16 February 2003: Marivaux, La Dispute
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Translated by Gideon Lester. Adapted and directed by Anne Bogart. Performed mainly by Bogart’s company, the Saratoga International Theatre Institute. Subscription series
I have not read this Marivaux play, and during the long wordless, beautifully choreographed opening sequence it seems to me that Marivaux’s play, whatever its original character, had been left, ostensibly at least, completely behind. This sequence, however, in which, one by one, all the characters (perhaps twenty altogether) enter along the front of the stage apron, stop, turn toward the audience, and then, as if looking in a mirror, admire their reflection, make some adjustment to it, and then move up stage, and then perform some wonderful male vs. female dancing and movement, effectively states in pantomime what seems to lie transparently at the heart of Marivaux’s play: that self-love and self-regard, self-preference, are what drive each of us, drawn though we are so strongly to connection with other humans. Not a startlingly new observation, by any means, but as always it is in the details of Marivaux’s representation and development of this view that all the comedy and all the seriousness end up residing.
La Dispute is about an experiment conducted by a prince and his consort, Hermione, in order to settle a quarrel over a philosophical issue. The issue is, what would happen if two pairs of children, male and female, were raised in isolation from all human contact except for a handler and then, at first maturity, exposed to one another. Marivaux’s charming, cynical conservatism has it — as we might well expect — that the two couples would, by imperious instinct, swiftly become just like us. Implicit in this experiment and its delightful outcome is the perhaps troubling idea that the social interactions that characterize the way we generally live — interactions characterized by constant infidelity to others in the service of faithfulness to our amour propre — are fully instinctive with us, or, as we now like to put it, genetic. We are born with these tendencies, these attributes, and to set them going it is necessary only to open up the right opportunities. The extended dance sequence at the beginning of the play, which I and my companion both thought was over-long by five or seven minutes (a little bit of indulgence of amour propre on Bogart’s part, perhaps), enacted this kind of scenario to wonderfully good effect, setting out the magnetic attraction exerted by humans on their opposites, but without giving away the “secret” of the outcome of the experiment. That outcome, by the way, was a free-for-all physical skirmish in which each of the four characters simultaneously wants to acquire a new partner without really letting go of the old one. In fact, it is even more complex than that, because each of the four, in gravitating toward the new partner and rudely dismissing the old one, has a strong nee