Dramaworks’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses – Duplicity and Hedonism Abound

I remember seeing some of Molière’s light and relatively harmless farces.   Perhaps I was expecting something along those lines, but Molière wrote a century earlier.  He never would have thought of writing the scandalous subject matter taken on by Choderlos de Laclos who wrote the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses on which Christopher Hampton’s play is based.  It is quite a study in changing mores foreshadowing the downfall of a depraved class. I come to this play with a particular advantage (or perhaps disadvantage) -- I’ve never seen the movie (or the play)! 

The play depicts games of humiliation and deceit, waged by arrogant aristocrats who preen with a sense of invulnerability, using treachery, sexual perversion, and degradation as their weapons.  Are these merely the games of the leisure class, a decadent society that is about to be destroyed in pre revolutionary France or is it a more universal theme?  The fact that Choderlos de Laclos’ novel has endured since 1782, and serves as the basis for a contemporary play, which was then reincarnated into a movie, seems to answer the latter question.  Think of today’s popular culture, the heartless “reality shows,” the treachery played out every day in corporatocracy and government, and the Internet affording abundant opportunities for narcissism and voyeurism, as just some of the manifestations.   Human nature is, well, human nature. 

Maribeth Graham, Harriet Oser, Kate Hampton

Two former lovers, aristocrats suffering from a severe case of ennui, Le Vicomte de Valmont (Jim Ballard) and La Marquise de Merteuil (Kate Hampton), for their own complicitous amusement set out to destroy some lives in their social circle.  Merteuil wants Valmont to seduce a young girl straight out of a convent, Cécile Volanges (Kelly Gibson) to settle a score.  “Too easy” responds Valmont who has his eyes on another more challenging target, the highly principled (and married) La Présidente de Tourvel (Katie Fabel).  Merteuil finally promises Valmont that if he can produce “written proof” of seducing Tourvel, she would have sex with him.  Meanwhile Cécile and her music teacher, Le Chevalier Danceny (Brian William Sheppard) have fallen in love.  And Valmont has learned that Cécile’s mother, Madame de Volanges (Maribeth Graham), has written to Tourvel calling him a “pervert.”  He now seeks revenge by bedding Cécile, Merteuil’s original intended target.  So the stage is set.  Merteuil and Valmont devise a scheme to trick Danceny and Cécile into their confidence.  From there the rest of the plot unfolds almost from its own internal energy, imbued with intrigue, deceit and sexual maneuverings.  And the actions of our villains have consequences in the end, circling back to them. The guillotine awaits them all!

Jim Ballard and Katie Fabel

Central to the play is the sexual, competitive tension between Ballard and Hampton pulling the strings of the other players, frequently with soap-operatic overtones.  Ballard plays his part with an arrogantly superior and disdainful demeanor but with a hint of humanity and, ultimately, vulnerability, while Hampton is the more malevolent predator.  In fact, Hampton’s Merteuil strikes me as a sociopath, whose verbal interactions can out maneuver any of the play’s characters, including Valmont who excels in persuasive rhetoric when it comes to bedding a woman.  Hampton comports herself with an untouchable imperiousness, and her power over the other characters is absolute.   She also gives voice to feminist rage -- after all, this was a society that was male dominated, and Merteuil seeks revenge on that score as well. One tell-tale exchange between she and Valmont seems to sum up her entire being, after Valmont asks I often wonder how you managed to invent yourself.  Merteuil replies I had no choice, did I, I’m a woman.  Women are obliged to be far more skilful than men, because who ever wastes time cultivating inessential skills?  You think you put as much ingenuity into winning us as we put into losing: well, it’s debatable, I suppose, but from then on, you hold the ace in the pack.  You can ruin us whenever the fancy takes you:  all we can achieve by denouncing you is to enhance your prestige.  We can’t even get rid of you when we want to: we’re compelled to unstitch, painstakingly, what you would just cut through.  We either have to devise some way of making you want to leave us, so you’ll feel guilty to harm us; or find a reliable means of blackmail:  otherwise you can destroy our reputation and our life with a few well-chosen words.  So of course I had to invent:  not only myself, but was of escape no one else has ever thought of, not even I, because I had to be fast enough on my feet to know how to improvise.  And I’ve succeeded, because I always knew I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.

The Dramaworks production is ambitious, twelve actors in a relatively small space with multiple scene changes, but the theatre company is up to the challenge.   The Director (Lynnette Barkley), the costume designer (Brian O'Keefe), the scenic designer (Victor Becker), the lighting designer (Jerold R. Forsyth) and the sound designer (Steve Shapiro) bring this period piece to life.  Barkley has a specific vision and coming from an extensive background of musical theatre and choreography, this production benefits from that skill.  (I loved the opening sequence of all the actors briefly posing “tableaux vivants” before the action begins, like a big production number of a musical.) There are eighteen scenes (too many, but that is what the play calls for) and Barkley tries to minimize interruptions of the action -- no blackouts and minimal moving of furniture -- so the many scene changes are as fluid as feasible, enhanced by Becker’s clever scenic design, and Forsyth’s lighting, moving from “sensual” to “cold and angry” and Shapiro’s selection of musical interludes for those changes – “to keep the energy going.” 

Les Liaisons Dangereuses Set

The details of costumes and scenery are extraordinary.  Ninety percent of the 18^th century furniture on the stage is original, not replicas.  The elaborate gold leaf railings and balusters were all welded in the Dramaworks shop.  There are 26 costumes for 12 actors and as the play takes place over three months, the changes are designed to connote the passage of time. Brian O'Keefe's costumes are spectacular!  (And kudos to the wig designer, Omayra Diaz Rodriguez.) Finally, there is a revolving staircase to assist with the multiple scenic changes.  It is a formidable undertaking for a regional theatre.

But essentially Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a cerebral play – and a long one too, clocking in at almost three hours including intermission --  and although hearts are broken on stage, and there are several redeeming comic elements such as the scene where Valmont dictates a letter intended for his love, Tourvel, while he is having sex with his courtesan, Emilie (well played by Nanique Gheridian, a founding member of Dramaworks) with double entendres abounding, it is a play which may fail to capture the audience’s heart.  (Do we really care about these characters?) My lovely wife, Ann, is away right now, and I usually judge the poignancy of a play by the number of tissues she goes through.  By that anecdotal metric, this probably would be a zero tissue play.  Nonetheless, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is well worth seeing for the costume pageantry and the script’s barbed wit alone.

Another Holiday Ritual

There’s a corollary to sending out Holiday Cards: receiving cards and then coming to the point of having to throw them out.  We keep a list of names and addresses so we have a checklist of the people we’ve sent and received cards from.  Over the years, that list has declined from hundreds, and then leveled off to about a hundred, and now to less than a hundred.  Death, and the attrition of friends with whom we now have only a superficial relationship are the main reasons for the decline, and some have gone the Email route to express their holiday greetings.  We still like to send a card and put a stamp on an envelope but probably that too will fall by the wayside one of these days.

I feel a sense of sadness when old friends or former colleagues suddenly disappear from our checklist.  Of course circumstances change and old relationships not actively maintained are the main culprits.  As much our fault as theirs.  On the other hand there are people with whom we exchange cards, year after year, although our contact with them from decades ago was strictly accidental and passing.  

One such exchange is with Bianca, the woman Ann shared a hospital room with when our son Jonathan was born.  I think we visited one another a few times after the respective births of our sons more than three decades ago, but outside of that, the only contact we’ve had has been those holiday card exchanges, she commenting on her son’s progress in life and we doing the same.  It is a touching tradition and we look forward to those holiday updates as our sons navigate their lives, born on the same day and at almost the same moment.

Another holiday card exchange is truly remarkable.  As the New Year was turning from 1989 to 1990, I had a business trip to Japan and decided to take Ann and Jonathan (his first such trip, being only 12 years old at the time).   

While I was meeting with our host, a Japanese bookseller in Tokyo one day (this photo is of us, he and his wife in front of our hotel), Ann and Jonathan decided to take the underground to the Ginza area to shop and have lunch.  As they were finishing their meal, Ann remarked to Jonathan that she thought a fellow diner appeared to have been listening very attentively to their conversation.  Ann smiled at her and shortly afterward a very demure looking older Japanese woman came over to their table and in very correct English apologized for appearing to be overhearing their conversation.  She went on to say “I hope you will pardon me, I do not mean to interrupt, but may I ask where you are from?”  Ann was a little surprised as it was quite unusual to hear a Japanese person speaking English so well.  

So Ann replied and the woman asked whether she could move next to them and talk to them a little as she had so few opportunities to speak to native English speakers.  She explained that she was a language teacher in her nearby home town of Yokohama.

By all means Ann said and so throughout the rest their meal, the three of them talked.  They hit it off!  She introduced herself as Mrs. Murakami, and invited Ann and Jonathan to be her guests at a specialty dessert shop down the street.  They continued to talk and then Mrs. Murakami did something very uncharacteristic of the Japanese, she invited us all for tea and lunch and to see her ancestral home in Yokohama where she and her husband lived.  Ann accepted knowing we were free that following Saturday.   

So off to Yokohama we went where she met us at the train station to help us find the house, situated in the prime spot at the top of a hill.  Although not a house the size of most average American homes, it was very large by Japanese standards.  But it had been handed down from generation to generation in her family and was highly treasured.  We were cordially welcomed by other members of her family and led into the living room and seated in places of honor.  This room also serves as a bedroom where tatami mats are placed on the floor for sleeping. After a small meal concluded with tea, we were given a short tour of the rest of the house, in particular one room devoted to the worship of her ancestors, where a shrine was adorned with candles.

The following year, we decided to send her a holiday card and she sent us one as well, the two crossing in the mail.  Since then, we have not missed a Christmas holiday without sending a card and note to her as well as she to us. 

As it turns out, Ann and Mrs. Murakami had a chance to renew their acquaintance ten years later, in 1998, when we flew to Japan to visit Jonathan, then spending his junior year at Doshisha University in Kyoto.  Mrs. Murakami treated Ann to an extraordinary luncheon where no menus were presented, exquisite small dishes just kept arriving at their table for almost 2 hours.  Ann remembers thinking that that was the most gastronomically incredible meal she has ever had!

However, this year we didn’t receive a card and we were worried, knowing Mrs. Murakami is about ten years our senior.  We were about to put our list away and suddenly there appeared an envelope from Japan and we could tell by the handwriting that it was from her.  We were elated.

Inside the card was a very neatly handwritten note as follows:

Dear Ann,

   Thank you very much for your 26^th Christmas card.  It gives me courage for life.  The picture of you two is so wonderful and you are as young as you are when I saw you for the first time in Tokyo.  I am not so fine.  I was in a hospital ten days this summer and next year I will have an operation on my eye.  But fortunately I can attend the class of Reading Shakespeare two times a month.  We have spent twenty years now.  Still we have seven plays ahead of us.  Every member is around eighty years old.

   Please tell my best regard to your dear son Jonathan.  I wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

With love, Toshiko

Indeed, Toshiko, your note too gives us “courage of life.”

Rules of Civility and A Dog’s Purpose

This is a continuation of the previous entry, two other books I enjoyed reading on the cruise.  Rules of Civility is the debut novel of Amor Towles who in “real life” is a “principal at an investment firm in Manhattan.”  In this regard he reminds me of a much younger version of Louis Begley, another professional (although a lawyer), who also stepped across the line into fiction writing.  Towles does so successfully as well, managing to capture a time, place, and social strata with a keen eye, one that makes the novel compelling reading. Think of the times of F. Scott Fitzgerald, combined with the insights of Edith Wharton into privileged society, along with some punchy sentences reminiscent of Mickey Spillane. (E.G.: “The driver put the cab in gear and Broadway began slipping by the windows like a string of lights being pulled off a Christmas tree.”  Or “The looked like they wouldn’t know skinny if it was wrapped in cellophane and sold at the five-and-dime.”)

Unusual, it’s a first person female narration although the novel is written by a man.  Our likeable protagonist, Katey Kontent, with grit and some fortuitous luck, finds herself navigating from her start in a secretarial pool into the somewhat shark infested waters of New York City’s upper class in 1938.  The art deco style scene is infested with some very rich people, and she and her friend Eve – actually roommates at the time – both set their sights on Tinker, an ostensibly very rich, attractive man.  Eve is the Machiavellian predator while Katey actually loves him.  But like much of life, things are not the way they seem.  Tinker has a dark secret as he follows his guide, the “110 rules” originally penned by the young George Washington, from which the novel derives its title, Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.

And there is a central theme that ties everything together in the novel when Katey realizes….

It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time-by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York' Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?  

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions-we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

In that regard, Wallace Stegner (see previous entry) would completely agree!

Rules of Civility is a noteworthy first novel and I am looking forward to Towles’ next work.

On to a touching work, very original as it is written from a “first dog’s” point of view.  Yes, dogs can think and write!  We just have to suspend belief and sit back and enjoy. I have my son, Jonathan, to thank for bringing this book to my attention, sort of a children’s book for adults, a simple and moving parable.  I think you have to love dogs to read A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron.  Dogs have been a good part of my life, but, alas, not for the last ten years.

I was about eight years old when my parents picked up my first puppy, a pedigree Boxer which for some reason, one that I do not recall, we named Jo-Jo.  He was a great watch dog and but was raised slightly to be slightly neurotic so he acted out some bad behavior.  With my sister and myself he was like another sibling and we could do anything to him, ride him, dress him up nonsensically (here we had a sailor’s hat on him and a cigarette dangling from his mouth), roughhouse with him (he always being gentle with us).  But leave him alone and he’d practically wreck the house.  It got so bad that our family once reluctantly left him in the basement.  What could he hurt there?  Well, we had an old coal furnace which was converted to an oil burner and when we returned home he had charged, battered, and wrecked the furnace.   Thereafter, he had to be left tied up when we were gone.

But I loved Jo-Jo and was always with him, remembering taking him to the Veterinarian with my parents when he was only eight or nine as he was ill, watching him be put in a cage, he looking back at me with sad eyes. The Vet said he should be fine, pick him up in the morning.  But he wasn’t and he had died before we returned the next morning of nephritis, apparently quite common in boxers. I was devastated and it took a long time to get over it.   My parents eventually got another boxer, named Sock (his white paws looked like socks).  But by that time I was off at college and never really bonded with him.

When Ann and I moved to Westport from New York, it seemed like everyone had dogs, so we found ourselves doggie window shopping and suddenly we had a Miniature Schnauzer pup, who we named Lilly.  She lived 16 years and was really like our first child.  We spoiled her rotten and loved her madly.  She was the smartest of the dogs I’ve known (maybe she’s really the author of A Dog’s Purpose :-).  She lived in our first two homes and even was part of our early boating life. When Jonathan was born, she reluctantly put up with his toddler taunting. 

We were putting an addition on the house and noticed she was losing her bodily functions on the unfinished floor.  She was also going blind and deaf so we took her on that long ride to the Vet.  I don’t think Ann and I cried so much in our lives.  We resolved, never again could we go through that.

So there was no dog in our life for a few years, no intent to get a dog, but one day I saw a little classified ad in the Westport News, “Miniature Schnauzer puppy available to a loving family.”  What harm we asked ourselves to at least see the dog?  “Please, please, please” our 12 year old Jonathan begged, “I’ll take care of her.”  OK, so we called the number and the woman on the line explained it was her recently deceased father’s dog, actually one of two fully house broken Schnauzer puppies he had had, brother and sister, named after Morse Code pulses, “Dot” and “Dash.”  The male pup had already been adopted but we wanted the female anyhow, so she agreed to a “test run,” we taking the dog overnight and we’ll see how it goes.  Well, Dot (who we called “Dotty”) came to visit and never left. 

Jonathan’s promise to feed and walk the dog lasted for a few weeks and then Dotty was our responsibility.  And once he went off to college, it was like it used to be, just our dog and Ann and me. She was game for anything and spent many nights and weeks with us on our boat, my rowing her to an island nearby our mooring to do her business.  She went with us on our most adventuresome trips, finally moving to Florida with us and finding a new sport, catching geckoes.  When Ann was out, she would always be by my side or on my lap if I was reading or watching TV.

By the time she turned 14, her health was declining and we could tell the time was coming for that dreaded ride to the Vet.  We couldn’t face it and about that time my mother died.  The day of my mother’s funeral, poor Dotty looked up at us from her bed, from which she couldn’t rise, and we knew that when we returned we’d have to make that trip.  We checked with the Vet.  He’d be there.  So when we returned from my mother’s funeral, we tremulously approached her bed.  She didn’t stir.  She had obviously just died, sparing us on the one hand but, given the day we had just gone through, adding so much to our grief.  I don’t know how we got her body to the Vet as the tears poured from me as I drove those ten minutes.  I needed windshield wipers for my eyes.  We agreed to cremation and a few weeks later received a Plaster of Paris imprint of her paws.  We still have that, but I can’t bear to look at it.

We are now resolved, we could never go through that again.

So there you have it, full disclosure for my reading of A Dog’s Purpose, which as I said, is written from a dog’s perspective.  This particular narrator is not only one dog, but is reincarnated to truly discover “a dog’s purpose.”   He/she segues from Bailey to Ellie to Buddy in the novel, three separate but related lives, learning in the first life the meaning of love, “the boy” as Bailey refers to Ethan, “this was, I decided, my purpose as a dog, to comfort the boy whenever he needed me.”  But dogs (see my own story) do not live long, and eventually Bailey must “leave,” being reassured by “the boy” as he departs this life, that “you were a good dog.” 

He is reincarnated as a new-born pup, eventually named Ellie, and trains as a search and rescue dog and during her career makes a number of rescues, including the emotional rescue of his masters, first Jakob, and then Maya, “I had a clear purpose – to Find, Show, and save people.  I was a good dog.  Both Maya and Jakob were focused on work, and that meant neither one of them could ever love me with the utter abandon of Ethan.”

Ellie is then reborn as Buddy, but it is a rocky start for him (first named Bear-Bear by uncaring owners).  He is abandoned in the woods by them, and by the time he finds himself back to civilization – eating garbage along the way, he is distraught.  “I was a dog who had learned to live among and serve humans as my sole purpose in life.  Now, cut off from them, I was adrift.  I had no purpose, no destiny, no hope.”   However, he finally finds a new owner, is renamed “Buddy,” and to go into much more detail is to get into spoilers although I sort of guessed where it was going. 

This novel would devour a full tissue box if Ann had read it.  It was touching and one must credit the author, W. Bruce Cameron, for his imaginative tale.  It is a gentle reminder that we all need to find our purpose in life and then find a way to fulfill it.  Buddy nee Ellie nee Bailey certainly did.

As Bailey exclaims:  “dogs have important jobs, like barking when the doorbell rings, but cats have no function in a house whatsoever.”