4 Women

BERENICE - MORELLA - LIGEIA - ELEONORA

by Edgar Allan Poe

Premiere: September 18 2008 Actors: Margarita Betancur - Edwin Alcides García - María Isabel García - Juan David Toro Nadia Silva - Diego Sánchez - Ángela María Muñoz - John Fernando Ospina Lina Castaño - Alejandro Vásquez Composition and Musical Director: Julián Henao Lights: Diego Sánchez - Alejandro Vásquez Scenario, clothing, utility and graphic design: Matacandelas Production: Cristóbal Peláez Friend Director: Diego Sánchez Assistant director: Juan David Correa Script and Direction: Luigi Maria Musati A production of Teatro Matacandelas - 2008

He himself, in himself, by himself, forever as one

By: Luigi Maria Musati

On its second stage, the three-year project for the two hundred years of birth of Edgar Allan Poe, after The fall of the House of Usher. 4 Women puts on the scene the four stories dedicated to Femininity: Berenice, Morella, Ligeia and Eleonora.

Although the dates of composition of each story are not yet well known, it is not the case of their first day of publication. These dates are to us the greatest interest because that way one can understand the dynamics of the author's thinking, the development and progression. For this precise reason the stories are presented in this order and not according to what is generally found in the collections of the writings of Poe.

The theme that unites the stories is Love, the symbolic and experiential relationship between Male and Female, with exquisite dark romantic features, but very similar to those of the medieval courtly poetry of Dante Alighieri in particular, as a result of the Platonic speech in Symposium. The woman can be abstraction (Berenice), infinite and fearsome pit (Morella), dream and seduction (Ligeia), but eventually what is Feminine is the horizon in which what is Masculine reaches its identity in a complex process inexorably crossed by Death (Eleonora). From the scientistic and necrophiliac obsession of Aegeus (Berenice's narrator) to the metaphysical sublimation of Piros (Eleonora's narrator) the four stories narrate a kind of Dantesque journey between hell and purgatory that stays at the gates of paradise.

We have carefully examined the texts and their variants (many in Berenice and Morella) and compared the narrative texts and poems, which often run through the names of Eleonora and Ligeia. We are not going to mind here throughout the whole preparatory process: it is enough to say that, as always, everything goes according to the principles of interpretation that begins as a critical distance and ends with a direct question to the Author, to the self-absorption (as is possible) with his writing. In addition, the experimentation with The Fall of the House of Usher persuaded us to pursue the use of the choir as a dramatic person, the original live music and singing as essentials and not just decorative components of the drama.

The drama is divided into a Prologue, a conductor theme, the stories and an Epilogue. The Prologue is an excerpt from the speech of Diotima to Socrates in Symposium by the divine Plato.

The conductor theme is the poem The Raven.

In the story “Berenice”, a fragment of the Alexandrine poem by Callimaco La Chioma de Berenice (The hair of Berenice) and the story of Poe The Island of the Fay are interpolated.

In Morella, there are some quotes from Fichte, Schelling, and Boehme, philosophers only embodied in the story; the hymn Ave Maria belongs to the first composition and edition of the story, then dropped and published in the poems under the title Hymn or Catholic Hymn.

In Ligeia, a poem by Poe: A Dream, a fragment of the admonition of Circe to Ulysses about the sirens (in Castilian and in the original ancient Greek), a fragment of the prelude to Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner and the Valse triste (Sad Waltz) by Jean Sibelius are interpolated.

In Eleonora, there are quotations from The Divine Comedy (the rivers from paradise on earth), the Song of Songs, Yves Bonnefoy and Omar Khayyam.

The epilogue is the sonnet of Dante Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare de La Vita Nova.

Finally, we believe is important to stress that nothing in the compositions of Poe is casual, much less the titles, headings, the names of the characters, as we have seen in The Fall of the House of Usher.

As for the names:

Berenice is the name of the Queen of Egypt Berenice II, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, who cut her hair as a pledge to the gods for the return of her husband from the war in Syria.

Morella is the name of the Catalan nun Juliana of Morell, famous for his precocious wisdom, but one must add that the root "mor" in Anglo-Saxon language means "dark".

Ligeia is the name of one of the sirens.

Eleonora is the name of the Queen of France and England Eleanor of Aquitaine, the protector of the troubadours and initiator of the courtly love.

It is not necessary to add more.

We dedicate the play to Our Woman: beloved wife, mother and daughter.

POE ON STAGE?

Poe is, above all, image and suggestion of the word, constructed with a formal architecture of ruthless rigor (recall here his essay on poetic composition). Each of his stories transformed in to objectified images (either theatre or film) is constantly risking banality, kitsch or redundancy, all the paraphernalia of terror and cheap mysticism. This, indeed, is a risk we believe is part of his compositional technique, lying on a subtle line between sublime and ridiculous, between terrible and the Grand Guignol, a risk that the interpreter should run, because before him the author has run the same. Poe challenges us to think: maybe no other author has ever corroborated more the maxim of Gorgias the Sophist, for whom art is a lie, and those who know how to deceive are better than those who don’t, and one that lets himself be deceived is wiser than those who were not fooled. The written word of Poe is, in short, a word that creates worlds, and in this sense is for us, as we had previously experienced with Seneca, the maximum theatricality, at least when theatre does not seek a voyeur representation but the ability to re-present, bring back something to present time, reminiscent from the shadows.