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Prose, schmos. Then there is: throws, woes, bozos, bulldoze, foreclose, heave-hos, no-shows, plainclothes, scarecrows, yo-yos, buffalos, Eskimos, folios, juxtapose, Oreos, panty hose, Romeos, status quos, tic tac toes, videos, my wild Irish rose, and which way the wind blows. These are only a smattering of the 150 or so words or phrases rhyming with "nose" that you will find in any reputable rhyming dictionary. When given an opportunity to write a new adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, a play that has long been a great favorite of mine, I knew that Rhyme was to be key to my work for a variety of reasons.
To begin with, I could conceive of no better way to honor the original. Rostand wrote his masterwork in rhyme, specifically in rhyming iambic hexameter Alexandrines, the style of great classical French dramatists. (By the sixteenth century, the Alexandrine was the standard line for epic narrative, tragedy, and high comedy, and it remained characteristic of French heroic verse for three centuries more.) Still, most adaptations of Cyrano are written in blank verse, including the one I grew up with, the seminal 1923 translation by American poet Brian Hooker, who also traded in the iambic hexameter for iambic pentameter. For good reason. With its resemblance to the normal rhythmic pattern of ordinary English speech, blank verse in iambic pentameter is a natural medium for the dramatist writing in this language.
I took the opposite approach—keeping the rhyme, while choosing to vary the meter. As contemporary audiences obviously do not respond to the Alexandrine line in the same way as those of Rostand's day, there seemed little point in preserving it. Instead, I fell headlong into the emancipating embrace of an unfixed metrical pattern. And carried along by this freedom, I made use of all types of rhyme (masculine, feminine or light, / apocopated, eye or sight, / end-stopped or internal and broken or wrenched; / in fact, any or all— "Anglicized" or…"Frenched?") conveyed in progressively less constrained verse units—from standard couplets to enjambments to open couplets and even far "freer" forms of expression. Taking such artistic liberties seemed, well, "right on the nose" for Cyrano, a telling way to capture the spirit of a work whose title character rejects formality, holds a keen disregard for decorum, and prizes his independence, his unique and unfettered style, far above any worldly considerations. When in the patisserie his friend Le Bret inquires what it is that Cyrano wants out of life, he famously replies "etre libre" — "to be free." (Rostand goes on to rhyme this with "la voix qui vibre"— "a ringing/resounding voice.")
Consider also that Cyrano de Bergerac is not a realistic play, but rather one that portrays a world somewhat idealized. Language can clearly help to define that world and in "la voix qui vibre," with rhyme serving to elevate the piece above everyday reality. Even when the perfect balance between the music of the words and their meaning is found in performance, the lines accordingly spoken with the quality of commonplace speech, the rhyming will not altogether fade away. A whisper of it is left in the audiences' ears, softly proclaiming that the world depicted on the stage is a romanticized one.
The use of rhyme, significantly, also serves to acknowledge, perhaps even enhance, the critical nature of that language itself in this world. In Cyrano de Bergerac the lives of the play's inhabitants are driven and transformed by poetry, by words—most notably through Cyrano's letters and his discourse in the dark beneath Roxane's balcony. "Elle baise les mots que j'ai dit..." "She kisses the words that I spoke...," remarks Cyrano, emerging from the shadows having just witnessed Roxane and Christian's first embrace. It is a bittersweet affirmation of the efficacy of language. With words being so central to the story, rhyme was my way of linguistically emphasizing their presence and importance.
Finally, it should be recalled that Edmond Rostand labeled Cyrano de Bergerac a "Comedie Heroique." The Heroics are evident in every adaptation, not only in the abundant swashbuckle and battlefield bravado, but even more so in the quiet sacrifice that pervades the whole of the piece. But what of the Comedy? Notwithstanding the notion that the nose is an intrinsically funny feature of our physiognomy, or such inherently comic situations as the beginning of the balcony scene and Cyrano's all-embracing paean to his proboscis, the dramatist's copious wordplay is quite delightful, making the piece often as witty as it is moving. "Trompe" in its verb form means "misunderstand." But hearing this word spoken early in the play, Cyrano deliberately 'misunderstands' it as a slur on his snout, responding to its noun form, which refers to an elephant's trunk. Needless to say, such lexical levity does not readily traverse from one language to another, perhaps explaining why so many English renditions of the play do not mine Rostand's rich vein of humor as deeply as they might. But this adapter felt compelled to try. On The Shakespeare Theatre stage, among Cyrano's "eloquent options" for insulting a big nose, you will hear this suggestion: "To the pachyderm you must be related / for your own trunk, sir, is no less truncated." The use of rhyme invites playfulness. In the aforementioned balcony scene, Christian beseeches Cyrano for help, asserting that should his wooing fail, he will surely die beneath the very tree that now conceals his whereabouts. I have Cyrano admonish him to think more clearly, with the mosaic triple rhyme: "What of Roxane? How pleasantly would it surprise her / come the morning, to find you here as fertilizer?"
You won't, of course, find this couplet in the Rostand text. Alas, words that rhyme in French don't necessarily do so when translated into English. Because of this, and basic structural differences in the two languages, I had my work cut out for me. (Indubitably, one would do well to have a nose like Cyrano's when it is to be so pressed against the grindstone!) When seeking my rhymes, I found myself guided more by Rostand's intent than by his exact vocabulary. So this version of Cyrano de Bergerac is far more an adaptation than a literal translation. And the changes transcend the vocabulary. Allusions obscure to 21st century audiences (who amongst us remembers Artaban, the gasconading hero of a 17th-century French novel?) have been tenderly "nosed-out" of this adaptation, but one small example of the many sorts of deletions and abridgements I made in the five-act original. Think of these cuts as literary rhinoplasty, a gentle bob to slightly reshape the play for modern sensibilities. If the results are far from perfect, I take heart in Rostand's frequent use of slant rhymes, those with an imperfect match of sounds ( "raison" and "oison," for example). Indeed, the imperfect choice might well be the most appropriate one when it comes to Cyrano de Bergerac. After all, for all of his panache, the immortal Cyrano remains dramatic literature's great champion of imperfection.
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WRITING 'CYRANO'
(Transcript of Opening Night Gala speech, modified)
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Whenever I'm asked to remark on my process of writing, I'm a bit embarrassed to say that, even after many years of going at it, I still don't have one. A dramatist once described penning a play this way: "Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit in front of the computer, lean your head against the screen…and wait until it bleeds." But I think Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan Lori-Parks may have captured my sentiments best: "Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened—not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always, no matter how many plays I write, a new and unchartered place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done."
That rings very true to me, even though with Cyrano de Bergerac I was not altogether entering an undiscovered country, a virgin wilderness of spirit. I had the great gift of a colorful and detailed map drawn by that most expert of literary cartographers—Edmond Rostand. I have always been deeply touched by his masterwork, with its story of the transforming power of love and language, its almost divinely noble yet profoundly flawed and human characters, its idealism, its romance, and, of course, its words, all packaged in a work of art that is both heartbreaking and comic at the same time. Like Shakespeare's work, Rostand's play has a remarkable dramatic vitality, perhaps made evident by the fact that it has been translated into numerous languages, transformed into a ballet, an opera, and motion pictures as diverse as Steve Martin's Roxanne and The Truth About Cats & Dogs, not to mention that apotheosis of immortality—a Mr. Magoo cartoon.
As an adaptor I had to decide what to keep and what to let go, what I might need to change and how to do so. Saul Bellow once described writing as a moment of finding "stillness in the midst of chaos." I'm not so sure about the stillness, but it is undeniably a chaotic and messy operation for me. Just a glimpse of a page of an early draft with its multicolored inkings, scribbled arrows, asterisks, crossed-out text, and tea stains would make that all too clear. I chose to maintain Rostand's use of rhyme, but to free his meter. He utilized the Alexandrine, a line that had special associations for late 19th century French theatergoers, but one not resonant in the here and now. I altered many classical allusions obscure to me and, I presume, to most 21st century audiences, and even eliminated characters—two perhaps worth mentioning here. First to go was the drunken poet Ligniere who only appears in the play's first scene. I fused his somewhat meager character's role with that of the delightful Ragueneau who, in the original, all but disappears on stage in that first scene, speaking no words for some 40 pages after his introduction. Similarly, I amalgamated the commander of the Cadets, Carbon de Castle-Jouloux, into the role of the salt-of-the-earth Le Bret. These consolidations not only did away with two of Rostand's thinner characters, but hopefully made two of his meaty ones meatier still.
Such changes take time. At least for me. Although there are playwrights who work fast (Noel Coward and Sam Shepard come immediately to mind), I'm not one of them. But I am in very good company, too. In the earliest version of Travesties, Tom Stoppard had Tristan Tzara address James Joyce as "you blarney-arsed bog-eating Irish pig." But in the final version the line had become "By God, you suspicious streak of Irish puke." As Stoppard explained "all this takes weeks." Working on Cyrano, I would often find myself spending the longest time on some of the shortest passages, trying to preserve the rhyme while maintaining the meaning and mood of the moment. I'm reminded right away of two particular segments, both occurring in the Patisserie. In the first, Cyrano is composing a letter out loud while a conversation is taking place between Lise and a Musketeer at a nearby table. These simultaneous speeches had to make sense separately and together - and still rhyme - and in meter! It all goes by in a flash, but took forever to write, as did the sequence shortly thereafter in which our hero describes his fight with the mob of one hundred, only to be continuously interrupted by Christian's disparaging remarks about his nose—that famous nose that casts a looming shadow over Cyrano's very selfhood.
I hope this was time well spent. To offer some idea of how things ended up in this new adaptation, below is a comparison of a brief passage as rendered in the Rostand original, the seminal Brian Hooker translation, and in my version:
Rostand:
Mais…chanter,
Rever, rire, passer, etre seul, etre libre,
Avoir l'oeil qui regarde bien, la voix qui vibre,
Mettre, quand il vous plait, son feutre de travers,
Pour un oui, pour un non, se batter, ou-faire un vers!
Travailler sans souci de gloire ou de fortune,
A tel voyage, auquel on pense, dans la lune!
Hooker:
To sing, to laugh, to dream,
To walk in my own way; be alone,
Free with an eye to see things as they are,
A voice that means manhood—to cock my hat
Where I choose—At a word, a Yes, a No,
To fight—or write. To travel any road
Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt
If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne.
Me:
To dream, to laugh, to sing,
to let my heart take wing,
Free! - with an eye open to see all things as they are!
To fight—to write—to follow the moon or any star
that I choose
win or lose…
Panache. This is the last word Rostand puts on Cyrano's lips before he dies. We use this word in English as there is no native synonym for it. It is likely impossible to translate all the playwright meant by it anyway, a word that originally referred simply to an ornamental plume or tuft of feathers worn on a hat or helmet, but which came to mean so much more through its use in Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand himself had difficulty explaining his precise definition of the term to the French Academy when he was inducted as its youngest member in 1901. Ultimately, he called it a special kind of "grace" which he wished upon all of the Academia. It is my hope and wish, finally, that my rendition of Rostand's landmark creation has even a little of that wonderfully elusive quality of spirit—that panache his play and his protagonist so embody.
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Barry Kornhauser, playwright-in-residence and director of Family Theater at the National Historic Landmark Fulton Opera House, Lancaster, Pa., is the United States nominee for the 2008 ASSITEJ International Award for Artistic Excellence. He has received the AATE Distinguished Play Award, the IRT/Bonderman Playwriting Prize, a TYA/USA International Observership and its Best Plays of the Decade commendation, and fellowships and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, TCG and the National Endowment for the Arts. This Is Not a Pipe Dream, Warped, Better Angels, Thunder and Potatoes, Calibanana, Worlds Apart, Honey and Sting, Power Play and A Christmas Carol are some of his titles. Directing projects have included Amazwi Omoya, New Kid, Sundiata, Two Donuts, Robinson and Friday, Wiley and the Hairy Man, Currently Franklin: The Story of a Paper Boy and Bocón! He also directs the Fulton's Youtheatre program for at-risk and disabled teens, winner of multiple NEA grants, the Starbucks Foundation Giving Voice honor and the PCA's Keystones of Accessibility Award. Kornhauser has taught theater everywhere from a one-room Amish schoolhouse to the University of New Mexico, and his HIV/AIDS prevention theater project, created under a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, won the state's Best Practices honor. As playwright and/or director, his work has taken him to such venues as the San Diego Theatre of the World Festival, the New Play Festival of NYC's Provincetown Playhouse, the Bonderman Festival, the Smithsonian and both the Kennedy Center's New Visions/New Voices and One Theatre World events. Kornhauser was the recipient of the Theatre Association of Pennsylvania's first Educational Theatre Award for "outstanding service by an individual for the advancement of theatre education in the Commonwealth." He also was the 2006 recipient of the Ivey Award for playwriting for his script Reeling, which premiered at the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, recipient of the 2003 Tony Award as America's Outstanding Regional Theatre. Kornhauser's verse adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac (entitled Cyrano), the Fulton's 2000-2001 season opener, was remounted by Michael Kahn at the acclaimed Shakespeare Theatre and was Washington's most honored production in 2005, winning four Helen Hayes Awards including Best Play. His newest work for the Fulton, Sowing the Wind, was developed through a PennPAT New Directions grant. Kornhauser has served on various panels of the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Ohio Councils on the Arts, the Heinz Endowments and the NEA. He is on the board of TYA/USA and is a member of The Dramatists Guild. For the AATE, he is the Pennsylvania state representative and has served as chair of the Winifred Ward committee and as a Playwrights in Our Schools mentor. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, Kornhauser shares an enthusiasm for the school with his wife, Carol, who works there, and sons, Max (a recent graduate) and Sam (a junior). Daughter, Ariel (who will begin attending next year), completes his real-life cast of "characters." |
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