The art of illusion is the art of love, and the art of love is the blood-red heart of the world, philosophizes the magician Alcandre at the end of Tony Kushner's post-modern adaptation of Pierre Corneille's 17th-century L'illusion Comique. Kushner's The Illusion is a curious blend of Shakespearean comedy, Pirandellian theatrics and Buddhist philosophy which exposes love as the dangerous and mercurial force driving the human comedy. While Corneille called his play a "strange monster" because it transgressed neoclassical unities and standards of verisimilitude, Kushner's version takes even greater liberties with our expectations regarding realism and the laws of time, place, and action.
The Illusion is a play within a play that echoes Pirandello's inter-penetrating theatricalities. It begins in the darkened theater auditorium with the arrival of a wealthy lawyer, Pridamant of Avignon, who seeks information from a magician about what has happened to the son who ran away fifteen years earlier. When Pridamant lights a match at the foot of the proscenium, we behold the black, gaping maw of the stage -- in front of which the frozen figure of the magician's servant, The Amanuensis, stands sentinel. In an instant, the theater is transformed into the Alcandre's cave where, for the next two hours, we are mesmerized by the flickering spectacle of uncanny visions conjured by the magician against its walls.
With Pridamant we behold three conflicting scenes of his son's involvement in dangerous romantic escapades, but we have no more understanding than he of the unfolding events, even though we are also spectators of the larger drama.
Kushner plays with our expectations by constantly changing the rules of the game. For example, when Pridamant complains he doesn't like what he sees and attempts to enter the action and change the outcome, he is informed that the events in the visions, which have all the vividness of occurring in the immediate present have, in actuality, already occurred and cannot be altered. By subtly changing details of each of the three scenes, e.g., changing locales, and characters' names, temperaments and period dress while maintaining the same actors and apparent continuation of the action, Kushner keeps us constantly off balance and searching for meaning. We are further confused when The Amanuensis leaves the cave to voyage to the "real" world and subsequently appears in the second vision as the father of the wealthy young woman who becomes the son's wife.
The play ends with an unexpected twist that affirms that we have been watching theater nested within theater. Pridamant's confusion when the brilliant, colorful images that have flickered against the cave's walls abruptly cease leaving the stage empty and void of answers, matches our own. We cannot be sure that the magician's last revelation is the truth or just another teasing twist. In a torrent of beautiful language before the lights are darkened for the final time, Alcandre soliloquizes that love, like the human carnage it has entrained through out history, is as insubstantial as the events of this world and that it, like the play we have just witnessed, is essentially an "illusion" -- a gossamer film of nothingness conjured in a dream.
The acting in The Illusion is superb. The youthful cast seems to be positively buoyed by the sparkle and wit of Kushner's writing which, in updating Corneille's language, pokes fun at neoclassical conventions. Robert Petkoff does an excellent job conveying the subtle changes in the errant young son from love-struck Calisto in the first vision to cynical and conniving Clindor in vision two, and the profligate Theogenes in the final vision. Margot White, as the wealthy young woman who is the primary object of Petkoff's attentions, is good but no match for her scheming maid played by Amanda Ronconi, who not only steals Petkoff's attentions but several scenes as well. The male actors who vie with Petkoff for White's attentions are especially strong and probably could have also been cast as the lead. Lorenzo Pisoni plays the wealthy suitor pledged to White in marriage with dash and command, while another suitor, Paul Niebanck as Matamore, does a wonderful parody of a moonstruck commedia dell'arte Capitane. John Fitzgibbon as Pridamant and Edmond Genest as Alcandre are competent but cannot compete with the actors in the brilliantly lighted and staged visions.
The only questionable casting is Craig Wallace, a black actor, in the role of The Amanuensis, Alcandre's off-and-on-again, deaf and dumb assistant. It would be refreshing to see New Jersey Shakespeare Festival be more daring here; Wallace, a gifted actor, might have been more appropriately cast as the magician Alcandre rather than as a grotesque creature of the dark.
As in most NJSF productions the set is simple but effective -- lit moons, painted scrims, a second-story window cut into a partial black backdrop, and a huge, brilliant paper rose plant for White's garden in vision one. Finally, director Paul Mullins, in his twelfth season at the NJSF is to be warmly applauded for the simplicity and effectiveness with which he polishes Kushner's gem for the stage.
