Arts & Events
Around & About--Theater & Literature: Notes on James Keller's 'Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust'
From the celebrated madeleine crumbled into a cup of tea that brings back lost memories of childhood, to the narrator--only once referred to as Marcel, sign of his identity with the author--in a rage crushing Baron Charlus' hat as Charlus replaces it calmly with one of many more ... and tells Marcel how much he cares for him, to the idea coming to Marcel of the book he wants to write--the same book the reader is plowing though ...
Playwright James Keller performs a very unusual solo act--unusual because it focuses on taking the audience through Proust's seven volume masterwork, rather than avowing the performer's own dedication to and identity with the book--of a tour through 'In Search of Lost Time' (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust, framed by an arragement of flowers that recall "Proust's cathedral of hawthorn"--and his asthma--and the screen for the 180 slides that accompany Keller's delivery, setting the elaborate stories he gives us a gloss on, not like gossip, but like a farsimpler version of what Proust does, as his own Virgil, guiding himself and the reader through the inferno, the purgatory and paradise of his memories, his discovery that they must be involuntary, taken off guard when least expected, so they may briefly live again ...
Keller tells us the tale both quickly and leisurely at once. He briefly acts out an occasional exclamation or gesture of one of the figures of the tangled story, like the way Jean-Louis Barrault quickly pantomimed the animals as he recited the Fables of La Fontaine here, alone onstage, on tour so many years ago. And at the end exclaims, "Merci, Marcel!" ... and then reclines for a moment before turning to the audience for a conversation.
What's the purpose of such a recitation, of neatly avoiding the self-reference of the usual solo show? One result: the friend I went with, an ardent reader of Jane Austen, is now determined to wade into Proust's intimate epic--intimate, but which also shadows the death of the glittering Belle Epoch and the rise, from the ashes of World War, of what will be the remarkable--and ersatz--era that followed, the Roaring Twenties.
Keller performs 'Who's Afraid of Marcel Proust' twice more, this Sunday at 2 and 8, in the Southside Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. $25. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2239503 or poorplayers.org
