Epic ‘Dream’ From France via Minnesota

LA JOLLA — Tackling a stage version of Marcel Carne’s 1945, 3 1/2-hour film “Les Enfants du Paradis” (“Children of Paradise”)--in English--would have been challenge enough for most companies.

But not for Theatre de la Jeune Lune, the Minneapolis-based company that Sunday night will unveil the West Coast premiere of its three-hour-plus “Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream” as the 11th annual La Jolla Playhouse season opener.

Three years ago, the company began contemplating ways to translate Jacques Prevert’s script about the complicated lives of an actor, a mime, an aristocrat, a murderer and the woman they all love, wrapped around tales of the Theatre des Funambules in 19th-Century Paris.

But because of the controversy surrounding the making of the film--which was shot during the Nazi Occupation of France--and the fascinating parallels between the lives of the film’s actors and the parts they played, the Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s four co-artistic directors and two artistic associates felt they also had to tell the real-life 20th-Century story behind the scenes.

This modest, idealistic group, with an annual budget of $800,000, dreams big: The current production includes 21 actors and eight musicians. And the show has been getting them some significant attention.

Stan Wojewodski, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, who first saw the Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s work when he directed at the Guthrie Theatre five years ago, arranged for them to be the first outside company to perform at Yale. Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, saw the show in the January production at Yale and invited them to make their West Coast debut in La Jolla. In April, the script won the American Theatre Critics Assn. New Play Award for 1993.

Heady stuff for a group that first formed when old Minnesota school chums Barbra Berlovitz Desbois and Robert Rosen met Parisians Dominique Serrand and Vincent Gracieux in Paris in 1971 while studying at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in 1971.

First Desbois and Serrand teamed up to create a populist theater that could interact with the public, then Gracieux and Rosen joined them. In 1979, the Theatre de la Jeune Lune (Theater of the New Moon) was born with the four working as co-artistic directors.

For the first seven years, the company performed in both Paris and Minneapolis. But in 1985, a $75,000 debt forced them to choose between their two homes. Minnesota’s lower cost of living--and working--prevailed.

To buy time, they had scraped $200 together and staged an original set of skits called “Yang Zen Froggs in Moon Over a Hong Kong Sweatshop” in Minneapolis. To their shock, the show was a major box-office success that ran until 1987.

Now firmly ensconced in Minneapolis, the company added Steven Epp in 1983 and Felicity Jones in 1985, both as artistic associates. Jones (who plays Arletty playing Garance) and Epp (who plays Pierre Brasseur playing the historical Frederick Lemaitre) also co-wrote “Children of Paradise” with Serrand (who directs and plays Carne) and Paul Walsh (who serves as dramaturge).

Ranging from age 29 (Jones) to 47 (Gracieux), they showed up for a recent interview and photo session in old, worn jeans, sans makeup and fancy hairdos. They took turns talking passionately about what it means to be a company of artists, to stay together as an ensemble for close to 15 years, alternately directing, designing, writing, moving scenery and finding props.

“I think there’s a lot of trust,” said Desbois. “But we would be telling a lie if we said we never fought. Every one of us has said this is my last show and that’s it. But we are first and foremost actors, and, if we weren’t here, where would we go?”

“Children of Paradise” was not a hard sell to the members of this company. This show struck chords on many levels. Carne, like Theatre de la Jeune Lune, believed in ensembles. His incandescent cast, which featured the great mime Jean-Louis Barrault as Jean-Gaspard Debureau and the legendary Arletty--whose part was inspired by her own life--were performers for whom Prevert, one of France’s great poets, had tailored scripts for years.

The film’s subject--the life of artists at a time in Paris when performers such as these were turning toward the circus-like theaters in rebellion against the stifling limitations of court-sanctioned theater--is “very close to the style of the company,” Serrand said.

And finally, the fact that the film was condemned by both by the left and the right is something that the company also finds relevant today.

The issue of censorship is a point McAnuff also finds particularly salient.

“This troupe manages to capture something about the plight of the artist that is eternal and ongoing,” McAnuff said on the phone from New York. “They capture the struggle not to be obedient to the intellectual left or some other group. What’s amazing about the piece is that it manages to look at several points of view and gives those points of view equal weight.”

Despite the fact that his film had nothing to do with Nazis, Carne was blacklisted after the war for making a movie in France while the Nazis were in power. He kept delaying the opening of his film until after the war was over, but working in Nazi-occupied France was deemed a tacit acceptance of that regime, and Carne, now 87, was named as a collaborator.

One of the show’s eeriest parallels with real life comes when Garance says in the film, “The one thing I’ve always loved is my freedom”; in the play the line is echoed by Arletty.

For just as Garance suffered for her liaisons--which had seemed simple enough to her--Arletty, who died last year, was publicly humiliated, received a commuted death sentence and was put under house arrest for three years for having had an affair with a German officer. She went blind not long after, which finished her career. Brasseur, however, suffered no repercussions for his affair with a German woman.

The multiple viewpoints of the script reflect the different views of the company members.

“When we were working on the writing, we all asked ourselves what we would have done,” Jones said. “I think I would have stayed and worked because that’s what I do. Like Carne, I would have been afraid to leave the country.”

Gracieux, who plays Prevert and designed the sets, finds it not so easy to know how he would have reacted--he might have chosen to work with the Resistance instead.

Rosen, who is Jewish, admits it’s “an issue that’s been with me all my life.” But he doesn’t see the making of the movie as “a black or white matter” and points out two Jewish designers in the script who did, in fact, work with Carne, risking their lives under assumed names during the Occupation.

And the fact that the story--like life--cannot be boiled down into a simple right and wrong appealed to Serrand as writer, director and the play’s incarnation of Carne. In the 50 years since Carne shot the film, the work has been described as everything from escapist fantasy to an exquisite reverie on the nature of art, love and beauty to a subtle but pointed analogy of life under the Occupation, with Garance’s affair with a murderer likened to France’s relationship to its Nazi captors.

The company ultimately decided that everyone was right.

“After a lot of writing, it became more and more precisely clear to us that we would never get a straight answer to any of those questions, that what was interesting were the contradictions,” Serrand said.

At the Mandell Weiss Theatre on the UC San Diego campus at La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, (619) 550-1010 or by TDD/Voice (619) 550-1030.