nothin Quartet Proves Symphonic | New Haven Independent

Quartet Proves Symphonic

Joey Moro Photo

Drawing room before the French Revolution. Air raid shelter after World War III.

In the months leading up to the Jan. 22nd performance of Heiner Müller’s Quartet at the Yale Cabaret, David Bruin was left to struggle with these spare, succinct words, the maddening and only stage directions that Müller left for directors, actors, dramaturges, and set designers at the beginning of the play. Bruin, a second-year dramaturge at the Yale School of Drama and the show’s director, found himself trying to reconcile these worlds: one, the sphere of ancien régime Paris from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses of 1782, the novel on which the play is based. The other, a blank, annihilated post-WWIII Europe that Bruin did not know, but had some faint inkling of.

What he discovered, and committed masterfully to the stage in Quartets end-of-January performance, was this: For all its seeming incomprehensibility, Müller’s thirteen-word command sets into motion a universe caught between the fantasies of lover’s play and death’s realities, that grim club to which we all ultimately belong. As the script unravels like a slow, spinning map of bodies in a room of funhouse mirrors, it operates in delicious, blurry dualities: love versus seduction and deep desire versus vampish horseplay, male versus female, young versus old, and finite time versus eternity.

I feel like these characters in Quartet look into something that we might call the deination, the energy to both come together and the energy to destroy. Part of that has to do with the world as the experience it in your head and the experience in front of you,” Bruin said in an interview before the opening night performance.

When the play opens, we are introduced to Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, ex-lovers who engage in seductive banter that ranges from mildly jealous to bitterly vitriolic. Valmont seeks to seduce Madame de Tourvel, the president’s principled wife, while Merteuil attempts to corrupt her young niece Cécile de Volanges, fresh out of a convent, by pushing her and Valmont on each other. Both are propelled by the humiliation and shame that seduction will bring upon Tourvel and Cécile — and on the other ex-lover. 

But there’s a catch: We never see Tourvel or Cécile, only their parts played by Merteuil and Valmont, who do so in drag. This is brilliance on Müller’s part. By playing up the conspicuous elimination of characters present in de Laclos’ novel, Quartet lends itself to psychological thrill and role-playing; it is the better and more robust cousin of Jean Genet’s The Maids, which the Cab’s Dustin Wills directed in drag last year. As actors Sydney Lemmon (Merteuil, Valmont, Cécile) and Edmund Donovan (Valmont, Tourvel) — and by extension, their audience — switch countries, genres, genders, and codes, they become pawns in their own monumental game, ultimately compelled to explore and dissect what it means to be wholly, violently in love with another body.

Bruin’s direction — a mix of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, with a nod to sacred text, the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, and a touch of Marx — and the show’s acting are what make Quartet deeply compelling. Lemmon and Donovan, both first-year School of Drama students and Cab debuts, fully commit to their roles as Merteuil and Valmont. As they evolve, so does the artistic narrative around them: strains of Franz Schubert mingle with Sam Cooke and the Righteous Brothers; red light falls on yellow, bathing the actors in blood red, signs of sacred and secular beauty find their way to each other in the same scenes.

The result is a show that is barbaric and divine, raucously funny and not funny at all. As two beautiful bodies weave and bend around Mariana Sanchez’s spare set — a long, slick dinner table with two chairs, a chandelier hanging overhead and a bottle of wine and two glasses on the surface — they challenge each other in a high-stakes game of role playing that cannot end in anything but voluptuous tragedy: Valmont becomes Tournel and Merteuil Valmont, Merteuil becomes Cécile and Valmont a wayward priest, Merteuil becomes the lover wracked with desire and Valmont her willing victim. The last, which feels as though it has been inevitable from the outset, leaves the audience near-breathless in the darkness, watching a lover’s death and wondering, genuinely:

Is this what it is to love with all my heart?

The last six plays of the Cab season were just announced! To find out more about the Yale Cabaret’s upcoming shows, visit their calendar.

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