Vintage Theater Collective

Hello Vintage friends, Eric Powell Holm here; I'm a proud member of the Collective, and the adaptor of our Fall production here at Strawdog, L'Ecole des Femmes, Or Woman School. I directed and adapted our last two full productions: A Wintertime Tale and Misanthrope, Or the Impossible Lovers, and this new script is based on Molière's breakthrough comedy l'Ecole des femmes, often translated as School For Wives. On February 1st, I came back to Chicago from Minneapolis, where I've been based for the past ten years, to work with the Collective on this new adaptation.

This Winter, we started what I hope will become a new tradition, a month-long workshop dedicated purely to developing the script.  My brilliant fellow Collective members and other close friend/artists in the amazing Chicago scene met at 10am four days a week to do a sort-of "standing table-work." We knew when the workshop 'begin' and when it would be 'over,' but we never gave ourselves the pressure of a public performance of any kind—to let the whole month of rehearsals be focused on play and experimentation and debate about the script itself, and how to bring it to life in the Fall.

I have a long and passionate relationship with this play.  My freshman year of acting school at the University of Minnesota/Guthrie BFA program (where I met Vintage founders Katy Collins and Rachael Jenison) included a class dedicated to reading the important plays in the canon.  We read Antigone and A Doll's House and Caucasian Chalk Circle—and of course we read Richard Wilbur's genius translation of Tartuffe.  The fact that someone could accomplish such a joyful and flowing and funny adaptation of a play in another language was something of a revelation, but more, the idea that Wilbur was translating twelve-syllable rhyming French Alexandrines into ten-syllable, Shakespearean iambic pentameter AND keeping the rhyme-structure... it still boggles the mind: to translate poetry in the form of drama, and keep the rhyme without betraying the matchless quality of the comedic storytelling.  Wilbur is still unmatched in Molière translation.  My French-speaking friends tell me that he manages to keep the rhythm of the original French while compressing it into a shorter line... astonishing.  I ran a company for several summers called Shakespeare On The Cape, and our production of School For Wives, translated by Richard Wilbur, was one of our most successful and acclaimed productions.  I fell even further in love with Molière, and, after Vintage commissioned me to adapt Le Misanthrope, I've been most attracted to this wonderful play; in my book, it's Molière's funniest script.

But I'm happy to report that our Vintage version is not a new 'translation' (I don't speak French, although you will sometimes catch me pretending to speak French), but instead a new 'adaptation.'  I cut a major scene in the second half of the play, for instance, because it repeats the arguments made at the top of the play; in order to achieve the proposed doubling, I've eliminated the foolish servants from the final scene; though Woman School is not set in any particular time period, the script makes references to films and cars and trains, and doesn't assume a 1660 setting; I've imposed a theatrically expressive relationship with music, with the idea that Love makes you want to burst into song.  

The thoroughly inspired mission of the Vintage Theater Collective is "to dialogue with classic works and learn through them how to better live in our world today." I was just reading about the word "Dialogue" (when used as a verb); the first definition "to converse," but the second verb definition is "to discuss areas of disagreement frankly in order to resolve them." I love the idea of arguing with the past (especially America's darker history) in order to resolve things. 

I also love the way our mission empowers us to have an aesthetic perspective that is equal to that of our great ancestor; after all, Molière was an actor and a writer who formed a company and produced his own work. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer. He fell in love with the wrong women and had to fight against a culture of censorship—it's only the accumulated years of lionizing Molière and his excellent plays that lead to a gulf between us. The critic and thinker Jan Kott is most famous for calling Shakespeare "our contemporary," and I find that point-of-view on these great dead artists thrilling and horrifying and ultimately galvanizing—it's our responsibility to be the best artists we can be, to aim for greatness, and to be unafraid of learning from, and arguing with, the past.

-Eric