Summer Vacation Madness by Garland Wright (review)

more deeply the truths of Goethe and his Faust. Truths of the kind to which Goethe surrenders in his elegy of lost love, when he affirms that "although man in his pain be dumb, a god/Gave me the gift to tell of what I suffer." SUMMER VACATION MADNESS Directed by Garland Wright Guthrie Theatre Rustom Bharucha There are three distinct theatrical styles in Garland Wright's production of Goldoni's Summer Vacation Madness: the first act is played with all the frenzied farcical action and flamboyance of commedia dell'arte; the second act is Chekhovian in its delicate counterpointing of nuances, tones, and details ; and the third act projects a stark realism one associates with Beckett. These styles are not directorial impositions on the play but astonishingly perceptive responses to the range and dynamics of Goldoni's dramaturgy. It should be pointed out that the three acts of Summer Vacation Madness are actually adaptations of three separate plays written by Goldoni as parts of a trilogy in 1761 (a year before he left Venice to work at the Com6die Italienne in Paris). Entitled The Vacation Frenzy, The Adventures of the Country Vacation, and The Return from the Vacation, these comedies exist in themselves as perfect entities, and yet, contribute to the all-encompassing framework and vision of the Trilogy. It was Giorgio Strehler who first condensed the three plays in his historic production at the Piccolo Theatre of Milan in the 1954-55 season. The adaptors of the play at the Guthrie (who are not acknowledged in the program) have used an anonymous British translation of the three plays from which they have shaped a marvelously resonant and supple text. Only occasionally anachronistic, the text avoids any attempt to make Goldoni "topical " or "contemporary." The play itself is so strong that it reaches an audience with startling immediacy despite its eighteenth-century social milieu. Goldoni depicts two middle-class Italian families vying with each other to go to the country where they drink, laugh, fall in love, and betray each other rather like Chekhov's characters before returning to the city, bankrupt and emotionally desolate. By the end of the first play, despite its seemingly innocuous effervescence, we realize that these people are desperately living on credit: their desire to go to the country seems almost obsessive and selfdestructive . Today, we may not emulate the aristocracy, as Goldoni's characters did, by spending summers in the Hamptons or Martha's Vineyard. But we still succumb to illusory worlds where we risk losing not only our 75 Boyd Hagen money but our identities. Perhaps, our contemporary equivalent for Goldoni's country is New York City. Garland Wright has not attempted to update the conventions, the behavioral patterns, and the class distinctions of Goldoni's world. In fact, what is so remarkable about the production is his very precise understanding of society , two centuries old, yet uncannily similar to our own in some fundamental ways. Wright's respect for the social commentary in the play is so intense that he does not obfuscate it with intrusive visual effects and technological gimmickry. Nor does he impose any "concept" on the play. Instead , he directs the action in the play moment by moment, always concentrating on details and revelations of character. Particularly eloquent are those moments in the second act where the characters , lost in their inarticulate feelings, attempt to socialize while playing cards. There is even a shadow-play sequence that must have influenced Chekhov when he wrote Treplev's play in The Seagull. The tensions between the main characters, arising primarily out of their repressed feelings for each other, explode in the third act. But then everything is hushed up and perfunctory marriages are arranged in order to maintain some kind of economic equilibrium. At the end of the play, one is acutely aware that Goldoni provides no solution, no glimmer of hope that his middle-class characters will eventually learn to see through their deceptions and truly confront their feelings. The ensemble acting of the entire company is worthy of America's most prestigious regional theatre. For the most part, the actors seem to support each other in their intricate...