Now I can catch up on my light summer reading with 3,000 pages of "Remembrance of Things Past"...

I was back in Chicago this weekend for my Theatre Building Chicago Musical Theatre Writers' Workshop. I decided to go and see something at Steppenwolf. It's interesting how some theatres can develop a brand image for a type of quality show, and Steppenwolf has certainly done that. I'm never disappointed when I see something there (the last show I saw there was the great LOST LAND starring John Malkovich) and I wasn't this time either. It's always a thought-provoking experience.

M. PROUST, playing in the Upstairs Theatre, is actually presented by About Face Theatre in what is called "A Steppenwolf Visiting Company Initiative." This excellent one-woman show was written by Mary Zimmerman (based on the writings of Celeste Albaret & Marcel Proust), directed by Eric Rosen, and stars Mary Beth Peil (whose Broadway credits include NINE and THE KING AND I). Mary Beth Peil plays Celeste Albaret, who was Marcel Proust's housekeeper for the last 8 to 10 years of his life.

From an interview with the playwright in the Steppenwolf Backstage magazine:

She was the only one who lived with him then. She basically cooked for him, answered the door for him, and took care of him -- not really physically, but in terms of his eating and cleaning the rooms. You know, the housekeeper ... but much more than that. She became a very surprising confidante to him and someone that he became very close to and very dependent on.

So the whole play of M. PROUST is based around the fact that when Proust would come in from his adventures outside, he began narrating them to her. I feel he was sort of rehearsing them ou loud before he wrote. In a way, she was his first witness and audience of that book. Yet the irony in the play is that although she felt she was very intimate with him, there were clearly things that he kept private from her.

And, from the Dramaturgical Notes:

Celeste Albaret is a unique and unlikely hero of literary history. She is the only housekeeper in French history to have been made Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters for her services to literature. She was awarded this honor not for her literary talent, but for the years she spent working for Marcel Proust. For 50 years she refused to speak publicly about his life, keeping a promise she made to him when his health declined. When in the late 1960s scholars turned attention to Proust's personal life -- particularly his secret sexual life -- she was outraged, and in 1973 she finally agreed to publish a memoir about her time with him. She died in 1982.

"Remembrance of Things Past", or "In Search of Lost Time", as it has more recently become known in English, is widely recognized as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The 3,000 page novel in seven volumes is part depiction of Belle Epoque society, part evocation of the deepest secrets of desire and sexuality, and part meditation on the nature of art and memory.

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