Fool's Paradise Lost

In translation, Simone de Beauvoir’s novella The Monologue is not something you read on a beach blanket. It’s not even something you’d read outdoors; the story, which forms a third of de Beauvoir’s collection The Woman Destroyed, is a galloping rant uttered by a Parisian woman named Murielle who finds herself alone on New Year’s Eve. The Monologue begins with the line “The silly bastards!” and, 30 pages later, ends with Murielle telling God to grant her divine revenge against those who have deserted her. Murielle’s screeds against parents, lovers, husbands and the partygoers dancing in the apartment upstairs have an Underground Man ring to them, which means that while offering a bracing read, they do not seem promising theater material.

Not, that is, unless Frederique Michel comes along and tries her hand at it with her City Garage ensemble in the form of The Sweet Madness. To make the 80-minute performance palatable as a stage adaptation, Michel apportions the text to four actresses wearing black (Cynthia Mance, Szlivi Naray-Davey, Elizabeth Pocock, Cheryl Scaccio) who take turns bemoaning a wasted life, as a fifth woman (Jennifer Piehl) moves about the stage silently observing. This mute spectator is Murielle’s daughter Sylvie, and her fate, we learn, is one reason for her mother’s lonely New Year’s.

Murielle is not someone the audience can cozy up to; vain, vindictive and snobbish, she is neither a feminist martyr nor a forgotten-mother icon. Although The Monologue has been staged several times in the U.K. as a one-woman show, it makes a certain sense to divide Murielle’s ruminations and tirades among four voices; it’s a strategy that keeps the monologue from becoming monotonous and certainly mitigates our hostility toward Murielle. However, this rhetorical solution doesn’t add anything to the work, and Michel’s direction doesn’t noticeably individualize the four Murielles by assigning specific themes to each of the actresses. They remain indistinguishable parts of the same self-pitying organism, albeit smartly choreographed by Michel through small, synchronized gestures such as dialing phones or crossing legs.

My main suggestion would have been to cast older actresses; although de Beauvoir’s Murielle is 43, Michel has changed her to 35, which makes her actresses far too young to be looking back over a life of regrets. The glaring age disparity also undermines the believability of Murielle’s sexual solitude, especially in France, a country far less obsessed with youth than our own.

Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s set is appropriately stark, as is his lighting plot; still, the upstage lights cast some unfortunate shadows on Sylvie, not the least of which is a Hitler “mustache” under her nose, a shading that would seem more appropriate for Murielle. If Sartre proposed that hell is other people, de Beauvoir’s Murielle is proof that hell can sometimes have a population of one.

THE NERD| By LARRY SHUE | At the COLONY THEATER, 555 N. Third St., Burbank | Runs through July 6

THE SWEET MADNESS | Written by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, adapted by FREDERIQUE MICHEL | At CITY GARAGE, 13401/2 Fourth St. (alley), Santa Monica | Runs through July 20