The play tells the story of a father, Pridamant (Bernard Bygott ’01), who seeks the help of the magician Alcandre (Pawel Binczyk ’08) to find out what has happened to his estranged son. The magician reveals Pridamant’s son appearing as the romantic hero of three separate but related vignettes. Pridamant believes the scenes he sees to be literally true; he believes that his son actually lives within them. He does not realize—although the audience might—that the three vignettes allude to characters from classic Spanish, French and Greek dramas “La Celestina,” “L’Illusion Comique,” and “The Myth of the Amazon Queen Hyppolyta,” respectively. The play’s denouement shows Alcandre revealing the artificial aspect of these stories to Pridamant: He has watched scenes from plays in which his son acted, not events that actually happened to the son personally. Pridamant’s relief at the falseness of the perils he saw his son facing quickly gives way to indignation over the realization that his son has entered what he considers an unworthy profession.
It is worth noting that the second of these vignettes is central to “The Illusion,” not only in its placement among the plays-within-plays but also because it is in fact taken out of the satirical French play by Pierre Corneille from which Tony Kushner freely adapted the entirety of “The Illusion.” To people who care to scrutinize these details, the play’s tongue-in-cheek allusions to its predecessor heighten the thematic element of reality interweaving and interacting with illusion.
This element already reverberates in certain instances both within the play’s interior and exterior: the audience views the theatrical character Pridamant as he in turn views a magical vision of his son which he thinks is “real,” but turns out to be staged performance scenes—a theatrical illusion within a magical illusion within a theatrical illusion. Additionally, Alcandre’s servant the Amanuensis crosses these delineated boundaries, illustrating the ephemerality of their delineations.
The performance of Daniel Freije ’11, then, was highly pivotal. He portrayed the Amanuensis who, alone among the characters, breached the separation between the play’s established realities: in the memorable end of the first act, the Amanuensis descends his master’s vantage point of observing Pridamant’s son in his scenes. He touches the stage floor to enter the scene which Alcandre has magically wrought. He reappears in the beginning of the second act as the irate father of a romantic heroine appearing opposite Clindor, the son. The deft, shadow-like restraint of Freije’s presence for the majority of the story served to accentuate the isolated moments throughout the play in which his Amanuensis flares out with dramatic intensity as he crosses the threshold of Pridamant’s reality into the magical and theatrical reality of Alcandre’s conjuring.
The performance space chosen for the play also blurs the line between illusion and reality. It was my first time seeing a performance in the Holden Experimental Theater; even before the play began and I knew anything about its themes, the proximity of the audience seats to the performance floor struck me. During the play, this proximity facilitated a tacit interaction between audience and actors which would not have been possible on the traditional proscenium stage of Kirby Theater. One could feel the swish of Gillyard’s saber as he dueled with his rival, played by Matthew Ghiden ’09, over the love of junior Lisa Smith’s romantic heroine. One could see the look of glee in Hampshire College senior Gwyneth Arnold-Starr’s eyes as her hell-bent antagonist soliloquized sabotaging the two lovers in conniving verse. One started with surprise and amusement as Michael Chernicoff ’09, the play’s comic relief character Matamore, made his bombastic entrance from out of a black curtain directly behind the audience seats. Despite the resulting tension of being so physically near people I know as they affected their dramatis personae—or rather because of it—the proximity was completely appropriate and, in fact, integral to “The Illusion”’s examination of just where, in a play, reality ends and illusion begins.
Now to be sure, it must be said that any playwright whose theatrical piece involves a play-within-a-play does so at his own peril. The archetype has been worn thin over hundreds of years of theatrical tradition; the results are often unremarkable, tiresome and commonplace. Fortunately for my myopic preconceptions, “The Illusion” delivers a stellar reworking of this archetype in a complex and thought-provoking manner, through its literary adaptation, the physical interpretation of its performance space, and some truly fine acting, direction and set design. As far as I am concerned, Cranch and Gillyard have earned their honors.