Now This Is a Comeback

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Who are America's hottest playwrights? Some are fast-rising newcomers and some are old hands. But nobody is faster rising or more of an old hand than Pierre de Carlet Chamblain de Marivaux, who in the past few years has vaulted from a footnote or curiosity to a leading dramatist at the nation's nonprofit houses -- and who has been dead since 1763. This season alone has seen at least eight major productions involving four plays, from False Admissions at Connecticut's Hartford Stage to The Triumph of Love at California's Berkeley Repertory. Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, New York, is now playing The Game of Love and Chance; a different translation of Triumph is running off- Broadway; and Princeton's McCarter troupe is rehearsing The Double Inconstancy, retranslated as Changes of Heart.

Marivaux's plays were long derided as being wordy, high-flown and much alike -- they are all about the lengths to which people will go, the rules they will break and the indignities they will suffer in pursuit of romance. As rediscovery began a few years ago, European and avant-garde American stagings often emphasized the dark elements of his work. At the other extreme, some scholars saw only his fascination with Italian commedia dell'arte buffoonery. The premier Marivaux exponent Stephen Wadsworth, who directed his translation of Triumph at Berkeley and is staging his text of Changes of Heart at McCarter, thinks any successful production mingles both flavors: "Marivaux's plays all combine joy and ebullience with a savagely acute perception of how people operate. He wants to leave you on the horns of a dilemma. You cannot simply like his characters for what they are or simply dislike them for what they do."

This moral complexity is one reason for Marivaux's popularity in a cynical time. Another is his obsession with sex and its consequences. Says artistic director Mark Lamos of Hartford: "We're in an age where we can only talk about sex, not have it. These plays are a roundelay of sexual enticement." A third factor, Lamos adds, is that the nonprofit theater has explored the best- known classics, "so there is a natural movement toward the less familiar."

In Buffalo there is merriment but no melancholy. The translation provides for commedia improvisations and further toys with the original by casting the actors both as the Marivaux characters and as a 1930s British touring troupe performing the play. The evening is fun. But it reveals little of why Lamos and others think Marivaux may be genuinely great.

The off-Broadway Triumph, however, makes the case. Its heroine, a princess disguised as a man, seeks the hand of a prince from a deposed rival family. To get her way, she bullies servants and promises to marry the prince's unworldly guardians -- an austere philosopher who spots her true gender and his matronly sister, who doesn't. The production is vividly pretty. What makes it work, though, is its edge, sharper than Shakespeare's in similar plots -- especially when the bamboozled guardians realize they have been cast aside and stare with shame and despair into a slowly fading light.