The Star without a Name
Translated
& Adapted by Ana-Catrina Buchser from Mihail Sebastian’s
Steaua fara nume
In a
small Romanian, 1942 town, life is as routine and predictable as the trains
that daily speed by, only occasionally pausing just long enough to drop off
passenger and package at its tiny, one-desk station. On one otherwise normal evening, a beautiful, young woman in
sheer-cut evening dress finds herself tossed off an express train for having no
fare by an indignant conductor into the exasperated (but also excited) hands of
the town’s four-eyed train master.
Unwilling to cooperate and provide any identification or explanation,
the high-heeled, nameless starlet finds herself in this no-name town in the
middle of forest and night with no money in her jeweled purse and quite ready
to end it all sitting depressed on the train tracks (if only another train
would come along now instead of hours from now). Enter an equally young and handsome, school teacher of the
nearby girl’s school who has come to retrieve a long-sought, rare book on
astronomy delivered by an earlier train.
In seeing the mysterious girl’s desperation, he insists she spend the
night (without him) in his house; and she reluctantly agrees. Sprinkle in a few eccentric, stock-character
townspeople who drop by the station amidst this unusual wrinkle in the nightly
schedule of the town; and the First Act of the reportedly two-hour,
fifteen-minute The Star without a Name ends in all of a half hour to the
surprise of an audience who does not know whether to clap, shrug, or leave.
Much of
the intermission becomes a show in itself as various actors and stagehands
bring out boxes and boxes of books and create stacks whose jumble soon define
the one-bed abode of our professor.
As Act Two gets underway, he and the still nameless and unexpected
visitor trudge into his without water and electricity abode (after all, it is
past 6 p.m. when the power station closes). But what has up to this point seemed to be dialogue and
action that lost something in Ana-Catrina Buchser’s newly translated adaptation
of Romanian Mihail Sebastian’s 1942 original begins to transform into a magical
evening between this odd-matched couple, both of ginger hair and increasingly
aroused natures. The attractively boyish,
pleasantly awkward Professor (delightfully portrayed by Myles Rowland) is
clearly both attracted to this nameless beauty now in his home and horrified
each time she wanders over to his one, street-facing window that opens unto the
small-town world of gossips and busy-bodies. The Unknown (as listed in the program and played by the tall
and distinct Marjorie Hazeltine) toys coyishly with the professor, soon finding
herself engrossed both by his looks and his knowledge as a sort of tour-guide of
the starry sky above them. She
uses her prowess (and her fear of the resident mouse) to persuade the professor
indeed to spend the night in his home with her. For that one night, these two happen-stance lovers escape
their boxed-in lives to traverse together a stellar landscape, making new
discoveries in the sky and in themselves.
Morning’s light will bring others bursting into their one-night
sanctuary who will shatter their naïve, nascent plans of a relationship with
the realities of their very different worlds. But for those few minutes of the play and few hours of their
co-existence, we and they find some joy and hope for their new beginnings.
Staging this new adaptation of an unknown-to-American-audiences play is a noble effort. Translator, adapter, producer, and director Ana-Catrina Buchser is to be commended along with Dragon Productions for taking the risk. Certainly at times it seems that some of the humor intended in the townspeople and some of the pace needed to keep the first act intact probably got lost in the translation process. However, the casting of the two leads and the direction of their one night together result in an evening of melancholic satisfaction.
Rating: 3 E’s
No comments:
Post a Comment