Penache!

A couple of days ago I stumbled across a second-hand copy of Cyrano de Bergerac, from the Broadway production with Kevin Kline and Jennifer Garner. I immediately bought it. I watched it last night and found myself deeply touched by their performances and the characters. I thought about a production I had seen at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I remember sitting with my father in their outdoor Elizabethan theatre and forgetting myself in the play. It just so happened that the Cyrano that night was an understudy, who had learned the lines in 24 hours, studied the blocking by watching a taped rehearsal and had only one performance the previous night under his belt. A prompter sat in the front row, but forgetting their presence I was jolted back into reality when he called for a line in the third scene. After that he was picture perfect. I cried for 20 minutes after the show, thinking about the beauty of Cyrano under the guise of a circumstantially large nose, and the tragedy of unspoken love. I never thought I would feel that conneciton again, but Kevin Kline brought that back to me last night. I cried as he recited his love letter to Roxanne in the last scene, stained with his blood and tears, and I continued to cry as I removed the disk from the DVD player. I think Cyrano de Bergerac is one of those plays that iwll always touch me. Moments like these remind me of the magic theatre brings to its audiences.

"I think the moon is a world like this one, and the Earth is its moon."