RETURNING TO THE ROOTS OF 'LA TRAVIATA'
For director James Marvel wisdom carries no clout. Probing, he makes his own judgments. "'La Traviata,"' he says, "is the big love story. I don't understand why people think Romeo and Juliet is a great love story; it's about two kids who don't understand the world." For him Alfredo and Violetta, the lovers in Verdi's opera, are the epitome of romantic attachment "I've seen about seven productions of 'La Traviata' throughout world in the last year, and one thing remarkably absent was the love. 'La Traviata' is a big love story. Otherwise all the gorgeous music falls flat."
Rather than drawing on existing interpretations of this popular opera, Marvel turns to the life of Marie Duplessis, the real woman on whom the character of Violetta is based, to shape his conception of the piece. Duplessis, a renowned courtesan who had liasons with writer Alexandre Dumas the younger and composer Franz Liszt, died of tuberculosis at age 23 and devoted her last years to making her heart pure. Dumas' novel "La Dame aux Camelias," a fictionalized account of his affair with Duplessis, was the basis of both his subsequent play and Verdi's opera.
Marvel was struck by Duplessis' growing spirituality. "At her death," he says, "she owned only a bed and a priedieu, the kneeler she used for her religious devotions. I see Violetta as having made a strong religious conversion in Act Two. At the end she sings the line, 'My body is in pain, but my soul is in peace.'"
Marvel finesses a possible feminist portrayal of Violetta. "For her to abandon Alfredo," he says, "is an act of selflessness. It's a matter of religious redemption. She's a martyr."
Marvel intensifies the mood of 1853, when "La Traviata" was written, by including choreographed gypsy and matador sequences that are often cut from the beginning of Act Three. "I like to include those dance scenes the same way Shakespeare includes comic characters for comic relief," Marvel says. "The dancing also shows the decadent, carefree life in Paris at the time. Paris was called 'the brothel of Europe' then. He quotes an epigrammatic contemporary characterization of the city. "Paris is the city of joy and gaiety where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief," and goes on to track down the attribution to Nicolas Chamfort in one of the reference volumes that he keeps at home.
Our conversation takes place on Marvel's cell phone as he travels from New York to his home in Princeton, and is a tribute to his ability to focus in the midst of distraction. Phone to his ear, he ignores the conductor's announcement of stations en route, negotiates the change at Princeton Junction to the Dinky, finds a taxi, and persuades the driver to reduce the charge from $10 to $7, all in the interstices of the interview. Once at home, he reaches for the book with the "Paris is the city of joy and gaiety" quote. He knows just where to find it.
Now 26, Marvel was born in New Orleans. "Growing up in New Orleans was wonderful," Marvel says. "There's a certain liberalness and ease which I always miss. There's a carefree attitude about life. I'm not much for Mardi Gras, I'm not a big partygoer or drinker, but there's something about the mystique of the city. New Orleans is very Catholic and very Voodoo. It's different from the rest of the country.
Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned a degree in world literature in 1997, was a cultural shock for Marvel. "I had gone to an all-boys Catholic school in New Orleans," he says, "and there was a low level of education in the South. Sarah Lawrence was then three quarters female and was in the Northeast. It was a challenge."
Marvel spent his junior year at Oxford's Wadham College. The following summer he studied at Charles University in Prague. "I met a lot of Czech writers and artists, including Vaclav Havel," he says. "It sparked my interest in Eastern Europe. Since then I've been in Budapest, in Bratislava twice, and in Lodz, Poland."
The East European connection persisted as Marvel earned a master's degree last year from the International Actor Training Academy, a conservatory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which had a strong Romanian presence during his work there.
Marvel is somewhat surprised at the theatrical direction of his career. "I come from an academic background," he says, "and I never thought of going into theater. I considered a Ph.D. in literature." He has received a fistful of grants for scholarly work about theater, and has published poetry, short stories, and reviews. His research now is on drama styles and training methods in different countries.
"To understand yourself better as an American artist you need to know what makes you different from other countries," he continues. "Most Americans revere the theater in Europe for its high aesthetic level, but Europeans admire American naturalism. The Europeans are trying to move away from a more classical approach to training, and get closer to the American form of realism that you see more in movies than in theater."
In Marvel's estimation, Europeans have an advantage over Americans when it comes to theatrical performance.
"In Europe," he says, "most productions are new; in the United States they're rented. In Europe theater is funded by the government, while in the United States, which has less government support, there are real budgetary constraints. It doesn't lessen the aesthetic in the United States, but there's a greater level of freedom in Europe." Ultimately, Marvel thinks that Europe is his place.
For Marvel opera is theater, with all its vitality and opportunities. He opposes the idea that opera is a museum species. " One of the main things I think as an opera director," he says, "is that we're not curators of an art form. Opera can't just be a piece of art hanging on a wall. It has to live, breathe, and move forward. I disagree with Peter Brook, who wrote in 'The Empty Space' that opera is a dead art form. Because I'm young I can appeal to younger audience, and show them what's exciting about opera. It has a lot to do with our life as we live it today."
Marvel has stepped outside the boundaries of a single language in his quest for theatrical effectiveness. With a cast consisting partly of English speakers, and partly of Slovak speakers, he has directed productions of "Romeo and Juliet" and of Sartre's "The Flies" for the International Theatre Institute (ITI) in Bratislava. ITI has hubs throughout the world, and a presence in New York. "In multilingual productions the actors speak their native languages," he says. "I want to create international performances of classic literature, with each actor performing in the country's traditional style. Surprisingly, different countries have remarkably similar performing styles."
Europe, where different languages impinge closely on each other, is a likely continent for this sort of theater. With a plethora of languages and dialects, Marvel should be able on the other side of the Atlantic to carry his taste for the unconventional beyond interpretation and correct the miscommunication of the tower of Babel.
By Elaine Strauss
April 25, 2001