Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover”
...followed by “La Musica Deuxième,” with performances by Astrid Bas, Daniel Pettrow, and violinist Ami Flammer
In collaboration with the Theater and Dance office of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York
“To share a language, a desire, the look in the other’s eye. The story of a couple who are coming apart, each speaking his or her own language; in a common language, the language of the couple. Music, the music of the story, of their history together. We’ve worked on that, Daniel and I, both of us, in a language that was almost foreign; for him and for me, to him and to me.”
Astrid Bas
The Program
The Lover (1984)
50 minutes
In The Lover, Marguerite Duras evokes the Indochina of her youth. A teenage girl in the thirties in Saigon has a scandalous affair with a rich Chinese man. In The Lover, Marguerite Duras adopts a tone that seems to confide to the reader topics that had haunted her throughout her work. Audiences are able to go with her as she drifts down through the Asia of the great Mekong River. The reader follows Duras through the twisting meanderings of the Delta, down into the humid rice fields and into the secret shadows of her obsessive and repeated incantations, which rise to the surface again and again in her books, films, and plays.
We get so involved with the details of the lovers’ story, so candidly and brazenly created by the novelist, that we are utterly carried away by it. It is no wonder that the novel was a tremendous hit right off the presses when it was published in 1984, winning le Prix Goncourt, the prestigious French literary prize. Astrid Bas performs in The Lover, with violin accompaniment by Ami Flammer.
La Musica Deuxième (1964)
50 minutes
“She: It was another man, not you. Anyway, that’s how it was, another man. You were off to one side, alone, on the other side were all the men I’ll never get to know. (Pause) I think you must understand me perfectly. (Pause) Isn’t that right?” From La Musica Deuxième.
La Musica Deuxième was first performed at la Maison Française at the New York University in 2007.The brilliant bilingual performance of Marguerite Duras’s work, performed by French actress Astrid Bas and American actor Daniel Pettrow, was well received by audiences. Performed by him in English and by her in French, each part is an accomplished feat of acting in its own language, with subtitles provided in English for the French part.
A man and a woman have just gotten divorced. They have started new lives but are unable to untie the knot which binds them. A shared desire to meet brings them together again. They are both familiar and strange, known and unknown to the other. A word here, a word there, and they begin to put the past they shared back together, a past which tugs on all the misunderstandings and betrayals and begins to unravel again.
In La Musica Deuxième, the real and the imagined become hard to separate, forming and reforming themselves according to desire’s melodic strains. The two hear each other as if listening to a piece of music, a piece of music Marguerite Duras has us hear as a chant coming from deep within, one that makes itself felt, as much as it is heard, from a far-off, secret place. Neither memory nor the past is fixed in place: everything happens in an endless back and forth between refusal and nostalgia, tenderness and revolt. (From comments by director Martine Charlet)
La Musica Deuxième is performed by Astrid Bas and Daniel Pettrow.
The performers
French actress and director Astrid Bas has worked the past few years on Georges Lavaudant’s adaptations for the French stage of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Cassandra by Christa Wolf, Cenci by Artaud, Satyricon by Bruno Maderna, and Buchner’s Death of Danton. She has also been in stage adaptations directed by Anatoli Vassiliev, Bruno Bayen, Frédéric Fisbach, Eugène Durif, Hélène Vincent, Yves Baunesne and Jean-Marie Patte. With a Master’s degree from Paris’s national conservatory of dramatic art, as well as a degree from the national theater school of Strasbourg, Astrid Bas has also appeared in feature-length films by Benoît Jacquot, Arnaud Viard and Shiri Tsur.
American national Daniel Pettrow has acted in more than fifty-five stage productions, both in national and international theater. As a member of the Wooster Group in New York, where he is currently appearing in Hamlet, Daniel Pettrow has worked on a number of collaborations with French directors, including Arthur Nauzyciel, Artistic Director of the National Theater of Orleans, and the German director Walter Asmus. In 1996, he also co-founded an alternative arts center in Atlanta called The Ballroom Studios, which is mainly involved with theater arts and the visual arts. Like Astrid Bas, he has also performed on the silver screen, in such films as Cult of Sincerity, The Last Adam and Kathy T. Getting Better, andon TV in Goodbeats and Roadtrip.
Ami Flammer has been solo violinist in the largest national and international chamber orchestras. Winner of the Maria Canals International Competition and of the George Enesco prize, he has been performing for years in a duo with Jean-Claude Pennetier, with whom he has recorded contemporary works and composers. He is a professor at the conservatory of Chalon-sur-Saone and of Gennevilliers, and is currently a professor of chamber music at Paris’s National Conservatory for Advanced Music Studies. In 1988, he published a tome of considerable length on the violin, published by Lattès. He has also composed several scores for cinema (for adaptations of novels by Marguerite Duras and for productions by filmmaker Eric Rohmer) and for theater (Kafka at the Avignon Festival in 1993, with Michael Lonsdale).
Cast
Astrid Bas: Actress
Daniel Pettrow: Actor
Ami Flammer: Violin accompaniment
Link to Daniel Pettrow’s website: www.danielpettrow.com
Link to the Theater and Dance office of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York: http://frenchculture.org/spip.php?article956
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