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  • The First American Play at the Comédie FrançaiseLee Breuer Directs Tennessee Williams
  • Lee Breuer, Maude Mitchell, and in conversation with Joan Templeton

Lee Breuer is a stage and film director, playwright, performance theorist, and a founder of the theatre company Mabou Mines, which he now co-directs, and which has produced and toured worldwide for forty years. He is known both for his radical adaptations of classics, such as The Gospel of Colonus (from Sophocles), Lear (from Shakespeare), Mabou Mines Dollhouse (from Ibsen), The Lost Ones (Beckett), and for original works like the trilogy La Divina Caricatura. He has been awarded MacArthur, Guggenheim, Bunting, and Fulbright grants and has lectured and taught at the Yale School of Drama, Harvard, Stanford, the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and the Moscow Art Theatre.

Maude Mitchell specializes in fresh interpretations of classics and the development of new work. For the past decade she has worked extensively with her partner Lee Breuer as an actor, dramaturg, acting coach, and teacher on many projects worldwide. She is best known for playing Nora in Mabou Mines Dollhouse in an eight-year tour to five continents. Among her awards are an OBIE and a Drama League citation.

This interview took place on May 27, 2011, in Manhattan.

TEMPLETON:

Congratulations on your great run in Paris. Un Tramway Nommé Désir is sold out and people are standing in line for the seats reserved for young people. Lee, please describe the circumstances of your invitation to direct the first production of an American play in the history of the Comédie Française.

BREUER:

We were on tour in Madrid a couple of years ago with Dollhouse [Mabou Mines Dollhouse]. Muriel Mayette, the Comédie’s Artistic Director, was there, and she saw the show and got in touch. She told me that she appreciated my work and asked me if I would be interested in directing a play at the Comédie.

TEMPLETON:

You’ve been a name in experimental theatre for almost forty years, ever since the Animations. Your Mabou Mines Dollhouse, with its male roles played by little people, has been an international phenomenon for the last eight years. In inviting Lee Breuer to her conservative institution, Madame Mayette was clearly signaling that she didn’t want business as usual at the “Maison de Molière.” [End Page 81]

BREUER:

Absolutely. She said: “We need to shake up the Comédie Française.”

TEMPLETON:

As a guest director, you had to be approved by the “Comité de Lecture,” the “Reading Committee.” I imagine that your selection was controversial for some members.

BREUER:

I understand that there was quite a bit of discussion and some opposition.

TEMPLETON:

Did you participate in the choice of Streetcar? Several writers in the French press commented that it was high time that the Français, as the French call their national theatre, put on an American play.

BREUER:

Well, I suggested my reverse-gender Lear [in which Lear is a woman with three sons], in which I had dreams of Jeanne Moreau coming out of retirement to play Lear. This didn’t go over, and Muriel suggested Streetcar. I said “OK.”

TEMPLETON:

As you know, Streetcar is not only the first American play to be put on at the Français, but the first non-European play. And out of a repertory of 2,662 dramas. Of course, most of these are period pieces which will never be restaged. But still, when you think that only forty of them are not French, that’s a statistic that sticks in your mind.

BREUER:

And Streetcar was chosen not just to be performed at the Français, but to become part of the company’s repertory, plays that are put on only at the Salle Richelieu, the theatre’s original theatre at Palais Royale. As opposed to plays performed at the theatre’s other venues, the Studio Theatre in the Louvre and the Vieux Columbier.

TEMPLETON:

As a French speaker, I thought your script worked well and was very close to Williams’s dialogue. How did you manage this?

MITCHELL:

Our French is minimal, so when we were given the translation...

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