Reviews

Diary of a Chambermaid

Lael Logan in Diary of a Chambermaid(Photo © Anthony van Slyke)
Lael Logan in Diary of a Chambermaid
(Photo © Anthony van Slyke)

Undoubtedly because he was raped by priests when he was a boy — or so the biographies attest — Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) had little respect for the Catholic Church or for anything else about his native France, which he saw as unremittingly arrogant, hypocritical, and brutal. Using literary means to flagellate his fellow citoyens for their execrable behavior, he joined a line of critics and satirists that included Voltaire and Choderlos de Laclos, eventually to be swelled by Marcel Proust and, in Germany, Frank Wedekind. The novels and dramas that these gents cooked up were slathered with the piquant sauce of cynicism.

In a 1900 work, issued when the French were knee-deep in the fragmenting Alfred Dreyfus scandal, Mirbeau claimed that he was merely editing a journal handed him by a chambermaid called Célestine R. The busy retainer recounted her exploits in various homes where her job description only began to outline the expectations put on her. A constant object of scorn by her mistresses and proposed libidinous extra-curricular sexual activities by her masters, Célestine has become something of a mistress herself, appeasing her assailants as she sees fit. Over the years, she has been pursued by a fellow servant named Joseph, whose past is shady but who is preparing to open a tavern and wants Célestine to share his future. Oddly enough, the menacing Joseph is the only one of Célestine’s self-proclaimed betters who doesn’t insist that she change her name; he’s content for her to be who she is, while the others want to mold her to their satisfaction.

Although Adrian Giurgea (pronounced “Georgia”) has done some editing himself in transferring Mirbeau’s work to the stage, he’s retained enough of the nasty, sizzling-hot original material to make Diary of a Chambermaid a jolt-a-minute drama. Concocting something that borders on literary soft porn, he’s concentrated on Célestine’s stay with the Lanlaires; she’s mean and accusatory, he’s bored and randy. Keeping the couple at bay, Célestine (Lael Logan) skirts Madame Lanlaire (Antonia Fairchild) and swings her skirts at Monsieur Lanlaire (Patrick McNulty) but not to the point where he is ever able to take charge.

Every so often, Célestine recounts an escapade at another locale — sometimes another rich person’s seething home, once a convent where she indulged in a round of same-sex delights under the nuns’ prurient eyes. With the young, ailing Monsieur George (Jeff Galfer), she acts out the old Gallic saw about orgasm being the little death (le petit mort): Sated, George succumbs post-coitally. As Célestine progresses from bed to bed and from bad to worse, she and Joseph keep tabs on each other and eventually make the leap from lower class to middle class. This leap, Mirbeau suggests and Giurgea seconds, is made as a result of successful and sustained deceit. The John Gay of The Beggar’s Opera would agree, as would Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, who should have gotten around to musicalizing this piece but somehow didn’t.

In bringing his adaptation to the stage, director Giurgea uses a long and narrow playing area between two rows of bleachers. His major conceit, with set designer Jeffery Eisenmann, is that bales of hay are rearranged — most often by the sinewy Joseph — so they can become tables with tablecloths thrown over them, beds with rumpled sheets, etc. (When Madame Lanlaire orders Célestine to fetch a sewing implement, the chambermaid tromps past the bales as if literally looking for a needle in a haystack.) Eisenmann also has built a loft at one end of the floor-level stage and placed curtains at each end, behind which scenes can be played. Costume designer Vanessa Leuck sends the characters out in appropriate, deliberately less-than-flattering period costumes. The most disturbing of these is a bloodstained dress worn by a character portraying the young Célestine after her deflowering at 12; in the soiled frock, she’s the emblem of innocence destroyed.

One would think that Giurgea, having constructed a tight script and having put together an imaginative creative team (lighting design by G. Benjamin Swope), would understand the absolute necessity of having a first-rate acting troupe to interpret Mirbeau’s corrosive nightmare. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The director/adaptor has worked at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, as have many of the actors he employs here. They’re all working under Antonia Fairchild, who’s founded the new company Dramahaus New York, but Fairchild doesn’t seem to have chosen her introductory production wisely. Diary of a Chambermaid requires style and technique, two commodities that her actors lack in large measure; indeed, the phrase “don’t have a clue” comes to mind.

The 11 cast members, producer Fairchild among them, don’t seem familiar with the concepts of affect and affectation. In particular, few of them know how to portray members of the upper classes. They present evidence that study of deportment and diction are not ACT’s strengths. If their characterizations were accurate — they aren’t — there would be no mystery at all about how the lower classes got the post-Revolution upper hand and created the new bourgeoisie. But these dialect coachless actors haven’t even learned how to say “monsieur” correctly.

Performers of the caliber of, say, the Royal Shakespeare Company doing Les Liaisons Dangereuses could probably make, well, hay of this provocative and evocative material, but Giurgea’s thespians pretty much make hash of it. Lael Logan has the face of a cat with retaliation on its mind but her Célestine isn’t the sly vixen she ought to be. Though Célestine admits that she’s afraid of Joseph, she is daunted by nothing else, yet Logan can’t quite convey the many facets of her masked seductiveness. (Paulette Goddard played the role in Jean Renoir’s diluted 1946 Hollywood version; in Luis Bunuel’s 1964 treatment, Jeanne Moreau filled the part. Giurgea tips his hat to Moreau by interrupting repeated choruses of “Plaisir d’Amour” to play a few measures of “Le tourbillon” from Jules and Jim, with Moreau chanting.)

Of the other players, only Christopher Oden as Joseph and Ryan Farley as Captain Mauger, the loudmouth next door, muster the bile that Mirbeau wants. During the scenes where Joseph woos Célestine but warns that he wants her completely and not just for a roll in the hay, he’s tough, menacing, and sexy. Suddenly, Mirbeau is alive and well and spitting venom. The author is also vitally present in a sequence where Captain Mauger, manipulating a ferret puppet as if it were real, expounds on his obsession with eating animals.

Towards the end of Diary of a Chambermaid, there’s a sequence in which Célestine and the spoiled-rotten Monsieur Xavier are seen in shadow play, going at each other in a couple of bawdy sexual acts. The larger enterprise might be described as a shadow of a play.

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Diary of a Chambermaid

Closed: August 14, 2004