Oregon daily emerald., December 06, 1985, THE Friday EDITION, Image 13

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Oregon daily emerald
arts and entertainment
Friday, November 6, 1985
v/n a chilly November night while
everyone else was gearing up for the
coining holidays, the cast and crew of
“The Madwoman of Chailiot" were in
the final stages of preparation for open
ing night.
"Madwoman." which opened last
night in the Robinson Theatre, is a good,
old-fashioned melodrama, filled with
ample spectacle, villains, eccentricity,
ami love to engage any audience
member.
At rehearsal before opening, the cast
paraded onstage in front of Director
Grant McKernie and costume designers
Sandy Bonds and Nancy Julian. Amidst
chuckles and concerns, decisions were
made about the various costumes and
how they reflected the characters'
personalities.
There was no curtain to signal the
onset of the play or mysteriously hide
the stagehands who dress the stage. The
actors whisked onto the set as set pieces
were flown in from above and pushed in
from the wings, Lots of excitement
abounded and everything was extremely
busy.
Watching this process feels more like
watching an actual theatrical presenta
tion. or a magical circus, rather than reul
life.
I he show is filled with lots of visual
and aural spectacle, music, explosions,
thunder, singing, dancing and juggling
The script, written by Jean Ciraudoux,
deals with the struggle between good
and evil, and how a band of hungry
moneymakers are going to tear up Paris
to satisfy their lust for oil and wealth.
Countess Auriela. the Madwoman of
Chaillot, is determined to rid the world
of all evil and ugliness. She believes the
world is a happy, beautiful place, and if
it's not. she can make it happen in the
course of an afternoon.
Although Ciraudoux wrote the script
in the '40s. Mckernie, who is head of the
University speech department, chose to
make the play more contemporary. He
says that this will universalize the action
by making it not appear as if it could on
ly happen in the '40s.
Ciraudoux, who was a French
diplomat, spent his days in meetings try
ing to rid the world of the evils that oc
curred in the '40s. Being unsuccessful in
that pursuit, he would come home at
night and write fantasies.
"Most of his [days sing a hymn to life,
most of them are very affirmational.
They're affirmational about human
nature," Mckernie says. "The hymn of
life being ordinary people doing or
dinary things."
M
i'icKernie says he identifies with
Ciraudoux's definition of good as "being
free to express yourself and your own
sense of eccentricity and to allow
yourself to be who you want to be,”
The characters of the play are a wide
assortment of ordinary people. They
range from the innocent to the extreme
eccentric. Countess Auriela is one of
those extreme individuals who has a
tendency to live in the past, when the
world was bright and beautiful. She
never recovered from a past love, and
tends to pour forth all her love on the
people around her. Matchmaking and
cats are her greatest passions in life.
Julian, a veteran Eugene-area actress,
portrays the Countess. "She’s so joyful,
so happy, it's infectious," Julian says of
Photo by Karen Stallwood
(above) Pierre, played by Trever Cartwright, waltzes with the "Madwoman,”
played by Nancy Julian, (below) Director Grant McKernie gives the cast pointers
during a rehearsal prior to the opening of "Madwoman of Chaillot” last night in
Robinson Theatre.
Photo by Stevon Wall
ner character. “I like her immensely. I
think she’s a wonderful person with an
amazing amount to give to the world. I
enjoy that feeling through her, it’s really
gratifying.”
The main villain of the show is the
President, played by theatre arts major
Stan Freitag. “My character can’t stand
her (the Countess) or any of her little
friends; they're just so stupid.” says
Freitag. “There’s something about them
he would like to exterminate.” Filled
with venom and hate for mankind, the
President provides a balanced comple
ment to the Countess Auriela.
c
V/aroi Nagle, a University graduate stu
dent in costume design, designed
costumes for the four madwomen. "The
madwomen are sort of in their own era;
they’re sort of not-period, ecclectic, all
period,” Nagle explains. “They’ve made
their choices from a number of periods as
opposed to the street people that live in
1985."
Their costumes reflect a romantic,
nebulous, eccentric feeling. “Lots of
layers in the mauves and pinks, sort of
dusty, rosy romantic and yet sort of ar
ty,” Nagle says. "They look like they’ve
been picked out by a little old lady who
couldn’t see real well and they are just
slightly off and don’t quite match.”
As for the rest of the cast. Bonds and
ulian have designed costumes using
ideas from European fashion magazines
and clothing they saw on the street peo
ple in Europe during past vacations.
Julian recently spent a month in
England, and Bonds went on sabbatical
last year in Europe for a term.
David Shaw, University Theater
technical director, designed the lights
for the show, and David Apple. Univer
sity graduate student in scenic design,
designed the set. The main set piece is a
stairwell which revolves manually.
"Any time you have to build a seven
and one-half foot self-supporting plat
form that has to roll quickly, it's always
an engineering problem, but it wfas fun
to build.” Apple says.
1 he production feels magical, even
down to the scene changes themselves.
“Grant wanted very much to have all the
scene changes happen in full view of the
audience so the audience could see
them, and that's kind of fun," Apple
says. “When 1 go to a play. I love to see
how they do the scene changes. (In) big
Broadway musicals now. they never
close the curtains; all the scene changes
happen as if by magic.”
McKernie decided on "The Mad
woman of Chaillot" for the University
Theater's second production of the
1985-86 season because he believes “it is
a play that deals with eccentricity and
love and it says that the way to be a
human being in this world is to be
yourself and to be an individual.
“The majority would rather just
become what in the play are in essence
called dead people, people who wonder
around and have no insides at all. and do
what they are supposed to do."
Stage Manager Nancy Larson says she
hopes Giraudoux' hymn to life hopefully
will leave a question in everyone's mind
in the end; “Who’s really mad? Maybe
in their madness they've got a wisdom
and knowledge that the rest of us don't
have.”
Performances are scheduled for Dec.
6-7 and 12-14. Curtain time is 8 p.m. and
tickets are $3.50 for University students
with I.D. and $4.50 for general public.
By Diana Taylor