Theater Review—

Ready For Love To Triumph,

And At Long Wharf, It Does

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — Long Wharf has chosen to end its current season with a big splashy operatic staging of The Triumph of Love by the 18th Century French playwright Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux.

Set in the beautifully detailed garden of an eccentric philosopher’s secluded estate, this tale of a beautiful princess and her maid disguised as young men in the hopes of making contact with the handsome, brooding young man wrongfully deprived of his father’s kingdom instantly brings to mind Shakespearian comedy – life in the Forest of Arden, perhaps, or Twelfth Night, when the two damsels join forces with the rambunctious Harlequin in order to outwit the pompous philosopher and his severe sister.

However, this is clearly a French version of the mistaken identity plot, and furthermore, coming more than a hundred years after Shakespeare, it is busy satirizing the intellectual ideas of the Enlightenment. So you have to think Aha – like Voltaire, and Candide. And being French, the heroine is far more assertive and independent than your fair Rosamonds and Violas, and far less in need of a strong man to rescue her.

The story goes like this: Princess Leonide of Sparta, having learned that the throne she inherited from her father was originally stolen by her uncle, who murdered the king and his wife, resolves to do the right thing and return the kingdom to its rightful heir – Prince Agis.

Agis, meanwhile has been raised in seclusion by the philosopher Hermocrate and his spinster sister. They have educated the young man along strict rationalist lines, to believe nothing that cannot be proved by logical evidence. He has been taught to shun romantic ideas, that love is a foolish illusion, and above all, that Princess Leonide is his bitter enemy who wants to kill him because he is a threat to her throne.

Thus Leonide and her maid, Corine, disguise themselves as young men, not because it is dangerous for women to be alone in public, but because this will enable them to gain access to Hermocrate’s estate. When she and Agis meet it is love at first sight (although the sincerely simple Agis thinks it is friendship).

In order to wangle and invitation to stay and visit, Leonide – in her character as the young man Phocion – seduces Hermocrate’s sister, the grim faced Leontine. When Hermocrate confronts her and says “You’re no young man. I can tell, you are a woman in disguise,” she admits to being Aspasie and seduces him as well. Now all three are in love with her and this sets up the comic situation of the plot.

The action is further supported by Hermocrate’s servants – the gardener and the Harlequin-valet. They are supposed to spy on Phocion and find out what he is up to, but Leonide easily buys their loyalty with gifts of money, and gives them the chance to clown around, using a large coach that seems to serve no purpose except to fill up the stage and allow the actors to climb in and out.

Jennifer Erin Roberts gives a remarkable performance as the glib-tongued princess who can talk herself out of many a sticky situation, and win the hearts of the pretty young hero as well as his forbidding protectors. Two and a half hours of this is kind of long, and, as one of our companions observed, it is kind of like Gilbert and Sullivan without the music.

Many people in the audience seemed to like it a lot, however, and gave it a standing ovation. This is a chance to see theater from a different time and place. It is more romantic than Moliere, and more intellectual than English comedy.

The set is really lovely, with weathered bricks and transplanted flowers set in sand, and a watercolor wash of a background suggesting a French bois. The third act was very funny, and allowed the hero to be less of a stick and more of a hunk, explaining why Leonide was so ready to trade a kingdom for love.

(Performances continue Tuesdays through Sundays until June 1. Contact the theater at 203-787-4282 or visit www.LongWharf.org for reservations and special programs details.)