Marguerite Yourcenar in the Theatre

Marguerite Yourcenar in the Theatre Dori Katz The Little Mermaid was written in 1942 while Marguerite Yourcenar was living in Hartford, Connecticut. Her friend Everett Austin, a talented artistic director and impresario, was staging a show based on the four elements and asked Yourcenar to write something for "water"; this theatrical divertissement based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale was the result. It was staged, with mostly local talent, a few times that year at the Hartford Wadsworth Atheneum in an English version which has since been lost. The reception accorded the production was perhaps worse than negative; it was indifferent . Years later, the play was not included in a list of theatrical productions staged by Austin published after his death. The Little Mermaid does not deserve such oblivion for it revives the charming story of the young mermaid who changes elements for the sake of love. The young creature must trade her beautiful voice for a pair of legs so that she can painfully walk on the hard ground behind her prince. As in the Andersen fairy tale, here too the man does not recognize the true face of love and chooses to marry someone else. The rejection kills the little mermaid who throws herself overboard. She does not drown but is carried to the heavens by bird-angels having earned a soul by her refusal to trade her life for that of the man who betrayed her. In the original fairy tale the chosen princess is as pure and lovely as the little mermaid, which hints that she could be a surrogate for her. If only the mermaid could talk, make herself known, the prince would recognize his mistake. In Yourcenar's play, the human relationships are different for everything human is portrayed in a satiri93 cal mode; the dwarfs are vulgar and ludicrous; Count Ulrich is a very pompous advisor recalling Shakespeare's Polonius. The bride is a stupid and vain princess, and the prince himself is a narcissistic, superficial womanizer whose rhetorical speeches predict the conventional monarch he will become . The themes of self-deception and mistaken identities found in The Little Mermaid lead to doubts about existence itself in an earlier play by Yourcenar , Dialogue dans le Mare'cage, written in 1930. This "dialogue" in the swamp takes place between a pilgrim returning from the crusades and the young wife he accused of adultery and locked up in his castle many years ago. Time has erased all certainties; is it really his wife, was she guilty or innocent , is she insane or wise, avenging or forgiving? In this version of the Pia Tolomei legend, the dialogue is really between life dreamed and life lived , and neither is more "real" than the other. The lack of fixed identities, the prevalence of illusion, uncertainties and self deceptions are themes of the three plays written in the forties; all three are based on Greek Classics. Electre ou la Chute des Masques (Electra or the Dropping of Masks) was written in 1944 and is based on Euripides' Electra. In Yourcenar's play, Electre is married to a peasant with whom she lives the wretched, difficult life of the poor in a miserable hovel. She has been sustained through all these difficult years of hardship by a burning thirst for revenge against her mother Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, her stepfather, and by her hope for Orestes, her brother, to return so that he will help her kill her enemies. The day he does return, she lures her mother to the house with the false rumor that she is pregnant and about to deliver her child. Once Clytemnestra arrives with a basket full of food (not unlike little Red Riding Hood going to visit Grandma and walking into the wolf's den) Electra kills her. The moral fiber of the play changes when it is revealed that Aegisthus and not Agamemnon is Orestes' father. The news makes Orestes the son of a killer and not of a victim. Orestes' purity is tainted by the discovery since it connects him to the old crime, the murder of Agamemnon; it is in part for losing his "innocence" that Orestes still carries out the...