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| Berthe Morisot with Bouquet of Violets etching, Édouard Manet, 1872 |
For example, on Saturday evening, I caught the Seat of the Pants production of The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarias, playing through May 31 at Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Tremont. In the 1990s I performed in a surprising number of shows in Pilgrim, beginning with the 1992 Working Theatre production of Jean Racine’s Andromache, and concluding with Eight Impressions of a Lunatic by Sarah Morton, and produced by Red Hen Theatre in 1998.
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| Lisa Lewis & David Hansen "Andromache" by Jean Racine The Working Theatre, 1992 |
I shared a bit about that production a couple years ago, one of those experiences I used to have, when I took myself seriously as an actor. I read several books on the character I was playing, Édouard Manet, and on the subject of the play, Berthe Morisot. For the first time in my life, I studied painting. I grew my hair out. I added to my shallow education in everything.
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| Manet & Morisot David Hansen & Tracey Field "Eight Impressions of a Lunatic" by Sarah Morton Red Hen Productions, 1998 Photo: Anthony Gray |
I have a good friend who has told me he was taken with that brief moment, that I succeeded in communicating all of those things. Good for me. What I remember is that no matter how much self-confidence, even arrogance, that I was able to maintain, it was only from the shoulders up. When Tracey Field, as Morisot, handed me a cup of tea, my hands shook so terribly. Every single time. My face can fool people. My hands, not so much.
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| Berthe Morisot Reclining Édouard Manet, 1873 |
But as long as I was there, I decided to just wander around. There's a lovely exhibit on community-based health care. I got fairly lost in the Hay-McKinney Mansion, a large wing of the museum I’d never taken the time to experience before. There were no other people around and I became concerned that I had entered some “employees only” area, especially when I encountered the servants’ quarters. But things were labeled for display, and marked “please do not touch” so I assumed the best.
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| " ... out of a DeLorean?!" |
And I hit the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, which I have been to many times (we even attended a wedding reception there in the late 90s) not so much to see the cars, but the peer through the windows of the recreated Euclid Avenue storefronts located along one wall in the lower level.
I was reminded of Yesterday’s Main Street at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, which my family first visited some fifty years ago. As an eight year-old, every exhibit made an indelible impression, and in idle moments, or drifting off to sleep, I would fantasize about what it would be like to live in a different time and place.
For more information, check out the script for my play Cleveland Centennial! or read this blog from the beginning.
The story of Manet and Morisot is one of mutual respect and admiration, and it’s one that still interests me because I seek out such symbiotic artistic relationships in my life.
Morton’s play is a feminist work, one centered on Morisot, and her struggle to create art while also accepting her place in bourgeois society – she wants to be married, to have a child, she also wants to paint and for her work to be acknowledged. Like most of us, she wants happiness.
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| Self-portrait Berthe Morisot, 1885 |
Many of the works currently on display at the the CMA are Manet’s studies and paintings of Morisot, and they are lovely, tasteful portraits of a proper, middle-class woman, often dressed in black, occasionally reclining, though never the subject of a fictional work like Olympia or Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (no, those two aren’t here in Cleveland) though the very best painting of Morisot is the last one we encounter before exiting through the gift shop – a self-portrait, painted when she was forty-four. She painted what she saw in the mirror, a middle-class, middle-aged woman, palette and brush at hand.
She looks happy.
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