Election Section

The title for this piece is taken from the Fêtes de la Nuit that I saw in the gardens at Versailles several years ago—fetes that were supposed to recall the sorts of entertainments that Louis XIV staged for his own pleasure ... full of huntsman, hunting dogs, courtiers, ballet dancers, and fireworks. Needless to say, my Fêtes are very different: they are the modern world, the democratic world, the world as seen, not through the eyes of a king, but through the eyes of a citizen. 

— Charles Mee, playwright 

In over 40 scenes that often overlap and spill over with the energy of the actors who play his citizen revelers, Charles Mee installs the tableaux of his Paris—a place of night-time festival, to which his title alludes, as well as intimate vignettes played out in public—on the broad stage of Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater. 

The often romantic foibles of his cast of Parisian “types” are featured as the performers change expression and tempo as swiftly as the waters of the Seine that flow under the bridges of Paris, in the verses of Apollinaire, with the love that is remembered curiously, but (like the waters) never comes again.  

Director Les Waters joked at a pre-opening night chat with the author that, being English, he could never find that Gallic charm. Instead, he said, he has applied something of the Music Hall tradition of staging to this Ferris Wheel of scenes that plays like revolving comedy sketches, skits, burlesque blackouts and production numbers. 

But these scenes add up to some sort of theatricale at best, not theater. Mee, who has been increasingly hailed as one of the top dramatists of the last decade and of this one, doesn’t exhibit a hint of dramaturgy in his Fêtes, only the kind of silly-putty construction that’s plagued various styles of American theater for decades. It’s just enough material cut-and-pasted together to toss to a cranked-up cast and competent director so that the resulting sound and fury seems to be something—or anything—of import. 

The material in this case, at times amusing enough, isn’t any different from a musical comedy revue—“varietes,” as the French say: variety show. Television’s done it better; Fêtes is sub-Syd Caesar. And the silliness of Fêtes is, too often, less than that of Caesar, Steve Allen, Stan Freeberg, and Jonathan Winters, who all got theirs from the subversively festive silliness of vaudeville via radio and the movies. The play is closer to a giddy talk show host gleefully interrupting his guest to the whoops of the audience, their uneasiness at being out in public relieved by all the distraction. It is Groucho’s bawdy irreverence replaced by Letterman’s smarmy insouciance. So much for festivity. 

Mee, a former historian, in conversation seems by turns pleasantly thoughtful and whimsical (rather than silly or insouciant). He discussed his tactics for making a personal sense of things—whether of the city of Paris or Greek Tragedy—stageworthy. One is to appropriate texts and images, both historical and contemporary, ready-made (though not in Marcel DuChamp’s sense or as Walter Benjamin’s “quoting”). As author of the play bobrauschenbergamerica, it might be expected his plays would be characterized by a random selection and montage of these appropriated materials, like what John Cage promoted as a way to devaluate the dictatorial role of the author’s personality. Instead, as Mee describes it, it’s more like a photo album or diary of impressions: “This is how Paris feels to me.” 

The 14 performers rise—or scramble up—to the occasion, bringing their own special talents to the fore: Dileep Rao pledging unending love at first sight to Maria Dizzia, just hoping she’ll have a coffee with him; Lorri Holt, after failing at a rapprochement with her lover (Michi Barall, the playwright’s wife), going hysteric, then histrionic, bewailing her own unexpected lack of empathy; Danny Scheie (who was featured in Mee’s Orestes 2.0 at San Francisco’s Nourse Auditorium a decade ago) menacingly addressing every spectator in the house, riffing on: “You talkin’ to me?” as he races through the aisles; James Carpenter, over a cigarette or un verre du vin, shrugging and spinning out endless accounts in a running gag that clears the stage, over and over, of his fellow smokers and wine-bibbers; and the excellent dancing, vamping and strutting of Corrine Blum and Sally Clawson (not to mention Jeffrey Lynn McCann’s Hip Hop acrobatics), adorned in Christal Weatherly’s hilarious costumes, in send-ups of production numbers, tango extravaganzas, and ramp shows. 

One scene, “The Intellectual’s Press Conference” (the intellectual well-performed by Joseph Kamal), is lifted from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless: the airport interview with “the famous Rumanian writer, Parvalescu.” In the movie, Jean-Pierre Melville, improvising an answer to Jean Seberg’s question “What is your ambition?” replies, “To become immortal—then die!” But in Fêtes there’s no byplay between cultures, between older man and younger woman (strange in a piece about love and relationship)—and Kamal/Parvalescu’s reply to the same question, tossed up from an actor standing in the audience, is “To become capable of a great love—then die!” 

Even in Paris, souffles fall flat. And the success of a fête (“feast”) and any of its dishes depends on the ingredients, the company, and the cook of course. Some of Fêtes de la Nuit’s served up raw, some cooked. At its best, it’s culinary entertainment, but from a mixed buffet, both hot and cold.