- OTHER MEDIA
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- Rob Melrose directs and translates The Bald Soprano for Cutting
Ball Theater's 10th anniversary
- SF Examiner October 13, 2009 (Emily Wilson)
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- Rob Melrose, the artistic director of The Cutting Ball Theater, likes
to keep busy. He just spent two years working with directors in New York,
Minneapolis and now Ashland as part of a prestigious grant, and the Cutting
Ball is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary with a production of Eugène
Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano that Melrose translated and directs.
- Melrose says he’s always been drawn to the absurd.
- “The first rock band I loved was Devo, who were fueled by Dadaism,”
he said.
- So Melrose has been a fan of the absurdist Ionesco since he read his
play Rhinoceros as a freshman in college.
- “I couldn’t believe someone had written a play where people
were going to turn into rhinoceroses,” he said.
- When Melrose came out to San Francisco, he naturally fell in with the
Exit Theater, which had an absurdist festival and has done 33 Ionesco plays
in 25 years.
- Melrose, who has also done translations from German, was excited to
work on The Bald Soprano.
- “it was translated in the 50s, and the language was old and kind
of stodgy,” Melorse said. “Bald Soprano is all about language.”
- Melrose went to Paris a while ago and saw the play that has been running
there for 53 years.
- “I kept those sounds in mind when translating it,” he said.
- Melrose thinks that Ionesco’s first play is also one of his most
radical, and the playfulness of the language is stunning, he says.
- “He wrote it because he was taking English classes, and he thought
the dialogues in an English textbook were so funny,” Melrose said.
“They are telling each other things they already know. For example
a wife will say to her husband, ‘My name is Susan and I am your wife.’”
- Melrose says there’s something oddly profound about characters
telling one another that the ceiling is above us and the floor is above
us.
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