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Arts: Pagnol’s ‘Marius’ Brings Comedy and Passion to Aurora By KEN BULLOCK Special to the Planet

Tuesday November 22, 2005

With a fine mural of Marseilles’s Vieux Port as backdrop for César’s airy cafe right down on the quais—Greg Dunham’s set—the players are positioned to begin their round of Provençal comedy and passion. 

Marius is leaning on the bar, listening to a solitary pair of customers talk. A sailor and a girl grapple, then clinch outside, where Fanny and Honorine set up their shellfish pushcart. Fanny is posing in vain to attract Marius’ glance. As the noonday siren is wailing over the docks, ferry captain Escartefigue at his table sounds his bosun’s pipe to rouse Cesar, stretched out on a bench with a bar towel over his face.  

Thus is introduced the ménage—with highly visible attitudes—of this very public house that will see daily business with its comings and goings, and the greater arrivals and departures of commerce afloat, scene of Marcel Pagnol’s first great signature play from the late ‘20s, Marius, now playing at the Aurora, in a new translation—the first in 70 years—by Jack Rogow. 

Pagnol came along after decades of revivalism of Provençal language and culture, an identity once so separate from the Northern French that the young Jean Racine remarked, in the 17th century while on a trip to the Midi, he had difficulty understanding people’s talk by the time he arrived in Lyons, and when he arrived in Marseilles, couldn’t comprehend a word. 

Marius was written in French, not Provençal, but Pierre Fresnay, who first essayed the title role, spent a few weeks tending bar in Marseilles to understand his character’s work—and to learn the tactile Marsellais patois of the dialogue. 

And it’s in the thick of it, the rapid-fire counterpoint of everybody talking at once about the latest news or personal tragedy, or arguing over a card game, that Rogow’s translation proves itself, sleek and colloquially American enough to handle the riotous exchanges, yet supple in its allowance of the idiomatic gem brought over by sleight of hand into English. 

“When the idiots dance, you won’t be playing in the orchestra,” César expounds to Marius, or, in comparing him to his sedentary uncle Emile, “He didn’t like to go out in the sun and drag his shadow around.” 

After the traditionalism of the Provençal revival, Marius sports clean, modern lines in its racy speech and in the strange poetry of its treatment of what seems at first just a loose rendition of a Boulevard comedy about a love triangle set among working people rather than comic bohemians. Fanny loves Marius, who in turn has cared for her since childhood, but Marius is passionately in love with the sea, with the call of distance. 

He says, “I long for Elsewhere.” 

Feigning an affair with an older woman, Marius is able to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes for awhile, but not Fanny’s. And it’s her despair over Marius’ conflicting temptation that makes her initiative to turn over the cart at her moment of triumph. 

Director Tom Ross presides over a very capable cast, with troupers like Robert Ernst as César (whose nuanced exits are a delight) and George Maguire as the vain, well-to-do widower Panisse (declared an old cuckold, but “There’re no cuckolds in heaven; the horns get in the way of the halos!”). 

These actors understand the humor of their characters very well, and the scenes of contention between Cesar and Panisse, and Marius with Panisse, are very funny as well as touching. The young lovers are well-portrayed by Daniel Hart Donoghue and Jessa Brie Berkner, especially Berkner’s body language as the still-teenaged Fanny playing the coquette a little uneasily, aiming at Marius’ attention and getting that of the old widower instead. 

Jordan Lund makes a florid, impressive Captain Escartefigue. And the principals are ably supported by two players who each juggle dual roles. 

“I’m saying that I have nothing to say,” sputters César to jibes from all as he sets out to see his mistress secretly, or so he thinks. Life’s little ongoing melodramas are burlesqued with charm in Marius, but its real dilemmas and elemental passions are seen in their harrowing immediacy. “Honor’s like a match,” says César to his son, “You can only use it once.” 

 

 

Marcel Pagnol’s characters in Marius are, of course, the inspiration for Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse and Cesar, as well as Café Fanny. 

His great trilogy—Marius, Fanny and César—has also been a favorite bill for Berkeley audiences in the cinema. Pagnol quickly took the director’s chair, founding his own studio to commit his plays to celluloid, almost as soon as there were talkies for his dialogue with all its flavor. Cesar was made as a film before it was rewritten for the stage. 

In the ‘80s, Claude Berri’s movie adaptations of Pagnol, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, were big hits here, a decade after the author’s death. Whether on stage, screen or the page, Pagnol, along with Jean Giono, served as introduction to the Midi for Anglophones before M. F. K. Fisher’s charming memoirs of Marseilles and Aix—and all their successors and the knock-offs that have followed ever since. 

 

Aurora Theatre presents Marius at 8 p.m. Wednesday.-Saturdays and at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday. 2081 Addison St. thought Dec. 18. Tickets $28-$45. 843-4822. 

 

Photograph by David Allen:  

Jessa Brie Berkner and Daniel Hart Donoghue star in Marius.v