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Producer’s Notes from Natasha Williams At first glance Ronald Harwood ‘s “The Dresser” is a play about actors: their strange attachment to theater, their devotion, their unlucky fate among the artists - to be like shooting stars, our focal points only for the duration of their artistic careers, then disappearing behind the horizon seldom to be remembered after the generation of their peers slips into history. But as you sink into the world created by the dramatist you are struck by an amazing net of themes, parallels and thoughts, running through the script like blood vessels , giving the play in general and characters in particular the warmth of life - the artistic truth that moves us so in the works of drama. In the face of a great play a director often feels dwarfed by the magnitude of choices in front of him, because no play can be staged about everything it can say - the action on stage is linear, the story is told along in the framework of time. The dimensions of dramatic performance come from the depth of the director’s and actor’s realization of all the unspoken themes, from their ability to empathize with the characters whose lives, like the lives of real people, are multidimensional. A 1982 Tony award winning play, “The Dresser” by Ronald Harwood has captured the imagination of many directors. The screen version starring Tom Courtenay was honored with five Academy Awards nominations in1983. The play has appeared on such innovative stages as the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 2004 and most recently in the Camelot Theatre in Oregon in February 2007. Every one of its productions has been different. Each strikes a different cord and explores a different theme : from the role of art at the time of war (the play is set in a heavily bombed England in 1942) to the question of personal identity of an actor versus identities he acquires as the result of playing characters again and again (the play portrays a day in the life of a third rate Shakespearean company on tour); from madness and inflated ego of a tyrant (Sir) to openly gay flamboyance of Sir’s dresser Norman, whose portrayal in the movie in 1983 was one of the first appearances of an openly gay acting character on the big screen. Our production, though touching on all of the above, focuses predominantly on the exploration of inner lives of the characters and their relations to each other, keeping a spot light on the fact that Ronald Harwood, well astute in theater (after attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts he joined the Shakespeare Company of Sir Donald Wolfitt, one of the last great actor-managers in Great Britain and from 1953 to 1958 was Sir Donald's personal dresser), took Chekhov’s theme of a “little man” to the Shakespearean proportions by building an obvious parallel between actors and back stage characters of his play with the archetypal characters in King Lear, thus translating Shakespeare’s drama into the language of modern life and giving a classic play yet another interpretation. The intimate space of the “Balagula Theatre” and deep felt, genuinely spontaneous sincerity of the interaction between Ed Desiato (Sir) and Ryan Case (Norman) were conducive to such interpretation. We hope that our audiences will enjoy the humor and the drama simultaneously present in this wonderful piece of dramatic work as much as we have enjoyed uncovering its beauty and depth line by line in the last several months as we have worked to bring it to life.
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