Grand Guignol on stage at Bernhard Theater
Monsters and melodrama, maimings and mutilations, bedroom farce, unspeakable butchery, and blood by the bucketful - a hundred years ago, it was all onstage every night at le Theatre du Grand-Guignol in Paris. From 1897 to 1962, the small Montmartre theater put on shows so terrifying and grisly that audience members were reported to flee their seats or even convulse in the aisles. Today, Grand-Guignol lives on only in a handful of books and Web sites, and a rich legacy of suspense and special effects still alive and well in thrillers of stage and screen.
The granddaddy of shock theater will make a return appearance with The Grand Guignol April 16-25 at Skidmore College's Bernhard Theater, when the College's Theater Department presents a double bill worthy of the tradition. Opening with the lurid 1912 favorite Le Baiser dans la nuit (A Kiss in the Night), the production will also present the world premiere of a new horror-farce, Nunky Gruel or A Stranger Is as the Dew. The new work is guest-directed by Yehuda Duenyas '96 and written by Normandy Raven Sherwood; both are founding members of the National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA), an award-winning experimental theater troupe based in New York City.
Six performances of TheGrand Guignol will be presented in Bernhard Theater from April 16-25. Friday and Saturday shows (April 16, and 17, 23 and 24) will begin at 8 p.m. The Sunday shows (April 18 and 25) will take place at 2 p.m. only. General admission is $12, and $8 for students and senior citizens.
The evening will open with one of the best known of Grand Guignol dramas, Maurice Level's Le Baiser dans la nuit. It tells the tale of a beautiful young woman rescued from a looming prison term by the former lover whom she has scarred for life by throwing vitriol in his face. All he asks in return is one last kiss; carnage ensues. Often retold, Baiser even inspired a DC Comics' edition, the 1950s The Haunt of Fear.
Billed as a tribute to le Theatre du Grand-Guignol, Nunky Gruel is a suspenseful comedy/drama "designed to make audiences squirm in their seats," its creators promise, and guaranteed to leave the Bernhard stage "bursting with carnage, dismemberment, and sinister figures." Such vivid theatrical mayhem was a not unnatural choice for the NTUSA troupers; their own startlingly original theater pieces often revive oddball theater genres (vaudeville shows, tent revivals, a 1950s casino floorshow, a self-help group, a vintage Chautauqua circuit show), by recreating them right down to the original stage design, lighting, music, and the intimate size of the hall, according to Duenyas.
The NTUSA company has earned critical praise as"one of the most exciting and eccentric young theater companies in town" ( New York Times) and won such notable honors as a 2002 Arts International DNA Project grant, a 2006 Village Voice "Obie," and the 2007 Spalding Gray Award for "innovative theatrical vision." With resume credits asdirector, designer, producer, and actor,Duenyasis currently pursuing an M.F.A. in electronic arts at RPI. "In NTUSA, we create both shows and specific places to view them that recreate a particular time and place," says Duenyas, who was an avid actor and theater major during his Skidmore years. "The challenge was, can we recreate in Bernhard Theater the feeling of going to the actual Grand-Guignol?"
Nunky Gruelwill attempt to answer that question with a clever set and a large cast of nearly two dozen student actors, in a play whose plot features a young would-be thief named Agnes. She arrives at a remote school for wealthy young girls, on the eve of a much-anticipated cotillion, planning to rob them all. When a sinister Dr. Nunky Gruel arrives to "vaccinate" the girls, all plans go terribly awry. Once again, carnage ensues.
Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol wasnamed for Guignol, a French puppet‐character similar to Punch of Punch and Judy fame. For 65 years, the theater, housed in a former church, focused exclusively on exploring what one Web critic called "the dark limits of what could be accomplished on the stage."As a 19th-century venue for avant-garde naturalist drama, the theater featured dramas "ripped from the headlines", i.e., from current-crime news items called "faits divers" and heightened with elements of surrealism, sadism, suspense, and razor-sharp psychological pacing. As director Duenyas explains, the theater's tiny size meant that its resident actors needed great skill, energy, and endurance to enact explicit physical violence and to wield stage knives, saws, and other weapons precisely and with believable intent. Makeup, lighting, props, and special effects also had to survive close audience scrutiny, a condition that boosted the development of special-effects stagecraft. A scholarly case can even be made forGrand-Guignol as "a neglected theatrical tradition with an incalculable, yet tangible, impact on other dramatic and cinematic genres," according to a scholarly essay in Theatre Research International.
Duenyas developed TheGrand Guignol for his directorial debut at Skidmore for all those reasons and one more: "As an art form, Grand Guignol is fun, physically wild, and well suited to college actors."
For reservations or more information, call the Bernhard Theater Box Office at 518-580-5439, or Kathy Mendenhall, theater coordinator, at 518-580-5431.
