yale College and Juilliard. ABOUT L'ALLIANCE NEW YORK L'Alliance New York is an independent, not-for-profit organization committed to providing its audience and students with engaging French language classes and audacious multi-disciplinary programming that celebrates the diversity of francophone cultures and creativity around the world. A welcoming and inclusive community for all ages and all backgrounds, L'Alliance New York is a place where people can meet, learn, and explore the richness of our heritages and share discoveries. L'Alliance New York strives to amplify voices and build bridges from the entire francophone world to New York and beyond. ABOUT RED BULL THEATER Red Bull Theater, hailed as "a dynamic producer of classic plays" by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, brings rarely seen classic plays to dynamic new life for contemporary audiences, uniting a respect for tradition with a modern sensibility. Named for the rowdy Jacobean playhouse that illegally performed plays in England during the years of Puritan rule, Red Bull Theater is New York City's home for dynamic performances of great plays that stand the test of time. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as its cornerstone, the company also produces new works that are in conversation with the classics. A home for artists, scholars, and students, Red Bull Theater delights and engages the intellect and imagination of audiences, and strives to make its work accessible, diverse, and welcoming to all. We value and practice inclusiveness, equity, and diversity in all of our activities, and are committed to antiracist action. Red Bull Theater believes in the power of great classic stories and plays of heightened language to deepen our understanding of the human condition, in the special ability of live theater to create unique, collective experiences, and in the timeless capacity of classical theater to illuminate the events of our times. Variety agreed, hailing Red Bull's work as: "Proof that classical theater can still be surprising after hundreds of years." Since its debut in 2003 with a production of Shakespeare's Pericles starring Daniel Breaker, Red Bull Theater has served adventurous theatergoers with Off-Broadway productions, Revelation Readings, and the annual Short New Play Festival. The company also offers outreach programs including Shakespeare in Schools bringing professional actors and teaching artists into public school classrooms; Bull Sessions, free post-play discussions with top scholars; and Classical Acting Intensives led by veteran theater professionals. During the pandemic, Red Bull created several new and ongoing programs to serve audiences and artists with our mission: Red Bull Podcasts, Online Readings, Seminars, and more. "The most exciting classical theater in New York" as Time Out NY has called it, has produced 24 Off-Broadway productions and over 200 Revelation Readings of rarely seen classics, serving a community of more than 5,000 artists and providing quality artistic programming to an audience of over 65,000. The company's unique programming has received ongoing critical acclaim and has been recognized with Lortel, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Off-Broadway Alliance, and OBIE nominations and Awards. For more information about any of Red Bull Theater's programs, visit www.redbulltheater.com. |
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