In a dual role as playwright and actress, Francesca Faridany discusses her upcoming production at McCarter Theatre in Princeton.
By: Matt Smith
<"I translated and adapted a play that was already there," says Francesca Faridany (pictured above with Julian Lopez-Morillas) of Fräulein Else. "I feel that very strongly, because he’s (Arthur Schnitzler) written it in the first person and it was easy for me to imagine it on the stage when I was reading it." Ms. Faridany stars in the show, running Jan. 6 to Feb. 15 at McCarter Theatre.>
Just before Fräulein Else opened at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., last fall, actress/ playwright Francesca Faridany underwent abdominal surgery that forced her to share the title role while she recovered.
Fortunately, the temporary setback for Ms. Faridany the actress provided an unexpected benefit for Ms. Faridany the playwright. On days when Tara Falk took over the lead in her adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1924 novella, she would find an aisle seat and watch from a new perspective.
"I got to sit back and be more of a playwright," she says, "looking at the play, the words, and what everybody does, because it’s so fascinating. I don’t get to see anything that goes on behind me (as an actress), obviously. I got my strength back and got ready for McCarter, which is a longer run."
Fräulein Else, which plays at McCarter’s Berlind Theatre Jan. 6 to Feb. 15, had its world premiere on the West Coast last March, a co-production of Berkeley Repertory Theatre and La Jolla Playhouse. Stephen Wadsworth has directed at each stop, with the cast Omid Abtahi, Mary Baird, Julian Lopez-Morillas, Lauren Lovett and Michael Tisdale also carrying over from California to New Haven and Princeton.
Speaking from Seattle, where she lives with Mr. Wadsworth (also her husband), Ms. Faridany was in the midst of a much-deserved holiday break before flying east to begin rehearsals at McCarter. Despite the continued success of Fräulein Else, she says she is reluctant to take too much credit for introducing Schnitzler’s tale of sexual awakening and societal inevitability to a modern audience.
"It’s hard for me to accept that I am a writer at this point," Ms. Faridany says. "I translated and adapted a play that was already there. I feel that very strongly, because he’s written it in the first person and it was easy for me to imagine it on the stage when I was reading it. Her (Else’s) imagination is drawn so vividly, he creates the world around her and sees through her eyes. I feel it’s all there."
The most difficult part of Ms. Faridany’s four-year quest to adapt Fräulein Else for the stage proved to be translating from the original German. She set about the task after discovering that the 1925 English translation she was using had omitted some of the more lascivious details including references to Else’s menstrual cycle and burgeoning sexual desires.
"I’m not a brilliant German speaker," says Mr. Faridany, "but I took it in school. I sat down with a dictionary and did a word-for-word translation. It took me months, but I got every single word, and sometimes three or four (English) words for each (German) word. I’ve got this huge, phone-book-like translation, but because I could choose the words, I could get into the world a bit more."
Fräulein Else marks the Ms. Faridany’s ninth collaboration with Mr. Wadsworth, known to McCarter audiences for his stylish adaptations of Marivaux (The Triumph of Love, The Game of Love and Chance and Changes of Heart), Noël Coward (Design for Living and Private Lives) and most recently, Molière (Don Juan). Her husband’s familiarity with classical works made him the perfect editor and now director for the work, which Ms. Faridany calls a "new classical play."
"It’s never been done in the English-speaking world before on this scale," she explains, "and also because it’s a modern piece. There you are firmly in the middle of the beginning of the last century. We’ve actually set it in 1912, although it was written in 1924, because we wanted it before (World War I), when the Hapsburg Empire this giant, crazy, messy empire is about to explode. We have the weight of that hanging over Else."
Else, a 19-year-old girl from Vienna, is vacationing with her aunt at an Italian resort when her middle-class family’s financial woes force her into an unpleasant arrangement with a family "friend." She ponders her situation in intense internal monologues that make rapid-fire switches from self-aware to self-deluded. Soon Else begins to lose her grip on reality.
"I love to play sort of fierce, classical women," says Ms. Faridany, who counts Dona Elvira in Don Juan as one of her many such roles, "and in some ways she really is a fierce person. There’s a weight to her, a gravity, that’s fascinating. On the other hand, she is completely naive. She’s completely aware of that… but the problem is that what goes on her brain is not what she does with her body. This whole idea of how you live in your brain compared to how you live on a daily basis, how you live physically, that’s her big, huge, sad problem in the play."
Arthur Schnitzler may have found real-life inspiration for his Else in a work by his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. The two men, each medical doctors and quite famous in Viennese circles, purportedly never met. They were mutual admirers, notes Mr. Faridany, who visited Vienna while honeymooning with Mr. Wadsworth two years ago.
"There’s no question in Stephen’s mind that Freud’s case of Dora (‘Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’), Schnitzler would have read the minute it was published," she contends. "There are very keen similarities between Dora’s story and Else’s story a young girl put into a compromising situation by her parents involving a family friend really icky stuff."
Fräulein Else, directed by Stephen Wadsworth and starring Francesca Faridany, plays at McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, Jan. 6-Feb. 15. Previews: Jan. 6-8, 13, 7:30 p.m., $30-$33. Performances: Tues.-Fri. 7:30 p.m., Sat. 4, 8:30 p.m., Sun. 2:30, 7:30 p.m. (Jan. 11 2:30 p.m. only), $33-$48. Note: This production contains full nudity and adult situations. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org