THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE
at Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Baird Hall
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The enterprising princess Leonide combines a search for love with revenge, obtaining both with some deft role-playing. Accompanied by her maid Corine, Leonide disguises herself as a man named Phocion in order to meet Agis, the young prince her family overthrew and whose throne she regretfully inherited. Agis has sought shelter in an isolated provincial “retreat,” where he’s under the control of his dour, love-loathing guardian Hermocrate, a stoic philosopher who’s taught the boy to hate Leonide. Sharing his seclusion is Hermocrate’s equally severe sister, Leontine.
Declaring that she is in love and “There is justice to be done!” Leonide sets out to seduce Agis, thereby also punishing his guardians for having set him against her. She woos Hermocrate (who guesses her sex) and seduces Leontine as Phocion. Her real love is reserved for Agis, however, though she must pretend to be a woman she calls “Aspasie.” Like his guardians, Agis can’t believe that spontaneous love can last, but pressing her ardor Leonide makes him confess that “the heart cannot love by rules.”
If the false love seems almost true, the real stuff is irresistible. The contrast between Collins’s Leonide, who knows what she feels even as she conceals it, and Bruce Orendorf’s Agis, who has never had such feelings before, triggers electric performances, as persuasive in what’s not said as in the final rhapsodic sharing.
If love obsesses Marivaux’ searchers, Albert Camus’ antihero is obsessed with death. The “superior suicide” that Camus depicted 55 years ago in his Caligula is, curiously, the one freely chosen moment in an intentionally perverse world–an intellectual Grand Guignol filled with real and threatened torture, murder, extortion, starvation, and rape.
As the incorruptible Cherea, Simon Perry makes much of his moral-minded character’s cutting exchanges with Caligula but could make them stronger still. As Caligula’s mistress, Carolyn Hoerdemann works hard to fuse Caesonia’s sensuality and cruelty into a treacherous mix. Giggling idiotically as the opportunistic Helicon, Matt Yde exudes venality from every pore (but overdoes the leering). And as the poet-victim Scipio, Charley Knapp suggests rectitude under fire but not much else.
