Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
February 25, 2010
Kushner’s ILLUSION: Production History
By Zachary Moull, Dramaturgy Assistant
Zachary is a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH)
Tony Kushner’s Adaptation of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique was first performed as a reading at the New York Theater Workshop in 1988, and received its premiere at the Hartford Stage Company in 1989. It has since been popular in theatres across the country, and gained international notice following Kushner’s rise to fame with the success of Angels in America in 1993-94.
Features of the two initial productions neatly illustrate the common concerns of many productions of this play: the desire to create a stage environment suitable to the conjuring of illusion, and the need to work through the complex transhistorical resonances between Kushner, Corneille, and their works.
The New York Theater Workshop performance took place in front of a set consisting of perspective drawings of classical pillars. This can be read as a comment on illusion—a sort of visual pun playing on the use of forced perspective in stage design that pithily suggests theatrical distortion. But the design choice also contains a statement on the mode of adaptation used in the work itself, insofar as Kushner makes a classic play present on stage in a mediated form—he is working, the stage suggests, from Corneille’s design if not always from his realization of that design.
Legend has it that the Hartford production was more overtly haunted by Corneille. As Sylviane Gold describes in the New York Times, the production was beset by technical difficulties until Kushner and director Mark Lamos decided to reprint the program to say not “The Illusion by Tony Kushner, based on a play by Pierre Corneille” but “The Illusion by Pierre Corneille, freely adapted by Tony Kushner.” All the technical glitches stopped on cue, save for one: Kushner’s name was mysteriously wiped from the marquee on the night before the show opened. The play continues to be performed and published under this revised heading, lest the original author return to seek his due. Kushner, perhaps in light of this experience, told the Times that after he is dead his plays are “fair game” for those who might wish to adapt his work as he adapted Corneille’s.
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