Meron Langsner
  • Home
  • About Meron
  • Blog: Taking Note and Taking Notes
    • Most Popular Blog Posts from Taking Note & Taking Notes
  • Playwright
    • Plays Available for Production or Development >
      • Playwriting Press/Book Covers/etc
    • Slippery Slope Podcast
    • Selected Videos of Short Plays from the Gi60 Festival
  • Theatre & Performance Scholar and Dramaturg
    • TEX Talk: "The Impossible Body" (Tufts Idea Exchange)
  • Fight Director/Movement Specialist for Theatre, Opera, & Film
    • Photos of Combat & Movement Compositions >
      • Press Quotes for Stage Combat & Movement Work
    • Stage Combat Resources >
      • Martial Arts Resources for Fight Directors
      • Cautionary Tales: Stage Combat Gone Wrong
  • Educator
    • In-Class Group Exercise Based on MARISOL
    • In-Class Group Exercise for CLOUD NINE & BLASTED
    • Class Exercise: Muppets, Casting, & Shakespeare
    • Sample Assignment: Towards a Dramaturgy of Stage Combat
    • The Cinematographer Exercise: Introducing Non-Contact Blows
    • Dramaturgy Prompt Assignment
    • Selected Comments from Student Course Evaluations
  • Contact Meron

On Adapting the Marquis de Sade's JUSTINE into an Opera for Valentine's Day

2/9/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
This coming Valentine's Day there will be a staged reading of the opera libretto that I co-wrote with Silvia Graziano based on the Marquis de Sade's novel, Justine (an alternate version was called The Misfortunes of Virtue).  This reading will be directed by Christie Gibson and once again hosted by Fort Point Theatre Channel and the poster you're looking at was designed by Cara Grace. 

We recently realized it would be helpful to hear it out loud again.  Plus, what can be more appropriate for Valentine's Day?

This is one more step in a project that's been a long time in the making...

Picture

I had been half-joking about adapting Justine for years, and had been feeling out composers for a while.  A while back I ran into Silvia at a performance of a pretty unusual opera and made a crack about this ambition and I believe that she immediately was incredibly enthusiastic about the idea.  I believe that that was the moment it went from a half-joke back-burner idea to an actual project.  We discussed it and decided to collaborate on the libretto, and then seek out other necessary collaborators from there. 

Adaptation is a tricky business.  In some ways you have it easy because everything you need is in your source material.  That said, it is important to select what stays, what goes, and what needs to change drastically in order for the new piece that you are creating to work.  Novels and operas work on very different rules and we had to figure out how the core story would best make the transition.  We agreed to re-read the novel (there are three versions and numerous translations, so it was interesting to see the differences in what we came back with) and then meet up and discuss structure.

Justine is a novel about a young woman who repeatedly does the right thing and gets punished for it in the worst possible ways.  She has a sister, Juliette, who goes out in the world with a diametrically opposed worldview and succeeds beyond imagination.  The novel is structured so as to display how each of the Seven Virtues is met with a poetic injustice.  We decided for the sake of dramatic structure to highlight three of these episodes, and intersperse episodes with Juliette and have the Marquis himself as a character who both narrates and participates in the action.  I am the lead writer on this project and we worked out a system where we wrote most of it in the same room, sometimes splitting up sections of who wrote what, sometimes writing passages together, and often editing and revising pieces that the other wrote (there is talk of a Jack the Ripper opera next, Silvia will take the lead on that one).  The current libretto is pretty seamless.  Unless you know one or the other of us really well, I'd say it's pretty difficult to figure out who wrote what.   

Once we had a libretto written, we set out to put a reading together.  We were very fortunate to be able to enlist David Gram, a director with a lot of experience with  both opera and new work.  I met David when he directed my play, The Godot Variations, for The Orfeo Group.  At that point Silvia and I had just started talking about collaborating. I mentioned the project to David and he was intrigued.

Silvia is the co-artistic director of Fort Point Theatre Channel, which meant we had access to both space and a collection of artists.  The first reading was an invite-only affair and included brief readings of erotic poetry.  This then led to quite a bit of rewriting in preparation for a public reading.The public reading was a Valentine's Day fundraiser for FPTC that took place at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre.  David stayed on as director, and our core cast consisted of Ashley Korolewski as Justine, Carolyn Berliner as Juliette, Robert Murphy as the Marquis, Hugh Long as Father Raphael, and Kristina Riegle as De Bressac.  Our poster was designed by Nick Thorkelson.   We also added a few bits of staged violence to the performance (I took care of those).

We were actually had a bit of trepidation about what the audience response might be.  The Marquis de Sade did in fact have sadism named for him, and his work reflects that.  I would also argue that he was the intellectual predecessor to Nietzsche, and his commentary on morality is both terrifying and compelling.  Our fears were unfounded.  Our audience response was overwhelmingly positive. 

So, here we are now getting ready for our next public reading.  We''l be announcing our cast pretty soon.  The reading will be taking place at 7PM on the 14th at 10 Channel Center Street (try and tell me that this is not a perfect Valentine's Day activity). 

I am really excited to see this project moving forward.  I don't know when I'll have more to report, but I suspect that I'll have a lot to say as this goes on.  

I hope that you can join us for Valentine's Day.

EDIT: Check out The Marquis De Sade's JUSTINE's Facebook page!

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Taking Note & Taking Notes

    Meron Langsner, PhD

    Playwright, Theatre & Performance Scholar, Fight Director/Movement Specialist, Director, Educator

    Archives

    June 2020
    May 2019
    December 2018
    February 2018
    January 2017
    October 2015
    October 2014
    August 2014
    April 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    May 2013
    January 2013
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011

    Categories

    All
    9/11
    Acting
    Adaptation
    Anthropology
    Boston
    Business
    Christie Gibson
    Collaboration
    Comic Books
    David Gram
    Directing
    Dramaturgy
    Edward Gordon Craig
    Fight Directing
    Filmmaking
    Freelancing
    Gi60
    Godot
    Hamlet
    Imaginary Beasts
    Internet
    Israel
    Israeli Stage
    Jewish Theatre
    Justine
    Lark Play Development Center
    Lmda
    Macbeth
    Marketing
    Marquis De Sade
    Martial Arts
    Merrimack Rep
    Metathearicality
    Mitx
    Muppets
    New Hampshire
    Opera
    Pedagogy
    Performance Theory
    Playwrights Commons
    Playwriting
    Psychology
    Puppets
    Romeo & Juliet
    Rory Miller
    Scholarship
    Shakespeare
    Silvia Graziano
    Skydiving
    Small Theatre Alliance Of Boston
    Social Media
    Social Sciences
    Stage Combat
    Stagesource
    Ted
    Tex
    Tom Stoppard
    Tufts University
    Vagabond Theatre Group
    Violence
    Whistler In The Dark
    Writing
    Youthplays
    Zeitgesit Stage
    Zillah Glory

    RSS Feed

    Follow @MeronLangsner

Resources

Plays Available
Stage Combat Resources

About Meron

Playwright
Fight Director
Scholar
Educator

The Blog

Taking Note & Taking Notes
Most Popular Posts

Contact & Press

Links to Press
Student Testimonials
Contact Meron
All content Copyright Meron Langsner 2011-2020 unless otherwise specified