Contemporary Performance: The Emergence of the Fairy Tale

0 '0 CINDERELLA RIDING AWAY WITH HER PRINCE CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE THE EMERGENCE OF THE FAIRY TALE Nina Mankin Artists' attraction to fairy tale themes has always reflected strongly the social and political climate of an historical moment. Even the Brothers Grimm, living in a Germany whose pride had been sapped by the sweep of the Napoleonic Empire, saw their vocation as part of a movement to bolster the German nationalist spirit. Nineteenth-century Romanticism, pitting itself against the stalwart rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment, turned to myth and the folk tale as expressions of the pure and naive spirit of humanity . The modernist impulse of the 1920s in France found fairy tales excellent terrain for the personal expression and imaginative freedom that individuals such as Cocteau and Apollinaire savored in their art. More recently , in the late seventies and eighties, feminists have brought social critique and literary revisioning to the patriarchal paradigms evident in fairy tales. 48 In the last two or three years there has been a new wave of interest in fairy tales of which the Lapine/Sondheim collaboration is only one example that also includes the work of artists as diverse as Philip Glass, Anne Bogart, and Maguy Marin. Here, in contrast to the interest in sexuality and the opportunity for structural analysis that many feminists have found in fairy tales, the current direction is characterized by a less theoretical fascination with children and the family, one that is reflected in society in general. It seems to be a time when the desire for the traditional family is coming back into vogue. Many people are having children, the sexual revolution has ended with the advent of AIDS; following the late seventies crest in the American divorce rate, monogamy and even marriage are back in style. Many artists are having families. In the Woods company alone at least four people have small children, including James Lapine. That fairy tales are on people's minds is not surprising. For an entire generation of Americans (Lapine, Bogart, and Glass among them), fairy tales were both favorite childhood bedtime as well as favorite movietime entertainment. It is interesting that at the same time this generation of artists displays a revived interest in fairy tales, the media is once again embracing the familiar stories. In the past two years alone four television series (including Shelly Duval's Faerie Tale Theatre and the most recent CBS Beauty and the Beast), and at least three major motion pictures (the re-release of Disney's Pinnochio and Cinderella, as well as William Goldman's own The Princess Bride) have centered around fairy tale themes. In his recent New York Times article on the re-emergence of fairy tales in performance, "A Return to the Land of Fairy Tales," child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim associates the contemporary attraction to childhood stories with the desire to escape into a world that is "simple and forthright, where it is clear who is and what is right and wrong." The longing that Bettelheim describes is precisely this nostalgia for the storybook time of the fifties when society seemed to follow a more defined, narrative, and familiar structure than the present. Bruno Bettelheim's book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, has been an important source among some of the artists recently interested in fairy tales. It was the first material Anne Bogart consulted in her work on Cinderella/Cendrillon. Bettelheim is cited extensively in the American Repertory Theatre program for the premiere of the Philip Glass/Robert Moran opera The Juniper Tree; and he was a very important source for Lapine as well. Martha Clarke, whose upcoming production was inspired by the Italian fairy tales of Italo Calvino, has also been reading Bettelheim. Bettelheim's thesis expands upon the Jungian belief that fairy tales and folk tales generally are representations of a society's collective unconscious, to conclude that these children's stories in fact facilitate the individual child's psychic development. It is this interest in the tales as expressions of a child's psyche, developing within a traditionally 49 familiar (and familial) context, that these theatre artists hold in common. Some feminists, interested...