stage matters / By William Kowinski

Another festival, another show — Collective joy at Dell’Arte’s Mad River Fest

(June 28, 2007)  They ride beneath a diamond blue evening sky, with the silhouetted solitude of gold-green hills surrounding, and passing of course the wide phantom waters of the Blue Lake. They walk from quiet streets through the unassuming fence into the big backyard called the Rooney Amphitheatre.

They seem mostly of the current theatre-going age: early to middle Baby Boomers now (you know, my g-g-generation), folding amiably weary bones into dark green plastic chairs. In front of them the younger families array their blankets in the grass, unpacking the faux Tupperware containers of healthy munchies. Soon the children are dabbing at their strawberries while parents discreetly sip their wine. All begin the bundling — the coats and sweaters, sleeping bags and even scarves, against the chilling evening and the cold oncoming night. They face the storied stage, expectant.

Dell’Arte Company members Adrian Mejia and Barbara Geary in “Tartuffe,” a contemporary adaptation of Moliere’s classic comedy, during the 2007 Mad River Festival. The Mad River Festival runs through July 21. Photo by Ed Smith

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Many have been ritually coming to Dell’Arte’s Mad River Festival for years, but all here — audience and performers, too — are enacting a tradition that goes back to the glimmering dawn of theatre.

In her current best-selling book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy , Barbara Ehrenreich chronicles much of this history. For thousands of years, people on a certain day dropped their toil and their daily selves, and put on masks and costumes for frenzies of singing and dancing that led to ecstasy and exhaustion, or even trance and speaking in tongues, before they returned revived to the village and the fields. Some of these seasonal events were meaningful ceremonies, others were more profane. Wine and wildness characterized festivals of ancient Greece and the Saturnalia of Rome, but apart from the participatory revelry there was entertainment by certain specialists. The Dorians of very early Greece held a festival called the komos, the root of our word “comedy,” presided over by the chief singer and master of ceremonies, the komoidos, or comedian.

In villages and towns of 12th-15th century Europe there was the Feast of Fools and festivals featuring Lords of Misrule — ordinary folk in the roles of princes, mayors and bishops, who by their behavior lampooned the lot. But soon the country people themselves were ridiculed by the imitating antics of the cloddish, clumsy, gullible characters called clowns.

Rulers of church and state first tried to co-opt the festivals and then ban or at least tame them, as well as demonizing the entertainers. But the festival fever always returned, and theatre formalized it. One lineage runs from Roman comedy to Commedia Dell’Arte and the broader category of physical theatre, with its blend of acrobatics, clowning, circus and farce; another crosses from the satirical comedies of Aristophanes presented at the Dionysia festivals, to the Lords of Misrule and jesters, to later political and social comedy. The whole idea of actors impersonating characters comes partly from the festival shows.

Then when a certain son of a 17th century French upholsterer who called himself Moliere took his failed theatre troupe out of Paris and into the country, he won laughing audiences with revivals of farce and commedia. It was in that early spirit that the Dell’Arte Company presents his later play, Tartuffe. It could be argued that stripping down the work of the mature Moliere to commedia elements does violence to his more sophisticated satire and urban emphasis on language, but this European Union of Italianated Tartuffe fits the festival occasion to a “oui.”

It is a telling blend. On a handsome set representing a wealthy French home, the excellently exaggerated costumes and makeup support a playing style that emphasizes the caricature in character in the mannered society of that French period (especially David Ferney as the mincing Valere), showing it to be as ridiculous as the masked stock characters of commedia (most prominently, Adrian Mejia as Orgon, the patriarchal Pantalone.)

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