STAGE REVIEW : A Striking View of 'The Guilty Mother'

By SYLVIE DRAKE

May 23, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Theater Writer

It’s uncommon (to say the least) for an opera company to present a play, even if that play comes with some original incidental music (by Mark McGurty) and, yes, includes a few lines of song ( “J’ai ferme les yeux pour ne plus rien voir . . . .”). Surely, only an outfit as addicted to the unconventional as the Long Beach Opera would have even considered such an undertaking.

Lucky for us that it did.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. May 24, 1989 FOR THE RECORD
Los Angeles Times Wednesday May 24, 1989 Home Edition Calendar Part 6 Page 2 Column 6 National Desk 4 inches; 142 words Type of Material: Correction
In Tuesday’s review of the Long Beach production of “The Guilty Mother,” this writer credited Philip Littell and director Brian Kulick jointly with the adaptation of the Beaumarchais play. The credit, which was not in the program, was included in an insert distributed to reviewers and confirmed verbally by Long Beach Opera general director Michael Milenski.
However, Littell said Tuesday that he had withdrawn his name from the production before the opening because he was unhappy with changes made to it by director Kulick. He added that he had written to Milenski reaffirming his singular ownership of the adaptation and requesting that no one be credited with it in the program. Milenski confirmed that he had received such a letter from Littell and acknowledged that he was wrong to give out Littell’s name without mentioning the dispute.
“I should have,” he said.
A statement in the review to the effect that “The Guilty Mother” has never been set to music was also in error. Darius Milhaud set it to music in 1964.

That play--”The Guilty Mother”--is the third piece in Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy that began with “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” operatic versions of which are on Long Beach Opera’s current season.

It is also extremely different in tone and intention from the other two. And it has never been set to music--though why is a good question, made especially glaring after one has seen what can be done with it as a play.

“Done with it as a play” applies because, in its unadulterated 18th-Century French form, “The Guilty Mother,” which is almost never staged (not here and rarely in France), lacks the brio of the other two Figaro comedies and is redolent with political innuendo.

The barbs were specifically aimed at the lawyer Nicolas Bergasse (thinly disguised in the play as the profiteering bounder Begearss), a deadly adversary of the playwright, whom Beaumarchais describes as “the Tartuffe of probity, the way Moliere’s Tartuffe was the Tartuffe of religion.”

This aspect of “The Guilty Mother” is now a historical footnote, less significant for us than the play’s more enduring universal qualities. Beaumarchais himself could see beyond the Bergasse affair and wrote that, “independently of any party or faction, ‘The Guilty Mother,’ is a play about the interior pain that breaks up families and for which divorce, otherwise good, is no cure . . . Paternal feeling, a generous heart and forbearance are the only remedies. That is what I wanted to impress on all minds.”

And, indeed, that is what the adapters of the play at the Center Theater impress upon ours. They are Philip Littell and the director, Brian Kulick. They have streamlined “The Guilty Mother,” shaved it of a couple of minor characters and changed Begearss to one Major Lequeu (a name easier to pronounce, according to the adapters who, in a bit of whimsy, borrowed it from Jean-Jacques Lequeu, a visionary 18th-Century architect).

The play finds Count Almaviva (Paul Elder) and his Countess Rosine (Camille Ameen) languishing in Paris, romantically estranged and lamenting lost loves while their maid Florestine (an impish Shannon Holt) and their son Leon (Brent Hinkley) pine away with love for each other.

Complications stem from the fact that (unbeknown to Rosine) Florestine is the Count’s illegitimate daughter and Leon is the illegitimate son of Rosine and the now-gone Cherubino. Thinking Florestine to be Leon’s sister, Almaviva wants to give her in marriage to the conniving Major (Arthur Hanket).

The ups and downs of young love, the quarrels of the unhappy Count and Countess, the insidious manipulations of the Major and the tomfoolery of a burnt-out and slovenly Figaro (played by performance artist John Fleck) and his buxom wife Suzanne (a feisty Michelle Mais) take up nearly three delectable, dark, often vastly but always subtly humorous hours.

The truth eventually sends the Major packing and rescues everyone else--young lovers and old, as the brawling Almaviva and Rosine learn to find mutual acceptance and solace in honesty, while Figaro and Suzanne discover they can’t live without each other.

It all works. So well in fact, that, aside from emphasizing universal values and emerging as a surprisingly tender and quizzical elegy to world-weariness and the corruptions of a lifetime (as well as, in the end, being a real song of renewal), we are even given a whiff of the prevailing turmoil and depression of 1790 Paris--a climate not so different from our own. Kulick and designer Mark Wendland achieve their ends visually as well as aurally.

The set is striking: An acutely raked white rectangle of a stage, set off by an overturned carriage and scattered trunks of all sizes and shapes. The effect is one of disarray in a sharply skewed world. Umbrellas sprout from the set like mushrooms, at odd angles and heights--a reference to everyone’s disgust at having left “the sun and dust of Spain” for the rain and mud of Paris. An oversized moon dominates the lunacy in the second half, while Peter Maradudin’s lighting and McGurty’s sweetly dissonant music complete the message.

For all its darkness, comedy abounds in this “Guilty Mother,” a further testament to the conceptual integrity of Kulick’s vision.

It’s all a delicious surprise: a superior collaborative effort that deserves much more than its two remaining performances.

At the Long Beach Convention Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, Wednesday at 8 p.m. with a final performance Sunday at 2 p.m. (213) 596-5556.