Beautiful beak

There are more flattering places to have your body described than in a book called Les Grotesques, but it was in that 1844 work that French readers such as playwright Edmond Rostand were reintroduced to a 17th-century firebrand named Cyrano de Bergerac, the subject of Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s season-opening production.

Yes, he was real.

And yes, his nose was apparently spectacular.

“Less doughy, less fleshy in its contours, it shows more bone and cartilage, more flat planes and highlights — it is most heroic,” wrote French poet Théophile Gautier, sparing no detail in his facial analysis.

“As for the rest of his face — insofar as that triumpant nose allows one to see it — it strikes me as graceful and well-proportioned. His eyes are almond-shaped and very dark, lending them a surprising blend of fire and gentleness. His eyebrows are slender yet very distinct. His moustache, somewhat thin and sparse, fades into the shadows at the corners of his mouth. His hair falls gracefully on either side of his face.

“Were it not for the nose, he would truly be a handsome fellow. That unfortunate nose, however, gave Cyrano de Bergerac the occasion to display his valour in duels that recurred almost daily.”

But there’s more to the swashbuckling romantic than his hopeless protuberance, says actor Jack Davidson, a Toronto-raised performer with a notably unremarkable nose.

“Cyrano offers so much,” says Davidson, who plays the title role in the RMTC production, a rhyme-time adaptation of Rostand’s 1897 work written by Winnipeg’s Jessy Ardern, who wrote Theatre Projects Manitoba’s recent R+J: Closing Night.

“Cyrano’s so witty, he’s so smart and he’s so capable of all of these things, but because of this one thing, he believes he’s not deserving, and he’s angry.”

Cyrano is enamoured with the brilliant Roxane (Stephanie Sy) — who is his cousin, at least in Rostand’s work — but feels hopelessly crushed when comparing himself to the upstart Christian (Darren Martens), who’s described as having “a beautiful head.”

What ensues is a tale of negative self-regard, with Cyrano using his literary gifts to help Christian, who describes himself as “too stupid to write,” to woo Roxane through daily letters.

“It’s kind of one of the earliest examples I can think of for what we would now call catfishing, where someone is being deceived in some way about who the person they’re communicating with is,” Davidson says. “As much as we don’t want that to happen, it does because people don’t feel that their self-worth is very high, and for whatever reason, they’ve gotten to a place where they think the best idea is to be someone else and mislead someone else in hopes that it might still lead to a connection.”

Cyrano, in Davidson’s reading, is largely about what poor judges each of us can be when it comes to assessing our own self-worth.

When she studied Cyrano in university, director Amanda Goldberg hardly thought the play was worth a sniff. So when her mentor, Citadel Theatre’s artistic director Daryl Cloran, suggested to Goldberg and Ardern — frequent collaborators on indie adaptations — to adapt Rostand, the Montreal-raised Goldberg was hesitant to sign up for the nose job.

“I kind of went, ‘I don’t know if this is the show for me.’ I didn’t really know if I understood what this play was or what the story could be,” says Goldberg, whose left nostril is pierced twice.

“And then Jessy handed me her adaptation, and I just feel like I understood it for the first time. The way she tackled the poetry and the language and the emotional arcs of these characters, all while keeping it in 1640, I felt was such an amazing representation of the power of adaptation.

“It wasn’t just this play about an ugly man with a big nose who can’t get over it: it was about deep-cut wounds and societal expectation and these ideas of performing versions of yourself.”

A play that once felt like a “time capsule — a period piece with big hats and big words” was made to feel contemporary through adaptation, a word with biological implications of survival across generations.

“Why I think this play has been around so long, and why people keep attacking it, is because there are modern questions and ideals in it. The question I think really relates to every character in this show is, ‘If I were truly seen, would I still be loved?’ Or, ‘If someone really saw me for who I truly was, would they still love me?’ And that question doesn’t belong in 1640; it doesn’t belong to Rostand in 1897; it belongs to all of us,” says Goldberg.

That’s what Goldberg, whose MFA thesis at the University of Alberta was about theatrical adaptations, enjoys most about working on revised and revived works.

“What’s so amazing and beautiful about adaptation is that you’re not creating something new, but you’re getting to speak to — in this case — 200 years of storytellers reinterpreting the same question,” she says.

“For general, contemporary audiences, I think adaptation is necessary because they need to be brought into the world and introduced to how it relates to them. I think for a play to be successful and resonant and to stay with someone, they want to feel close to it.

“We introduce the audience clearly to 1640, and the goal is that by the end of the piece, 1640 feels like today.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com