THE LOVE of THREE ORANGES

Winner of the 1993 Tony Award as America’s Outstanding Regional Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, that had been founded in 1947 by Gregory Peck, is led by theatre and film director Des McAnuff.

The Playhouse’s 2004 season begun with 700 Sundays … Billy Crystal … A Life in Progress (April 20-May 2), written and performed by Billy Crystal and directed by Des McAnuff, a show that will be on Broadway starting with December 2004.

The Love of Three Oranges had 40 performances between Sept. 14- Oct.17, and the price of the ticket varied between 29-52$.

The casting took place in June, in New York and Los Angeles, La Jolla Playhouse being one of the few regional theatres in the US that are doing national casting.

Nona is one of Eastern Europe’s most exciting emerging directors. I met her in November 2002 as part of the Central and Eastern European Theatre Initiative in Bucharest. The Initiative, led by Director Philip Arnoult, brings together American directors with a new generation of international theatre artists to discover exciting new talent. And we found it in Nona! She is a very keen intellect with a tremendous imagination. The work I've seen at Mic Theater and at her own theater Toaca in Bucharest (Romania) involved very physical work with actors and arresting visual imagery. I was extremely impressed by her work and soon after, I invited her to the Playhouse to discuss collaboration opportunities. She visited the Playhouse last year, and I’m pleased that Nona made her American directorial debut here at the Playhouse."  

Des McAnuff

When the big, citrus-colored curtain gives birth to commedia dell'arte stock characters, La Jolla Playhouse the theatergoers know they're in for a fantasy excursion through Carlo Gozzi's "The Love of Three Oranges."   As imagined and directed by Romanian director Nona Ciobanu, Gozzi’s fairytale world is set in the kingdom of Lugubria, where an unhappy hypochondriac prince named Tartaglia (the appealing Jim Parsons) has never laughed. Born depressed, he carries around a necklace of prescription bottles, the contents of which fail to lighten his mood, one of melancholy and despair.   The show is performed by an excellent team of American actors assembled and trained by Ciobanu just for the Playhouse, but the real stars of the show are the concept and the Curtain and the costumes fashioned of the same, stretchy cloth created by Ciobanu's co-designer Iulian Baltatescu, who also is lighting designer. Ciobanu's directorial style is pure, subtly amusing and refreshingly offbeat. James Magruder's translation is colloquial and topical, as is all good commedia.  The production possesses an ephemeral quality, as if this stage, this cloth, these actors will vanish when the show is done. It’s a sad, wonderful, magical feeling to carry into one’s dreams.  Playhouse world thru orange-colored glasses By CHARLENE BALDRIDGE La Jolla Village News, Thursday, Sept. 23

Romanian theater duo helm Playhouse's imaginative 'Three Oranges'

These endearing stock characters illuminate Gozzi, Ciobanu’s and Baltatescu's fable, which presents a magical universe sure to delight theatergoers.

CHARLENE BALDRIDGE

North County Times

…The plot is simple. A curse has been placed on young Prince Tartaglia (Jim Parsons), and he must search the kingdom for three oranges in order to survive. The execution of this plot is one of the most unusual and highly entertaining unravelings I have witnessed in 15 years of theater.

Laughter begins immediately at the start of the play as the curtain becomes a character, a sort of birth mother to the performers who emerge like larva wrapped in a fleece-like coverall. As they roll, find openings to extend their arms and legs and take form, Tartaglia reveals through sobs as huge as his big ball of a belly, that he is terribly depressed and wishes to die.

As the story moves on, every moment is filled with surprise and more laughs.

Ciobanu describes her play as a fairy tale with a group of commedia dell arte archetypal characters. The curtain, she said, "can be seen as one of the major symbols of theater, having the role of creating a boundary between two worlds: the real world and the one of imagination ... both the magical world of theater and our daily one.

Magical is the key word of how the performers use the curtain to fit the moment in the story. Each actor plays a combination of roles as Tartaglia and Truffaldino take to the road to find the three oranges that will cure Tartaglia of his illness.

…the cast of performers do a magnificent job.

The merging of so many cultures and art forms is thrilling enough, but the execution of this production is what's worth seeing. Words cannot do it justice.

DIANA SAENGER

La Jolla Light

Storyline in 'Three Oranges' a juicy one

There is a bright purity in the elegant fantasy now at the La Jolla Playhouse, based on Carlo Gozzi's 18th century confection "The Love of Three Oranges," which both pricks the imagination and cleans out some accumulated grime of pretentious naturalism.

While there's plenty of visual mystery to savor in the exotic stagecraft of Romania's Nona Ciobanu and Iulian Baltatescu  who between them did sets, costumes, lighting, music, adaptation and staging  it's the comfortable fairy-tale environment of the ancient commedia dell' arte plots and shtick that grants permission to enjoy the tricks.

Mainly a vast, yellowish cloth drop of something like gauze of jersey which can be pulled tight against protrusions to create effects arguably more eerie than any electronic morphing. Somebody flies, seeming to skip up the drop, to exquisite effect. Pods of the same material roll out from under the Mother Drop and turn into costumed actors. In fact, virtually every scrap of material onstage, except decorative details, is this same yellow stretch stuff.

This is far too much an ensemble show to single out individual actors. Everybody did well and there was a general sense that all nine of them could trade parts at random and do just as well. Believe me, please, that's a compliment.

Welton Jones

Ciobanu and Baltatescu have devised much ingenious stage magic to enhance their  streamlined--90 minutes, no intermission--Three Oranges, employing balloons, bubbles, a flying rig, a big puppet bird, and, their piece de resistance: a huge golden-yellow backdrop of fabric so strong and malleable you can do anything under the sun with it--the Silly Putty of cycloramas. The chief interest in the show turns into watching to see what new thing can be done with that backdrop as it gets raised, lowered, tightened, billowed, made to extrude persons and objects, bounced on like a trampoline, slid down upon like a slide, cocooned in, expressed from behind by faces and hands like the rubber walls in Polanski's Repulsion, and transformed into a big-breasted giantess.

Playing three dozen endlessly antic roles, the cast of nine performs very skillfully and with exemplary vigor, although the characterizations tend toward the artificial. A story so unrealistic is better served the more sincere the acting.

George Weinberg-Harter

Backstage West Southern CA

Director Nona Ciobanu is a woman with an avant-garde, individual vision, and her idea of using a curtain as a key protagonist that moves the story forward is an intriguing one. Owing to its flexibility and elasticity, the huge yellow curtain easily embraces and expels characters with admirable boldness. When they emerge from this curtain, which represents a maternal figure, they're all dressed in vividly identical yellow material. Ciobanu and Iulian Baltatescu (who did the evocative lighting) make every scene a treat for the eye.

Joel Hirschhorn

Variety

Gozzi wrote a scenario more than a script. He took a story, blocked out scenes in successive paragraphs, and let actors playing Pantalone, Truffaldino, Smeraldina, and the invidious Fata Morgana take it from there. In the La Jolla Playhouse production, Romanian guest artist Nona Ciobanu goes a step further: the set assumes a starring role.

It's not a set, really, just an enormous yellow curtain that takes up the entire rear wall. But the elastic drop's rarely a curtain. In the beginning it's a pregnant stomach, which gives birth to young hypochondriac-extraordinaire Tartaglia. Later it's the giant, trembling witch Creonta. At other times objects bulge from it in bas relief. In one of the production's most majestic images, the curtain bellies forward, like a full sail, and the wizard Celio (suspended by wires) bounds across it like a slalom skier, or -- or you pick: Ciobanu's free-spirited visuals make for open-ended interpretation.

Dressed in yellow clown costumes and led by Jim Parson's witty/whiney Targaglia, the cast performs commedia-like physical comedy riffs. James Magruder's American adaptation includes riffs of its own, as when he refers to sleeping around as "collateral congress."

San Diego Reader

Romanian director Nona Ciobanu views theater as a place for poetic transformation.

During a break from rehearsing her first American production, the visitor from Bucharest says of herself and designer Iulian Baltatescu: "By our natures we are not into things, or putting many things onstage. We choose one thing. We are always looking for essences, the primary image."

To find that essence in Carlo Gozzi's 1761 fairy tale, "The Love of Three Oranges," Ciobanu re-imagined the curtain that separates the illusions of theater from the real world of the audience. "I had this idea to make the curtain be the main character of the show, giving birth to the story and to the characters," she says.

Experimental tradition

Even before the 1989 political revolution that overthrew the repressive Ceausescu regime, an avant-garde, visually-oriented theatrical tradition had arisen, mostly around the same Bucharest academy where Ciobanu and Baltatescu met and trained.

A cadre of such directors, creating during the ferment of the 1960s, left the country to work in Europe and the United States after Nikolai Ceausescu came to power in 1965. Influenced by the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht and the radical experimentalism of Vsevolod Meyerhold, that group of progressive theater artists included Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Serban, both of whom worked at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge and the Public Theatre in New York. Also emigrating: director Lucian Pintilie, and the film actor and director Andrei Belgrader, a former professor at UCSD.

Belgrader's boisterously contemporary anti-war adaptation of the classic "Ubu Roi" as "Ubu Rock" premiered at ART, and had a wild, hilariously crude production at the university in 1998.

All four directors created notable reinventions of classics as they attempted to reinvigorate the modern theater. Robert Brustein, the critic, historian and former ART artistic director, has worked with most of them. In a 1988 piece in the New York Times, he called their directing "metaphorical" and went on to define their shared approach:

"Metaphorical directing attempts to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent," a process Brustein called more radical in its risks than merely updating the setting of a play. The metaphorical director "authors" the production as much as the author writes the script.

Brustein might have been describing Julie Taymor (who hadn't emerged yet ) - she directed in 1996 at The Playhouse, another Gozzi work, "The Green Bird" -  or Ciobanu (who in 1988 was still living under a communist dictatorship) when he said that such directors with a feeling for metaphor "are interested in generating provocative theatrical images – visually expressed in physical production – that suggest and reverberate" rather than concretely nail down the play.

'Oranges' gets juiced up in an avant-garde staging at Playhouse

Anne Marie Welsh

The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Oranges" has lots of fanciful layers to peel

Comments from Earl Warren Middle School Theatre Students:

"I loved your costumes and your acting.  You did a great job of doing different characters by changing your voices and body motions.  You rocked!" - Alexandra Lopez

"I thought that the set was awesome and it was really cool that the actors used the whole theatre during the play." - Elizabeth Campbell

"I thought that they play was hilarious and very creative!  I loved the costumes and the use of the orange material around the set.  The play was very well thought out and the actors did a great job of making the stage come alive with expressions."

"I liked your costumes, they were simple but great.  I liked how the Prince wore pajamas, he was funny." - Robert Fisher

"The thing I loved most about this play was that all of the actors were so focused on what they were doing and never lost character.  That is a fantastic skill to posses!"  -   Rhiannon Joseph

"I loved how the actors used all of their props and how they took up the whole stage and theatre; including the stairs and exit sign.  My favorite actress was Smeraldina, she was hilarious!" - Lauren Levy

"Your performance was really cool and humorous." - Chelsea Falkner

"I totally loved the play.  I loved how creative it was and how the props were used so well.  I loved all of the characters and how the curtain was used for so many different things. It was awesome!  You have great actors!  I loved their personalities and how they used the whole theatre space, especially the stairs and exit sign." - Kelsi Thurston

"Actors - you guys were great!  You kept your focus and did not mess up, even if you did, I did not notice.  I loved all of your voices!  Nice Job!" - Liz Malcolm

My students have said it best!  From the first minutes of the opening to the very end I was sitting on the edge of my seat!  I don't know which I loved the best - the set, use of space, acting, costumes....!!!!!!!!!!  Brilliant work La Jolla Playhouse! - Cheryl Yoshida, EW Drama Teacher