6-23-06
Zimmerman hands over
the reins to her protege.
Mary Beth Peil holds the stage for an hour and a half as Proust's maid.
She remembers “yelling and yelling at him” in the dream.
Now, even though the dream has not come true, Rosen regularly welcomes Zimmerman to rehearsal with the words, “Wait ‘til you see the new number.”
It doesn’t take a degree in dream analysis to understand Zimmerman’s anxiety about handing over the director’s reins to Rosen. It’s the first time the Tony Award-winning writer has had someone else helm one of her original adaptations.
From the beginning, Zimmerman knew she wouldn’t be directing this show. She’s currently working on three shows simultaneously while also teaching full-time at Northwestern. “I’m not bored,” she says. She’s perfectly happy to keep up to date on M. Proust’s progress by reading the rehearsal reports each day and talking regularly to Rosen.
“I’m shocked that I’ve been as casual about it as I have,” she said. “I thought that this was going to destroy Eric and mine’s relationship. That I was going to go in and absolutely take over.”
Instead she’s tried to embrace an approach espoused to her by Philip Glass when he had two world premieres of the opera Akhnaten opening simultaneously in different cities, under different directors. He told her, “The whole purpose of this is to see what someone else does.”
It helps, of course, that Zimmerman and Rosen have known each other for years. “My trust in him is sort of total,” she said.
Rosen’s first real contact with Zimmerman, ironically, was in a class she taught at Northwestern on performing Proust. “To tell you the truth, I knew nothing about Proust at all,” he said. “I just had to take her first class. Then I just fell in love with it and with her.”
Zimmerman had fallen in love with Proust much earlier. She’d planned to read his 3-volume “Remembrance of Things Past” the summer she was 18. It ended up taking her four years. “Because I was really young, it was slow going.”
Yet she couldn’t help “but be impressed by the acuity with which he writes about human behavior,” she said. “There’s just no one like him in the world in describing our complex drives and emotions and the contrariness that’s inside all of us. And he’s the best at love and unrequited love and passion and desire and how the whole cycle and mechanism of that seems to work.”
She kept returning to Proust and now admits to “an obsessive love for him.”
”There were years in which I had those volumes by my bedside and kind of randomly opened them and read just from anywhere as much as some people might scripture,” she said.
Which led, eventually, to her staging a master’s recital inspired by Proust while completing her Ph.D. 20 years ago at Northwestern. It was a 40-minute one-woman piece in which Albaret recalled her eight to 10 years in service to Proust while he was writing his literary masterpiece.
“They were sort of best friends,” Zimmerman says of the unlikely pair. Albaret was fiercely loyal to Proust and guarded his privacy and his work diligently. After his death, she was asked over and over again to comment on the author’s life and she refused for 50 years. Only when she was 83 (and we’ll come later to reasons why) did she agree to do a series of interviews talking about the way in which Proust would come home at night and perform the events of the day for her, rehearsing them before sitting down to write them into his book.
This idea of Proust first rehearsing his writing with his maid as an audience enthralled Zimmerman. “He actually sort of performed it out loud before he wrote, and it just goes to show that all literature is speech that was captured and wants to return to the air again.”
But she concedes the maid’s role was little more than a framing device in the first performance piece. “Initially, she was just a convenience for me to get to these big passages of Proust that I wanted to do.”
Now she says the show could just as easily be titled Celeste, as M. Proust examines the connection between the maid and the writer. “Their relationship is really moving,” Zimmerman said. “He was really, really lucky to find her and she basically turned her life over to him. She didn’t write a word, but she made his life possible and his work possible in a way that not just anyone could have done.”
The piece is “a little bit about hero worship,” says Zimmerman, quoting Albaret: ”’I can’t imagine a more beautiful life than the years I lived with him,’” or ”’I died when he did. I lived for 50 more years, but I went the night he died.’”
Yet what makes the work particularly fitting for About Face is the reason Albaret finally broke her silence regarding her beloved Proust. She felt she had to publicly disavow the idea the author was a homosexual (although all other evidence shows he was).
It’s perfectly Proustian, Rosen said. Just as Proust’s characters tend to be obsessed with people who turn out to have alternate desires, Albaret was infatuated with a gay man. “She’s in love with Proust and she can’t accept that he’s gay and the reason really is because then he couldn’t have loved her and she really believed that they had this intensely different relationship than what they actually had.”
That’s where the real story is, Zimmerman said. “If you read Proust, he really starts to open up in his writing when he does long passages that are just unbelievably detailed and compassionate about those people who are homosexual. Yet the entire ruse is that it’s someone else. It’s just kind of beautiful to see Mary Beth Peil doing Celeste doing Proust masquerading as someone who is objectively talking about this. When actually he’s talking about himself.”
It makes for a multi-layered production, but that’s how it has to be done, Rosen and Zimmerman both agree. “If you try to stage [Proust] head on it’s impossible,” Rosen said.
“What you have to do in order to do him is find some way to focus it, or fracture it, or refract it through some lens,” says Zimmerman. “In this case it’s through his housekeeper Celeste Albaret.”
This is not Rosen and Zimmerman’s first foray into staging Proust together. Before this was Proust House, a production developed out of that first performing Proust class at Northwestern. That latter was developed into About Face’s Eleven Rooms of Proust. In that site-specific and sensory experience, the idea was to stage Proust’s dreams.
“I’ll tell you that some of the best performances of my life have been around Proust,” Rosen said.
“This is a next step in our creative relationship and we’re both aware that that’s happening,” says Rosen. “But to be honest, I don’t work with any writers that I don’t have a huge reverence for. It’s very clear between us, as it is with most writers I work with, that I’m serving the writer’s vision.”
Rosen is particularly qualified to realize Zimmerman’s vision as he is probably one of the artists best tapped into her intentions. He spent a year of his life traveling around the country mounting productions of Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. In taking the show apart and regularly rebuilding it, he came to understand it from the inside.
“I understand her vision, her style, her taste, her technique. As much as anyone can understand another artists’ work, I understand hers,” he says.
It also helps the collaboration that they’re good friends. “We’re kind of best friends,” says Rosen. “We talk several times a week and make each other laugh. So when it’s tense, we can crack each other up and that’s valuable.
“She’s also very trusting with me. She’s been responsive to my ideas and my process and very respectful of what I need as a director to get the best show out. She’s totally available when I need her and she disappears when she thinks it’s best not to be in the room.”
Zimmerman trusts Rosen’s expertise particularly because of the nature of the production. “This is a very, very different show than most of the shows I do. It’s one person. It’s one set. It’s all talking, There aren’t any movement sequences. No one does a back flip.”
Along with the constraints on her time, Zimmerman acknowledges another factor in her willingness to let Rosen direct was her reluctance to take on the “intense engagement with a single other person,” a one-person show represents. “For the most part it’s negotiating with an actor the approach to this text, line by line, and Eric has a lot of practice [with that] in a way that I don’t.”
Zimmerman has a markedly different process. She’s normally writing the script as she goes in the hours between her rehearsals.
“M. Proust is much more standard. This is much more the way the way it’s normally done,” she said. For her, a big difference was in having to provide Rosen with a script to work with on the opening day of rehearsals. “I had to forecast what it was going to be like, which is what every normal playwright does, but which I’ve never done, or almost never done.”
During the week of tech rehearsals, Zimmerman was confident her nightmare scenario would not be realized. “How wrong can it go? It’s not like staging an epic with cast of 29, and it’s three and a half hours long, and it has all kinds of multimedia and a thousand billion choices to be made. This is like a single unit set. She has one costume. She’s on stage the entire time. She has a chair. So what are the outrageous things that can happen?”
Her enthusiasm for Peil’s performance also contributes peace of mind. “She’s unspeakably brilliant in this,” Zimmerman said. “There is something transfixing about her and so authentic. I told her, ‘I’m taking a $100 bet right now that there are going to be people who come to you on the sidewalk and say, “You must have been so sad that M. Proust died.” [People that] actually think that she’s real.’”
Rosen’s not taking the bet. He too raves about Peil’s contribution as the show’s third collaborative force. “I say three words to her and her face lights up and she says, ‘Let me try, let me try,’ and then she does something that is so much more complicated and layered than what I could have imagined moments to be like. There’s this surplus of life in her that is translated into the work.”
It’s exactly why Rosen enjoys working on one-person shows. “It’s almost like working in miniature, in that every detail, every breath of it matters,” he said.
“It can become really hallucinatory when you’ve put enough detail in that all of a sudden the performance starts to feel more real and more alive than life does. I watch Mary Beth do some moments and I feel like I’m looking at the person in front of me. Not the actor. Not the character.”
Much to Zimmerman’s relief that person does not sing, or take off her clothes.
M. Proust opened June 9 in the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre. The show continues through July 16. Tickets are $25 – 40. Call 312/355-1650 or visit www.aboutfacetheatre.com.