190.
CHÉRI
If
the souvenir shop at the Signature Theatre were selling a DVD of CHÉRI, the
mostly ballet-oriented theatre production conceived, choreographed, and directed
there by Martha Clarke, I’d buy it just to play before going to sleep. I can
think of no better soporific to lull a restless brain into slumberland than
this relentlessly boring, dull, undramatic, arty, resolutely humorless, and unimaginative
presentation inspired by Chéri (1920) and Fin de Chéri (1926), two novels by popular French writer Colette, about the doomed relationship of 24-year year old Chéri (Herman Cornejo) and
the 49-year-old Lea (Alessandra Ferri), best friend of Chéri’s mother,
Charlotte (Amy Irving).
Herman Cornejo and Alessandra Ferri. Photo: Joan Marcus.
Set in 1910 post-Bell Epoque Paris
in an expansive, pale blue bedroom—with large double doors up center, a pair of
mirrors, and two sets of French doors at stage right, on a hardwood floor that
rises slightly from right to left—the piece is almost entirely danced by the
two lovers in repetitive and unoriginal pas de seul and pas de deux sequences
performed mainly with Chéri and Lea in sleepwear. There are four brief
intervals in which Charlotte—dressed in the same pretty period gown throughout,
but with a hat on for the fourth—narrates the background to the lovers’ sad
story (I refuse to call such romantic nonsense tragic); throughout, gifted concert
pianist Sarah Rothenberg, also in period clothing, sits at a grand piano playing
a monotonous litany of selections from Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Federico Mompou,
Francis Poulenc, Richard Wagner, and Morton Feldman; the piece is as much a concert
as it is a ballet, but, despite a text by Tina Howe, it can only technically be
called drama.
Even at a little more than an hour
the piece feels endless; whatever drama there is in the story is thin enough
without being further deprived of protein by setting it entirely to music with
only brief narrative snippets to explain its progress. This, despite Colette’s
own advice to writers, “No narration, for heaven’s sake!” quoted in the program. Chéri, a beautiful
young man, is having a hot affair with Lea, a woman old enough to be his mother,
but is induced by Charlotte to marry a more age-appropriate and wealthy woman. When the
heartbroken Lea writes to Charlotte that she is now happy with a new man, an
obvious ruse intended to hurt the young man, he returns, sleeps with her, and
then coldly turns his back on her. We then learn from Charlotte that he went off to war, where his best friend was killed, dying on top of him. Still
haunted by his love for Lea, he returns to the bedroom where they had their
trysts years before. Charlotte tells us that Lea is now gray and stout, but Chéri,
who apparently never looks for himself, can remember only the middle-aged
beauty of the past. Distraught and alone, he puts a pistol in his mouth and
blows his head off.
Put like this, the situation perhaps
sounds much more fraught with dramatic tension than it is in the performance.
Mr. Cornejo, of the American Ballet Theatre, and Ms. Ferri, who retired as prima ballerina assoluta six
years ago and remains amazingly slim and agile at 50, are both exquisite
dancers, but there is nothing they can do to overcome the ennui exuded by the
dreary story, Ms. Clarke’s charmless staging, Christopher Akerlind’s meager
lighting, and David Zinn’s bland set. The attractive and talented Ms. Irving is
completely wasted, her delivery no more than ordinary. One wonders what she’s
doing here.
CHÉRI
might at least have been a series of arousing erotic encounters blended with
romantic angst. Instead, it generates about as much heat as any recent New York
day.
