PRINCETON: Foundation grants $425,000 to McCarter Theatre

   The McCarter Theatre has received a $425,000 gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for two large-scale projects in the next three years.
   ”I am thrilled that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recognized McCarter Theatre as one of the nation’s foremost centers for new play development,” said Artistic Director Emily Mann. “This generous grant will allow us to move forward with two major visionary works that will inspire, excite and challenge our audiences.”
   The projects are a complex adaptation of the Phaedra myth by Irish playwright Marina Carr and a new translation and adaptation of the Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy by Stephen Wadsworth.
   McCarter will use these projects to develop new models for producing work of significant scope and scale.
   As part of an unusual developmental process, McCarter will collaborate with Princeton University and later with other producing theaters, possibly resulting in a model for similar partnerships between like-minded institutions in cities throughout the country.
   McCarter Theatre has been the American artistic home of Marina Carr for more than a decade. “Phaedra, “Ms. Carr’s adaptation of the Phaedra myth, is the product of a McCarter commission.
   ”Marina Carr has written an aural and visual poem, telling an ancient story in modern terms — poetic, fractured and deconstructed. As a director, I lie awake at night dreaming about this play and the visual world it evokes,” said Ms. Mann, who is the director of “Phaedra.”
   Funding from the Mellon Foundation will allow McCarter to develop the multi-media aspects of the production that are necessary in to realize Ms. Carr’s and Ms. Mann’s vision for the piece.
   McCarter will spend 2011 focusing on the development of the piece, with a full production in the 2011-2012 season.
   The Mellon Foundation grant will also allow McCarter to commission theater and opera director Stephen Wadsworth to translate, adapt and direct the three plays that constitute Beaumarchais’ Figaro plays — “The Barber of Seville,” “The Marriage of Figaro” and “The Guilty Mother.”
   Mr. Wadsworth last partnered with McCarter between 1991 and 1997 to adapt and direct three plays by 18th century French playwright Marivaux.
   Mr. Wadsworth has said of the Beaumarchais trilogy, “Beaumarchais’ wide-ranging efforts on behalf of personal liberties, civic discourse, fairness in the courts, freedom of the press and revolutionary causes are distilled in the Figaro plays, which are part of the essential literature of democracy. The trilogy has the power to rock a theater audience in today’s America, and the wisdom to remind us of the struggle that forged our democracy.”
   Funding from the Mellon Foundation will support new translations as well as the development of a new production format necessary for making an event of this magnitude work both artistically and practically.
   The translation and adaptation of the Beaumarchais trilogy is scheduled to begin during the summer of 2011, with the goal of producing all three plays in the 2012-2013 season.