 |
Lisa Lewis & David Hansen
"Andromache"
by Jean Racine
The Working Theatre, 1992
|
The Book Club Play takes place in a nice living room in modern America, and as SOTP specializes in site-specific plays, they found a pleasant sitting room at Pilgrim for the performance. This room is adjacent to the actual theater space (with a platform stage and traditionally seating) and was one we used as a dressing room for
Eight Impressions.
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.
 |
Manet & Morisot
David Hansen & Tracey Field
"Eight Impressions of a Lunatic"
by Sarah Morton
Red Hen Productions, 1998
Photo: Anthony Gray |
It is a marvelous thing to be so prepared, so attired, so transformed. And I had it so easy; Morisot and her mother, speaking of my character before I entered, the great man, generating expectation and anxiety in them and in the audience. There is a particular moment, when the charming and confident man appraises the woman’s work, when he is surprised, sees beauty, originality, remarkable talent, and he is amazed, even threatened.
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.
 |
Berthe Morisot Reclining
Édouard Manet, 1873 |
Last Saturday, I took myself on an artist date to University Circle. First, I explored the
Cleveland History Center. I had been looking forward to checking out the
Hollywood on the Cuyahoga exhibit, which held a few surprises (I want to know more about those Cleveland-based lithograph houses that were some of the biggest producers of movie posters during the silent era) but was padded out with a lot of photos of movie stars who grew up – or spent a some time – in Cleveland. That’s not really interesting, that’s just trivia.
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.
 |
| " ... out of a DeLorean?!" |
In fact, I saw the servants’ dining room before I saw the main dining room, and I thought, this is cozy. And there’s a lot of natural light. The Hay-KcKinney dining room was grand and opulent and dark and felt dusty.
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.
Or maybe just a different time. My kids tease me about my obsession with the
Great Lakes Exposition of 1936. And it’s true, if you were to use the DeLorean they have at the Crawford Museum, to travel to any time or place in history, I wouldn’t choose the birth of Christ (that might settle some arguments) or Shakespeare’s London (that wouldn’t
settle any arguments) I would choose the summer of 1936, Cleveland, Ohio.
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.
 |
Self-portrait
Berthe Morisot, 1885 |
And Manet was just one part of that equation. A mentor, a colleague, even if you will, a muse.
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 happier.
%20Readings.png)
