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Play Makers Repertory
Company, the oldest in
the state, looks back on
25 years of theater
Play Makers Celebrates Past and Future in Anniversary Season
By Geoff Wessel
Staff Writer
The year is 1975. The Vietnam War is ending
and, for the first time, UNC enrolls more women
than men. And on Jan. 25, Play Makers
Repertory Company stages its very first play,
Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”
Twenty-five years later, Chapel Hill’s oldest
professional theater group is among the most
prestigious in the state, Artistic Director David
Hammond said. This season’s six plays reflect
the com' ay’s history, from its origins at the
beginni. 0 of the century to its gods for the
future.
The company traces its roots back to the
Carolina Play Makers, a nonprofessional group
formed by University President Edward Kidder
Hm
COURTESY OF PLAYMAKERS REPERTORY COMPANY
Jealous Arnolphe (Ray Dooley) instructs his protege Agnes (Hannah
Moon) on how to be an ignorant wife in "The School for Wives."
Graham and Professor Frederick Koch in 1918.
“Professor Koch’s theory was that everybody
had a play to write,” said William Hardy, who
worked with Carolina Play Makers as a graduate
student in the late 19405.
“Out of it came the Carolina folk plays - plays
about ordinary people that became a tradition of
the Play Makers.”
The Carolina Play Makers company was also
the birthplace of UNC’s Department of
Dramatic Art, one of the oldest in the nation.
The Carolina Play Makers nurtured writers
like Paul Green and Thomas Wolfe, a founding
member of the company bom 100 years ago this
October. Wolfe’s play “The Return of Buck
Gavin” appeared on the group’s first playbill.
Play Makers Repertory Company will be pro
ducing Ketti Frings’ dramatization of “Look
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COURTESY OF PLAYMAKERS REPERTORY COMPANY
Beth Hylton, left, and Marc Alexander Stern play slapstick servants Georgette and Alain in Moliere's "The School for Wives."
The 17th-century verse comedy opens Play Maker Repertory Company's 25th anniversary season.
Homeward, Angel,” Wolfe’s most popular novel,
in honor of both the author’s centennial and the
company’s anniversary.
The 25th-anniversary season will also feature
“The Crucible” and Shakespeare’s “All’s Well
That Ends Well,” the two plays Play Makers
Repertory Company performed in its first year
of production.
Other plays, such as its current production,
Moliere’s “The School for Wives,” reflect the
company’s historical commitment to fostering
creativity, interest and participation in drama for
students and community, Hammond said.
Hammond, who has been with Play Makers
for 16 years, said the company has changed in
many ways over 2 1/2 decades.
“It’s evolved steadily,” Hammond said. “The
seasons have expanded, the audience has grown
Moliere's 'School for Wives' Delights With Humor
Play Makers kicks
off its 25th season
with hilarious wit
By Jeremy Hurtz
Assistant Arts & Entertainment Editor
Play Makers Repertory Company’s
silver anniversary season takes off with
a highly enjoyable staging of “The
School for Wives” that draws out serious
elements while maximizing the play’s
humor.
In the first great verse play from 17th
century French playwright Moliere, the
action centers around the unraveling of
middle-class nobleman Arnolphe’s
scheme to marry the perfect wife -one
he has raised
from toddler
hood.
Arnolphe
(Ray Dooley)
has molded his
charge, Agnes
"The School for
Wives"
Playmakers Repertory
Company
Through Oct. 1
(Hannah Moon), into a respectful, naive
seamstress on the premise that idiots are
less likely to cheat on their husbands.
The day before he plans to wed her, he
learns of the (perhaps successful)
attempts of the foppish stallion Horace
(Noel Velez) to bed her.
Moon and Velez prove themselves
handily in depicting Agnes’ childlike
ignorance and Horace’s spry zest.
But the show is Dooley’s. His versa
tile physical presence provides the play
with riotous slapstick. Even more
impressive comic timing lends punch to
Thursday, September 14, 2000
by more than six times what it was, there’s been
a continual investigation of the integration of
training and the work.”
Hammond said training had been a priority
from the beginning, but that the company would
stress outreach even more in the future. “It’s a
wonderful combination of very skilled profes
sionals and young artists, where artists can grow
because the kind of work we do is actor-depend
ent. The actor is really at the heart of what we
do.”
Hardy’s wife Martha Nell Hardy, who attend
ed graduate school with him and later performed
occasionally in Play Makers, said she remem
bered benefitting from the training the company
offered.
“Young people had to learn all of a sudden
how to cut it in a professional group,” said
Amolphe’s neurotic rantings.
The play’s hilarity might also be
attributed in part to the excellent trans
lation from the French - both because it
was an important factor in drawing
Hungarian director Laszlo Marton to
stage the play in English, and because of
the considerable merits of the transla
tion itself.
Rendered into English by two-time
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard
Wilbur, these couplets contain a range
of puns, from gleefully cheeky to devi
ously subde.
Many of the play’s double enten- \
dres rest on Amolphe’s fear that he
has been cuckolded even before his
wedding: “Alas, I’m trembling; I fear
some further blow/One can discover
more than one wants to know.” Later,
Agnes naively defends her hospitality
toward Horace: “How could I have the
conscience to deny/The succor he
required, and let him die?”
Also masterful is Marton’s direc-
tion. He has directed this
iced
play many times
before and under
stands it intimately.
Marton first staged
“The School for Wives” in his
native Hungary, which was then a com
munist country. He uses various devices
to imply a parallel between Amolphe’s
intentional stunting of Agnes’ intellec
tual development and the way commu
nist governments often keep political
ideas from the reach of their citizens.
This layer of meaning integrates so
flawlessly with Moliere’s characters A
and situations that one can
almost imagine it to be the play- *
wright’s original intent. Yet
Marton’s symbols are so
Page 5
subtle - Amolphe’s house, for instance,
is surrounded by an iron gate that rolls
back like a curtain -one could watch
the play happily without catching on.
The veteran director closes the sec
ond act with a wordless interplay
between Arnolphe and his house. This
can’t be found in the original, but it
splendidly maintains tension during
intermission.
Strokes of dramatic genius like this
one, coupled with pow
erful comic sense,
make Marton’s innova
tions most welcome.
For instance, he makes
one brief exchange -
involving the throw
ing of a flowerpot
at Horace’s head -
work
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Hardy, whose full-length play “First String
Concerto” was produced in 1950 by the
Carolina Play Makers. “Most professional actors
are pretty disciplined. The kids, when they work
with a group like that, learn what they have to
do.”
Hardy will be returning to the company to act
in the production of “Look Homeward, Angel.”
Hammond said other future goals included
sponsoring a series of symposia on topics rang
ing from writing drama to strategies for reaching
wider audiences.
“We’re doing more outreach,” he said. “We
are interested in an ongoing relationship with
our audience.”
The Arts & Entertainment Editor can be
reached at artsdeskQuncedu.
hilariously. The act is meant to occur
off-stage; Wilbur advises in his transla
tion’s introduction against attempting to
portray it. Yet in Marton’s hands, it
becomes a highlight of the show.
It is ironic that, though Marton has
slyly injected into “The School for
Wives” a message that is in some
respects anti-communist, this play
seems to exist socialistically - it belongs
equally to two writers, one actor and a
director. If Hungary had this much suc
cess with the shared-property system,
the iron curtain might never have fallen.
The Arts & Entertainment Editor
can be reached at artsdeskQunc.edu.