EXIT Press | The publishing division of EXIT Theatre, presenting indie theater since 1983

$18.00 at Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com (wholesale orders available at Small Press Distribution).
Pelleas and Melisande is one of three plays included in Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi, new translations by Rob Melrose of the Cutting Ball Theater, with a foreword by Oskar Eustis of the New York Public Theatre, an introduction by Paul Walsh of the Yale School of Drama, and an afterword by the translator.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY PAUL WALSH, YALE SCHOOL OF DRAMA:
“To bring these three plays ( Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi) together into a single volume is to embrace a heritage of modernist experiment, left us by young men in their 20s living in the 19th century. It is a heritage that redefined risk as it redefined theater and the purposes it serves. And it is this that makes this volume so valuable. We are invited to see these plays that defined the theater of today afresh, in a language that is both immediate and theatrical, and embrace the risk they celebrate as our own. And isn’t that what we should expect from a new translation? To experience again as new those very things that helped shape who we are?…

“Maurice Maeterlinck entranced his audience with a new kind of dramatic action that was more static than active and more contemplative than resolute.

“Pelleas and Melisande was among Maeterlinck’s first great plays for the new theater. It was given a single performance on 17 May 1893 at the Bouffes-Parisiens, directed by Aurélien Lugné-Poe, whose Théâtre de l’Oeuvre would host Jarry’s Ubu Roi three years later. The Belgian-born Maeterinck was 29 and already heralded (by Octave Mirbeau writing in Le Figaro), as the most brilliant, sublime and moving dramatic poet of the age, rivaling Shakespeare in his ability to pierce the mystery of human nature. Other critics were less kind. They found Maeterinck’s mystical tale of forbidden love and the inescapable lure of destiny both undramatic and unnatural. Maeterlinck countered that the dramatic was itself unnatural, and chose instead to explore the inescapable inevitability of fate as it mocks the paucity of human intentions and human desires. His story is a simple one but its reverberations are immense. A child-like woman marries a man, falls in love with his brother, and dies. For a moment, beauty pervades the world of shadows sending ripples across the surface of a lake and then fades. At the moment of happiness, disaster strikes. Only a drama of inaction can capture the mystery of a world in which action itself proves futile.

“Like Ubu Roi, Pelleas and Melisande was judged unstageable because, like Ubu Roi, it created a new language for the stage. Among those who attended Lugné-Poe’s performance of Pelleas and Melisande were Stephen Mallarmé and Claude Debussy. Both were entranced by the play. Debussy considered it the perfect vehicle for a new kind of opera. Inspired by Maeterlinck’s search for meaning in suggestion rather than statement, Debussy composed an opera of fleeting impressions floating in a strangely insubstantial and decidedly metaphysical ether. Debussy’s opera premiered in 1902. The following year Arnold Schoenberg used Maeterinck’s play as the basis for an orchestral tone poem, and two years later Jean Sibelius composed incidental music for a production of the play in Helsinki. Something in Maeterlinck’s play spoke to the tenor of the modern age.

“At a time when the Parisian critic Ferdinand Brunetière promoted a drama that turned on the battle of wills and Émile Zola promoted a drama that documented the elemental battle for survival in realistic environments, Maeterlinck chose an unassuming fairy-tale plot composed in an ambiguous language, at once formal and surprising direct. This poetry of the theater, without rhyme or meter, relies on repetitions and symbolic resonances to craft a drama of metaphysical import. These characters seem to glide through a world that is familiar even if not like that in which we live our daily lives. And in the process, Maeterlinck created a new dramatic vocabulary capable of intimating the feelings of incomprehension and suspension we feel in our most intimate moments: when we acknowledge our aloneness before the fear of death or the longing we experience at moments of inexpressible happiness. ‘I’ll never find my way out of this forest again’: the clarity of the words point to without capturing what remains immediate and unfathomable.

“There is an acknowledgement of implacable cruelty at the heat of Maeterlinck’s play that pushes it into the 20th century. It is this that terrified audiences at the play’s first performance and it is this we cannot escape today. This sense of implacable cruelty ties Maeterlinck’s play with Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. Composer Alban Berg recognized this when he sat down to write his famous opera based on Büchner’s text: ‘It is not only the destiny of this poor man, but also the unheard-of-mood of the individual scenes …You will find something similar in [Maeterlinck’s] Pelléas!’”

FROM THE TRANSLATOR’S NOTES:
While directing Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, I read that the play Konstantin writes within the play itself is based on the plays of Maeterlinck. Who was this Maeterlinck, I wondered, and why had I never studied him in school? I was surprised to find that Ibsen and Strindberg were also influenced by Maeterlinck and that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. I immediately started reading his plays as well as the only biography I could find about him. Maeterlinck’s plays are truly unique. They have a moody, evocative, melancholy fairy-tale quality to them. Scholars have labeled them as “symbolist” plays and the great Russian directors Stanislavsky and Meyerhold struggled to find a performance style to suit his writing. He was in his time, a tremendous force. Maeterlinck had a castle in Nice and a mansion in Paris. To get permission to compose an opera of Pelleas and Melisande, Claude Debussy, a pauper at the time, knocked on the door of Maeterlink’s house and asked the Nobel Prize winning author. Permission was granted and the rest is history. It has always amused me that in that moment, it would have seemed unbelievable to Maeterlinck that this poor composer would outshine him and that in the future Maeterlinck would mainly be known through Debussy’s opera. It’s an odd twist of fate. Translating Maeterlinck is tricky. I started work on Pelleas and Melisande while a student in Paul Schmidt’s class (at the Yale School of Drama). Schmidt was puzzled at what to do with the play. The characters give long descriptions of their surroundings, which Schmidt felt should be cut and put into the visuals of a production. At the same time as he was teaching me, Schmidt was translating Phèdre for the Wooster Group and was striping down Racine’s verse into a clean film noir-like prose. Yet what made sense for the Wooster Group’s production of Racine (later titled To You the Birdie), didn’t make sense for my work on Maeterlinck. For me, the challenge of translating the play is figuring out how much of that moody oddness a modern audience can take. It is a different aesthetic and it is almost as if he is showing what it would be like if people spoke to each other from their souls. It is not about being realistic but rather about being essential. Otto Heller puts it best in his book, Prophets of Dissent: Maeterlinck holds that nothing matters that is not eternal and that what keeps us from enjoying the treasures of the universe is the hereditary resignation with which we tarry in the gloomy prison of our senses. “In reality, we live only from soul to soul, and we are gods who do not know each other.” (Maeterlinck, “on Emerson.”) It follows from this metaphysical foundation of his art that instead of the grosser terminology suitable to plain realities, Maeterlinck must depend upon a code of subtle messages in order to establish between himself and his audience a line of spiritual communication.

Maeterlinck is full of characters talking soul to soul and full of silence as well. There are more ellipses in Pelleas and Melisande than in any other play I have read. I started by translating each line word for word, even trying to duplicate the sentence structure. Then I went through with Paul Schmidt’s voice whispering in my ear every time a repetition seemed too much or sentence structure was just too bizarre. I tried to smooth things out and get the language sounding like people actually talking to each other. I wish so much that he were here to see the result. I know he’d have comments to give in the intelligent, generous, and gentle way that only Paul Schmidt could.

read more about Ubu Roi

$18.00 at Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com (wholesale orders available at Small Press Distribution). Ubu Roi is one of three plays included in Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi, new translations by Rob Melrose of the Cutting Ball Theater, with a foreword by Oskar Eustis of the New York Public Theatre, an introduction by Paul Walsh of the Yale School of Drama, and an afterword by the translator.

“Something remarkable happened on December 10, 1896. Something that changed theater forever. On that day a diminutive young man of 23 named Alfred Jarry stood before the gathered audience at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris and introduced his new play. The expectant audience was mixed of friends and foes, enthusiastic supporters and suspicious critics. They had come to see a new play by a writer of promise. What they got instead was a riotous parody, a malicious mockery, a scabrous affront, a puerile attack on literature, on drama, on theater and on themselves. As the first word of the play was pronounced from the stage, the theater erupted in pandamonium: a riot perhaps, or perhaps a demonstration that testified to the belligerent daring of Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Friends celebrated, foes fumed, and the bad-boy avant-garde was born. It took nearly fifteen minutes before the play could continue. People stormed the exits, fist fights broke out, and Jarry’s supporters shouted: “You wouldn’t understand Shakespeare either!” (always a useful retort during any kind of brawl).

“Here was a play unlike anything seen on the stages of Paris before: a scatological mockery that challenged assumptions about good taste and good behavior, a performance that questioned the very nature of theater and divided the audience between those who came expecting the ordinary and those who came hoping for the extraordinary. All at once the very notion of risk was redefined as both a style and a goal. And the greater the risk, the greater the reward.

“What had started out as an adolescent puppet show for school friends, lampooning a hated teacher, ended up an avant-garde scandal of momentous proportions: an irreverent parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth without poetic rhyme or logical reason. The tragic heroes of old were replaced by an omnivorous, foulmouthed ogre who becomes the king of Poland simply by being greedy, sadistic, mean-spirited, and obscene. Perhaps Father Ubu was meant as a monstrous metaphor of the modern philistine, bent only on self-gratification and ready to abuse the power of success. If so, we know the type, just as we recognize what Father Ubu calls “the battle of the voracious against the courageous” in which “the voracious have completely devoured the courageous.” And that’s why Jarry’s play continues to capture our imagination today.

“Jarry’s Ubu Roi was a deliberate affront, an impudent attack on established culture, and an impish act of self-performance in which the artist demonstrated his right to say whatever he wanted in whatever way he wanted, and the world could like it or take their lumps. As an artist, Jarry celebrated the unhealthy and the unnatural. He was given to excessive displays of excessive behavior including worship of the mysteries of absinthe that hasted his death at age 34 of tuberculosis complicated by dissipation. In his final years he took to dressing as Father Ubu, violating every rule of polite society and decent conduct and inventing his own school of artistic practice, which he called ’pataphysics or the “science of imaginary solutions.” 20th-century playwrights from Jean Genet to Eugene Ionesco to Mac Wellman have described themselves as following in the ’pataphysical tradition. “The opening volley in what was later described as a pitched battle for the terrain of the stage between avant-garde barbarians and middle-class philistines was a craftily inappropriate obscenity, an untranslatable mispronunciation that was itself a denunciation: “merdre!” The word has been rendered into English in dozens of ways from “Shittr” to “Shite” to “Pschitter” to “Shee-yit,” but none of these translations has achieved the same riotous response that first welcomed Father Ubu to the stage. Perhaps the task is impossible. Riots don’t happen every day. Or perhaps it’s not a matter of translation but a matter of situation. Maybe it wasn’t the word that caused the riot or demonstration or ruckus or outburst, but the play’s blatant attempt to insult its audience by utterly disregarding theatrical conventions and the conventions of going to the theater. Perhaps it was the winds of change that sparked the riot or the shadow of things to come. In fact, we are told, more obscenities were hurled by members of the audience at one another than were heard from the stage.

“Jarry’s audience was poised for trouble — both friends and foes — and they found trouble at the first excuse. Today we are inured to insult, especially from the stage, and less prone to find offense, even when it’s intended. What is a translator to do? Perhaps the goal is not to try to cause a riot but simply to make the play available to contemporary audiences in all its raw and playful mockery: to find a theatrical language that captures the semiotic polyvalence of Jarry’s original, that shares its heterogeneity, and embraces its admiration for the inappropriate, the fatuous, and the downright bad. When merdre becomes “To shit or…,” as in Rob Melrose’s translation printed here, two of the greatest turns of theatrical phrase in our shared vocabulary are combined and deflated in a single gesture, and the ambiguous relationship of Jarry’s text to the history of its performance and the history of all performance is underscored.”

FROM NOTES BY THE TRANSLATOR:
Translating and adapting Ubu Roi has unfortunately become a free-for-all in creating filthy new words and finding new excesses in language. People have used the play to make political statements, to criticize the middle class, and to shock the audience. I think most people working on the play overload it with nasty words trying to recapture the riot that came from its first production. I think causing an hour-long riot after the first word (“Merdre” in French) is impossible today. I don’t think trying to top the things that shock a modern audience is a good idea and I think these efforts take us further and further from the play Jarry actually wrote. In translating the play, my goal was to get back to some of Jarry’s original impulses. Ubu Roi started as a short sketch Jarry wrote as a precocious schoolboy with his friends making fun of their teacher and the things they learned in class, especially Shakespeare. This balance between Shakespearean plots and schoolboy antics it are what makes the play fun. There is something delightful about thinking about a bright puckish boy having his way with Shakespeare, whereas yet another shockfest is not as interesting. The first word “merdre” – Jarry’s invented word for “to shit”. He took the noun “merde” (shit) and added an “r” to it, making it into an infinitive verb. The most famous sentence in literature is “Être ou ne pas être” – “To be or not to be”. Starting the play with “merdre” is like a perverse version of “être” in the same way that the plot of the play is a perverse version of the plots of Macbeth and Hamlet. I’ve translated “Merdre” as “To shit or…” in order to get both the Shakespearean tone and the irreverence that undercuts it. It is important to remember that the premiere of Ubu Roi was in a major theater in Paris where men wore tuxedos and top hats and women wore evening gowns. The irreverence of the play only makes sense in opposition to the serious expectations of art that preceded it. The same is true of the original classroom sketch – the iconoclasm is coming out of an expectation of a serious study of literature. I thought it was important not only to stay true to Jarry’s original language but also to recapture some of the mock-serious tone the play has. The tone of the play is decidedly tricky. There are references to Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Henry IV 1 and 2, Henry V (Jarry loved the dirty French puns in Katherine’s scene), and Richard III. At the same time, there are numerous references to Punch and Judy shows (the small club, puppets, and being put in a pocket). I’ve made sure to bring out those Shakespearean echoes and have also used words from classic American comedy to get the Punch and Judy feel (sap, hooligan, lout, etc). On top of this, Jarry has a whole slew of invented words that echo Rabelais’s bawdy sixteenth century masterpieces Gargantua and Pantagruel. Like Rabelais, Jarry compounds words and alters them to form new creations. The closest we have to this in English is Lewis Carol’s Jabberwocky and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. As an example, Ubu’s favorite epithet is “cornegidouille” which combines “corne” – antler or horn with “bidouille” – tummy or belly. Essays have been written about this being Jarry’s way of sexualizing the belly – making it into a phallic symbol. I’ve translated this word as “hornpauncher” which hopefully joins the ideas of horn and belly in a way that also calls to mind “horny,” “paunch,” “puncher / poker,” as well as “Punch” the character. What is wonderful about this play is that on one hand it is the lowest of low comedy – appealing to our most vile instincts. On the other hand, it was written by a precocious and misunderstood genius with the highest level of intellect and invention. What is terrible about this play is that given the state of governments and human nature, it is always a contemporary play. There will always be Ubus. Without our doing anything to it, it is–sadly for us–always relevant.

read more about Pelleas and Melisande

$18.00 at Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com (wholesale orders available at Small Press Distribution). Woyzeck is one of three plays included in Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi, three new translations of plays by Cutting Ball Theater with a foreword by Oskar Eustis of New York’s Public Theatre, an introduction by Paul Walsh of the Yale School of Drama, and an afterword by translator Rob Melrose.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY PAUL WALSH:
“To bring these three plays ( Woyzeck, Pelleas and Melisande, Ubu Roi) together into a single volume is to embrace a heritage of modernist experiment, left us by young men in their 20s living in the 19th century. It is a heritage that redefined risk as it redefined theater and the purposes it serves. And it is this that makes this volume so valuable. We are invited to see these plays that defined the theater of today afresh, in a language that is both immediate and theatrical, and embrace the risk they celebrate as our own. And isn’t that what we should expect from a new translation? To experience again as new those very things that helped shape who we are?

“Born in 1813, (Büchner) died when he was only 24, leaving Woyzeck an unfinished crossword puzzle of short scenes and fragments that anticipate the dramaturgy of the late 20th century. Scholars have stewed over the four manuscripts that Büchner left at his death, amplifying and codifying, rearranging and revising, but only performance on stage can bring Büchner’s play to life as the text printed here does. Woyzeck was published posthumously in 1879 and received its first performance on November 8, 1913 at Munich’s Residenztheater. Since then it has been embraced as a defining text of the modernist avant-garde, staged around the world and heralded as a forerunner of all that came after it. It is epic in scope and structure, though it focuses on a single individual caught in the web of life. It creates its story through a seemingly haphazard series of scenes, each composed as a “slice of life.

” Here, as in Pelleas and Melisande, a man murders the woman he loves; and here, as in Maeterlinck’s play, the reasons seem insufficient. We are left feeling both helpless and inadequate: baffled by actions we can forgive but not explain.

“Büchner’s play tells of a man brutalized by society, by doctors and by the army, until he himself becomes the brutalizer. In a sense, Woyzeck becomes an ogre like Father Ubu in Jarry’s play or Golaud in Maeterlinck’s. His actions, like theirs, are implacable but understandable, and hold a mirror up to our own inexplicable but understandable cruelties. We search the play for reasons, rearranging the fragments, reinterpreting the clues, but are met each time with the same unanswerable questions that plague us in life. This too is a paradigmatic story for the modern age….” — from the introduction by Paul Walsh

FROM THE TRANSLATOR’S NOTES:

“Woyzeck is a mysterious play. Büchner started writing the play in 1836 and left it unfinished when he died a year later. He left four drafts behind and scholars, editors, and translators have puzzled over what to do with those four drafts ever since. For years the thinking was that these four drafts were equal fragments and it was up to the editor to piece together a play from the twenty-five odd scenes set down in these texts. Now scholars believe that the fourth draft was his final draft for publication. This draft only goes to scene seventeen, which means that a play for performance needs to use material from the earlier drafts even to have an hour-long play.

“This translation came from the facsimile edition of Büchner’s drafts in Büchner’s own handwriting and was created for The Cutting Ball Theater. It is decidedly a play for performance. For this version Büchner’s fourth draft is considered to be the final word and it follows the scene order he set down there.

“Büchner writes in short clipped short sentences, which some translators have interpreted as his attempt to capture the Hessian dialect. Many have tried to find a similar lower-class dialect in English for Woyzeck and Marie. This translation tries to capture some of the same sounds and sentence structures in English. So rather than trying to find an equivalent dialect in English, this translation tries to get as close as possible to the way Büchner’s writing sounds in German.

“Short and unfinished as it may be, Woyzeck is an extraordinary play. Each compact scene is full of ideas, action, character, and emotion. At the same time, however, it is asking for a director to decide what kind of play it is. Is it a naturalistic play? Is it an expressionistic play? Is it about class? Is it about man vs. animal? Is it about sex and jealousy? Is it about the military? Is it about science?” — Rob Melrose, translator, Artistic Director, Cutting Ball Theater

FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY OSKAR EUSTIS:

“Rob Melrose is a kind of magician, and his theater, Cutting Ball, is one of the most exciting and integrity-filled enterprises going in the sometimes-shabby field of the American theater. These translations, lucid and sharp, are a beautiful testimony to the value of Rob’s achievement.” – from the forward by Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theatre, New York City