Production History of Kushner’s Illusion
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.
Two recent negotiations of these challenges are particularly interesting. In a production by the Dallas Theater Center in 2006, the play was performed in front of a backdrop of enlarged black-and-white photographs—a set that simultaneously evoked antiquity (black-and-white photographs in a hypertechnological era) and novelty (photographs appearing at all in a production of a seventeenth-century play). And as photographs exist at one remove from reality as such, they gesture toward the illusory or the phantasmatic and so could provide a fitting setting for the play. In Chapel Hill in 2007, a production by the Playmakers Repertory Company changed moods drastically over the course of the three illusions. The first illusion featured warm romantic light and full flowing period costumes; by the third illusion, with all color drained from the staging, wind and rain effects battered the actors, who performed in costumes described as the “cold skeletons” that remain once decorations are stripped away—umbrellas made only of the metal frames, hoop skirts made of only the hoops. That the illusions of the play are generated by a character onstage becomes in this production a rationale for an expressionistic staging, where the external world of these scenes matches the experiences of the characters themselves.
A similar concept was used in another 2007 production, a version of the play in Spanish that notably chose to work from Kushner’s text, not Corneille’s. In La Ilusión, each illusion was played in a different theatrical style: the first as a commercial musical, the second as a formal baroque drama, and the third as a restrained tragedy in modern dress. The production also focused on the metatheatrical elements of the play, with the actors further complicating the distinction between illusion and reality by interacting directly with audience members. Felicia Londré argues that Kushner’s version of the play “has transcended its sources” to become an important work in its own right, much as Corneille’s play did in its own time. This is neatly illustrated by the performance of Kushner’s Illusion in Spain, a country whose theatre in the seventeenth century had greatly influenced Corneille himself.
–Zachary Moull, Dramaturgy Assistant
