Upcoming: "The Rose of Youth," "Orphée," "Pleiades"

 Apologies for the lack of posting, but 2013 is turning out to be busier than I anticipated. I spent much of this afternoon in a coffee shop, revising my translation of Jean Cocteau's Orphée in preparation for its staged reading at Theater Pub on April 15. The sunlight streamed through the beveled edge of the coffee shop's glass door, casting rainbows on my computer screen and making me think of the glass panes of Heurtebise, the guardian angel-glazier character in Orphée.

It's slightly odd to return to my translation of Orphée after I first translated it two years ago. The initial translation project might be one of my favorite bits of writing I've ever done, though, just because I accomplished it in such a stress-free, orderly fashion. Every night, I would translate one page of the script, and in a little over a month (it's not a long play) I had a finished translation. Instead of making me insane, it actually made me feel saner and smarter. Though I don't like admitting it to myself, I need routines and patterns. Maybe I should do more translations; maybe I should just be better at setting aside a dedicated time to write.

Moreover, because it's a translation, I feel less of an emotional connection to the writing than I usually do, so it isn't too difficult to go back and revise it. Often, what I write is intimately linked to my emotional state at the time, so revisiting a work years later means I must make an effort to remember my mindset when I first wrote it. With Orphée, though, returning to the work does not mean dredging up the past, because I've always viewed the work rather objectively.

Perhaps one theme of 2013 is seeing artistic projects come to fruition years after I first conceived them. I decided in 2010 to translate Orphée, worked on the translation in early 2011, and only now am I actually getting to present it publicly.

Furthermore, I have my staged reading of The Rose of Youth coming up in less than two weeks, on March 29. And, as I've said before, I wrote that play during the 2007-2008 school year, saw it as the culmination to a great four years studying drama at Vassar, and never expected anything more to come of it. But here I am, five years later, directing a staged reading of it.

I also wanted to announce something else exciting that I have coming up this spring. Atlantic Stage, a theater company in Myrtle Beach, SC, will present a staged reading of my play Pleiades on the second weekend of April, as part of their New Voices PlayFest! (I wrote Pleiades in 2011, if you're counting.) This marks the first time my work will be seen in the South, and makes Pleiades one of the many San Francisco Olympians Festival plays that have gone on to have a continued life. And I kind of love that the play, which takes place in the Hamptons, will be performed in a different East Coast beach town. I practically danced around my room when I learned that Atlantic Stage had selected my play, and I hope to have more information soon. Unfortunately, I can't jet off to Myrtle Beach to see the reading -- I could really use a beach vacation after the busy month I've been having!

Image: Jarvis Cocker, holding a French dictionary. Yeah, one reason I wrote this post is to have an excuse to use this picture.

Starstruck and Starry-Eyed

Image: Jacket designed by Yves Saint Laurent in 1980 as a homage to Jean Cocteau.

I've been in a good mood all day ever since I woke up to an email informing me that the Comité Jean Cocteau has granted me the rights to do an English translation of Orphée!

The head of the Comité Jean Cocteau and the keeper of the moral rights to his work is Pierre Bergé, who was a friend of Cocteau's in the '50s and is best known as the personal and professional partner of Yves Saint Laurent. The email this morning mentioned him by name, saying that he is "tout à fait d'accord" (entirely in agreement) with my plans. I am very grateful and more than a little starstruck!

Starstruck... I guess that's an appropriate word, considering that Jean Cocteau loved star imagery and incorporated it into his signature.

Coctelian

On this day in 1889, Jean Cocteau was born. "The most versatile artist of the 20th century," he was a playwright, filmmaker, poet, novelist, artist, designer, librettist, and more. He was deeply involved in the Parisian art scene from about 1910 to 1960, meeting, influencing, arguing with, befriending the most important artists and performers of his time. He did so much that it's hard to get a grip on his career and his personality; this New York Times article is a valiant effort.

Cocteau's house in Milly-la-Forêt has just been restored and opened to the public as a museum; see this excellent article on Paris-Update.com.

I first encountered Cocteau's work when I saw La belle et la bête as a teenager, on the big screen at a revival house. I was friends with a boy named Danny who went to my church, and after Mass one day, Danny's father cornered me and my parents and said "We're going to go see Cocteau's La belle et la bête this afternoon... you mean to say you've never seen it? Oh, you MUST. You HAVE to." And so I entered Cocteau's world of aesthetic beauty, of striking images, of adaptations of old myths and fairy tales...

It was only this year, though, that I read any of Cocteau's plays; but once I did, I was captivated--despite not always thinking that the English translations I read were much good. That's why I am about to begin the process of translating his 1925 drama Orphée. (First, though, I have to obtain the rights to translate it--this could get interesting.) Orphée is notoriously difficult to translate, because it is full of puns that are deeply woven into the fabric of the script. Nonetheless, I love a challenge, and I am already thinking of solutions to make these puns work in English...

Now, another thing I learned recently is that the adjectival form of the name "Cocteau" is "Coctelian." (Adjectives can be funny, can't they? Like "Shaw" becomes "Shavian.") And I LOVE this, too, because it makes a perfect multilingual pun: the word for "cocktail" in Spanish is "coctel."

And Cocteau's plays, Coctelian dramas, are indeed crazy cocktails, mixing up ancient myths and modern avant-garde techniques and some motifs that seem to come completely out of left field, such as the horse in Orphée. That's why I like them so much, and why I am eager to keep exploring Cocteau's artistic creations... and trying to understand the indefatigable, elusive, complex man who made them.