La Musica Deuxieme: Produced by blessed unrest (theatre for the adventurous)
Written by Marguerite Duras; Translated by Barbara Bray; Directed by Jessica Burr. Costumes by Sera Bourgeau; Lighting Jay Ryan; Sound by Laura Galindo.
Marguerite Duras was a fantastic writer of lyrical and haunting poetry with a revolutionary style. She was a feminist who authored many novels, plays and screenplays. Her very praiseworthy and unique creativity includes this brilliant play ("La Musica Deuxieme") currently staged in the excellent space, The Drawing Room, a perfect venue for this highly charged story of love, desire and abandonment.
It's a story of two lovers; He (Taylor Valentine) and She (Matilda Woods) have been separated for some time and meet again in a hotel room. Many of Marguerite Duras' novels have hotel rooms, seaside resorts, beautiful white muslin curtains on gorgeous
French windows with a breeze that constantly makes the curtains wave restlessly - like the people in the room; the character, "He", is restless, anxious, talks in French on the phone while anticipating something beautifully troublesome. Suddenly, here, the elegant Matilda Woods ("She") enters. Thus, a tale of passion, longing, desire, betrayal begins one more time.
In a very charged language, they try to be vague about their dishonesty but both of them come to reveal how they have cheated on each other: He, with some exotic foreigner and She abandoning him (at least that's how he took it) while going to the bars all alone by herself. They each inhabit a dilemma of tortured passion to possess and abandon, and then possessing again under all odds, and followed by betraying and abandoning yet again, - not only of the one that each desires but of one's own individual self, too.
The very tense and taut dialogue from both sides is all about this longing of being together at least one more time under all circumstances, though we (the audience) can see the ultimate result of said longing will be a disaster in the making a second time.
Duras' writing is all about an unfulfilled passion of ever longing, to be a winner of sorts that will encounter defeat over and again. The longing, (a beautifully and haunting word) is often suggested in a metaphorical, stream of consciousness manner that will lose its essence if that burning desire and long lost passion - still burning underneath - should unite. Duras's longing here has no union but merely stays as longing. It is an emotion that remains - expressing the characters' pain and regret of a love lost and in spite of this eagerness to possess they both will have lost, alas! - one more time. This passion, however, which leaves each lover naked without ever touching - surely lasts longer,
This is a wonderfully acted play by both Valentine and Woods, and directed to perfection by Jessica Burr. Lit very effectively in dim light by Jay Ryan, it will be with me for a long time as well. I already feel a strong desire to see it one more time.
Everyone should rush to catch a performance of a great play by one of the most gifted writers in the world.
May, 2024 Reviewed by BINA SHARIF
Editor/Publisher: artsinternational.blogspot.com
Member: ATCA
email: binashariff@gmail.com
Cell: 212-260-6207
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