Visiting Director Stages 'Lorenzaccio'

He was known as “Lorenzo the devil” in sixteenth-century Florence, the hedonistic favorite of the Duke Alessandro de Medici, his cousin and eventual assassin. Never predictable, mostly because he was perpetually drunk and always irreverent, he became a symbol of Florentine decadence, a worthy complement to the debauchery of Alessandro himself.

No one could have guessed that precisely three centuries later Alfred de Musset, France’s Shakespeare and George Sand’s hopeless lover, would transform Lorenzo’s story into tragic farce. And even then, no one could have expected that two centuries after that, Lorenzo himself would be transformed—into a skinny, pale, 21st-century girl, with springs in her legs and melancholy eyes.

Jay Scheib, the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s (HRDC) current visiting director, knew that Lorenzaccio had to be a period piece, using dingy Chinese restaurants, pineapple bras and stiletto heels as emblems of the current time period.

Scheib stages Lorenzaccio from a 1993 translation by Paul Schmidt, who didn’t always take de Musset literally, but nevertheless ended up being faithful to him. Lorenzaccio was meant to be kept contemporary, whether that meant seeing the chaos of Renaissance Florence in 1830s Paris or 21st-century America. What Scheib didn’t know, right up until the show was cast, was that the scoundrel Lorenzaccio would wear braids.

Scheib says he firmly believes in “tailoring characters to actors,” even if it means not knowing the gender of the lead until auditions are over. So Lorenzo became Kate Walker ’06.

Once the cast was assembled, he proceeded to turn his actors into people. Over a period of three days, he trained them in the art of viewpoint, of thinking in character when their character stood idly on-stage, of moving spontaneously and sometimes wildly, but always naturally. The goal was to be articulate with gesture.

“It changes how I look at scenes,” said Carla M. Borras ’05, whose Maurizio, chief of the Florentine police, momentarily quits the emergency assembly after the Duke’s death to grab a beer.

“[Jay] works trying to find behavioral gestures and then amplifying them in weird ways,” explained Benjamin D. Margo ’04, whose dual roles—Catholic conspirator and president of the HRDC—are sometimes conflated. “It all sounds so stupid—I’m peeing on trash cans and taking off my shirt and lifting weights.” (Margo’s corrupt Cardinal confesses to the Duke’s lover while sitting on a toilet.)

If nothing else, this peopling of the stage is useful for Scheib, who often directs by walking on stage and joining the scene. The action continues, but suddenly Scheib has become a member of the crowd, sneering at Lorenzo, running after the mob, pulling up a chair in the Happy Gardens Chinese Restaurant (a hotbed of Republican agitation against the powerful Medicis). It’s as though once de Musset’s exaggerated characters have figured out who they are, Scheib can calmly walk into their midst, already in character himself.

Scheib is a graduate of Columbia’s theater program and spent most of his professional life in Europe. In Salzburg he directed a show that used the text of Herman Melville and the music of Bruce Springsteen; in Budapest, he explored the work of Tennessee Williams. A former student of Robert Woodruff, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, he is at Harvard to re-inaugurate the Visiting Director Program, the ambitious undertaking of Margo and the HRDC to give students the chance to work with professional directors.

“We wanted somebody who was prepared to come into a student environment and shake things up and go nuts,” said Margo, who is also a Crimson editor. The HRDC Board was most excited by Scheib, who presented, among other ideas, Schmidt’s gritty translation of Lorenzaccio and a vague hint of the theatrical use of “multimedia.”

The result was the welcome collaboration of another professional, Leah Gelpy, who specializes in sound and video design, and who made possible the first video live-feed the Loeb Mainstage has ever seen. In addition to the Chinese restaurant and the pasty-colored American ranch house that comprise the set, a large video screen hangs over stage left, streaming out scenes from the interior of the house. Margo notes dryly that Scheib’s proposal of de Musset’s Florence also “didn’t say ranch house.”

Scheib had to tailor Lorenzaccio not only to the cast but to the stage. Alfred de Musset never intended Lorenzaccio’s five acts to be staged, and the speed of the play, the warped, cinematic quality that has dressed up the tragedy as a farce, can’t wait for conventional set changes. The video camera lets the set remain fixed, and the action to move from room to room. It also lets the audience “see around corners,” an idea that Scheib takes very seriously.

Lorenzo never mourns for the decay of Florence, despite the fact that, in murdering the Duke, she does what all the whining Republicans and hopeless exiles never dared. His madness—her madness—comes not out of dogma but out of an intense aversion to boredom. “Maybe I’ll be honest again,” she says, “and I won’t find it boring.”

—Staff writer Lily X. Huang can be reached at lxhuang@fas.harvard.edu.