Southern Methodist University visiting drama instructor Mace Perlman carries around a bag of masks – hand-crafted leather faces made for him by a famous Italian master while he was studying with the renowned Commedia dell’arte company, Giorgio Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro di Milano. As a young man, Perlman’s fascination with Shakespeare led him to Europe where he studied with Strehler and the master mime Marcel Marceau in Paris. The experience fueled Perlman’s lifelong fascination with Commedia dell’arte and Renaissance drama and culture. At SMU, he is producing a work by the 18^th century French playwright Marivaux called The Dispute. Rarely performed in the United States, Marivaux‘s work was lost for nearly 250 years when it was rediscovered in France in the early-1970s and staged in a production that quickly became one of the most popular in France. We spoke with Perlman about his love of Commedia and bringing Marivaux‘s work to SMU, for which he has drafted a new translation of The Dispute.

FrontRow: When did you first become interested in commedia dell’arte?

Mace Perlman: I first caught this bug with I was 19, which would have been 1982. You know, I went [to France] as a sophomore in college. I dropped out. Well, it’s called stop out. It was a temporary, you know -

FR: Yeah, a little break.

MP: A little break. But I went to Paris to study with Marceau to study movement. And I did that knowing what I loved was Shakespeare. What I really loved was the theater of language, of poetic language. But the Shakespeare we were doing was kind of coming back up. And so, I went to study mime as a Shakespearian actor who wanted to develop a kind of eloquence of the body that could match the kind of eloquence of the language.

FR: What made you make that connection? Where did you hear of the school in France, and why did you go? I mean, it makes sense when you explain it, but not every 19-year-old thinks that way.

MP: No, you’re right. I always say it’s like a dog finding the right kind of grass, you know, it was very instinctive. It was not an intellectual thing. It’s interesting too because Marceau was an excellent storyteller, he was a very verbal, extremely verbal human being. He was a wonderful storyteller and a wonderful mimic of language. He was great at doing accents, all different kind. He was famous among his friends for – he could do for hours the sounds of a Spanish soccer game, a Spanish soccer announcer. Or a western with cowboys – all in kind of fake English. And he was a great poet, also. He had a great poetic sensibility. So all of these things.

I think we aren’t even used to the idea of language being physical, of laughing with the mind, you know humor that’s not cerebral humor, but like philosophical humor. Humor that makes of laugh they way children laugh at a story that puzzles them, or a paradox. I sometimes say – this is one of those awful sound bites – I say this play [Marivaux’s The Dispute] is Midsummer Night’s Dream meets Waiting for Godot.

FR: [laughs]

MP: I don’t know. Hopefully that doesn’t go into the article. But I mean, Waiting for Godot is a very funny, philosophical play. And this also is a very funny. It’s very, very funny. The actors keep making each other laugh all throughout rehearsal. They keep surprising each other. And that’s the challenge for all actors I guess, is not to get in the way of the comedy.

To me the most wonderful kind of laughter is the things we can’t explain why they make us laugh. Its not topical laughter, you know, it’s not a joke about – do I dare say a joke about George Bush here? You know. W. Its something so deep, it can make us laugh again and again and again.

FR: It gets back to why Commedia dell’arte was popular 250 years.

MP: There you go. And that’s why Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton – there is a connection. When I teach Commedia, I say watch the Marx brothers, because it’s physical and verbal, and surreal. You know someone will say Harpo has been burning the candle at both ends, and Harpo will pull out a candle at both ends.

FR: Is that essential role of the verbal aspect of this play what made you want to make your own translation?

MP: The language in this play is very simple in a certain way, and yet I made a new translation because, I don’t know… there were some kind of good translation out there, but I felt like there’s a voice in this place that is very innocent in a certain way. It’s a play about innocence. It’s the comedy of these four children. The story line is that these four children have been raised in total isolation, one from the other, and now they are going to be let loose into the ring. These children are 19 with, well, they have the life experience of a toddler. They’ve been taught language. It’s very interesting. They have been taught music and they have been taught language. They have been taught to speak French. And they speak more or less correctly grammatically. There is a subtly, and the play is so beautifully written in French. There is some confusion in the beginning over gender in a way that can’t really be rendered into English. But we also watch them build language as the play progresses. They begin from a very simple place and the building blocks start getting put together very quickly.

FR: Do you think it’s why Marivaux’s work isn’t as well known here in the states: the language barrier? Because he is dealing with language in such a unique and particular way that it looses something in English?

MP: I am sure that’s part of it. I think, also, without being unfair to Americans, I think we don’t take that much delight as a culture in language. I mean, it’s not so much about – of course there is a difficulty in translation from French into English. But I think also, and also that’s not even fair for Americans. Look at the Marx’s Brothers. Look at the word play.

FR: Woody Allan

MP: Sure. Um, but I am also thinking this is a play of wit. It is also a play of wit. And somehow the era of Cary Grant – we’ve had wittier moments, you know, in Hollywood screenwriting. I don’t know, we are always saying how we live in a visual culture as opposed to a language-based culture. I don’t know about that. I think it may be a period that we are in.

FR: The Marx Brothers started in Vaudeville which has its comedic connections to Commedia dell’arte. So there’s…

MP: Absolutely. I mean Chico, and Harpo. You know it’s interesting how these Jewish children, you know… How did that happen? How did these Jewish Boys from Brooklyn wind up with Italian sounding names? You know, Groucho and Chico and Harpo. It’s interesting. Absolutely, you know Commedia is there in Bugs Bunny. You know those cartoonists were also referencing Vaudeville. If you look at those old Warner Brothers Cartoons, they grew up on Vaudeville. And they’re parodying Opera, you know Grand Opera, Verdi, and Wagner. There is even an old Tom and Jerry set in a concert hall. It’s interesting that we have sort of cubby-holed, you know, we have separated things – whereas this is a theater that is a tragic-comic theater. The Commedia, and Marivaux, I think. I think its tragic comic like Shakespeare, like Molière. And we laugh deeper, more deeply, and more fully at things that embarrass us. There is Woody Allan again. Things that deeply embarrass us, things that cause us shame, things that frighten us. The bigger the fear the bigger the laugh you know, somehow. It’s so interesting.

FR: When you come here and you are with students who are used to doing more classic productions, how do you work with that, and how do you break that down to get them to move into the commedia style?

MP: That’s a good question. We are finding out about that now. We spent a lot of energy on acting last night. The students are wonderful, I have to say. I am very proud of them. They have worked very well. The masks, we have played with these masks. I had up there the neutral masks, then half of these character masks and we have also played with clown noses. I think the masks help to get us out of the kitchen sink work. In the masks the body has to express, and in the masks, if one wants to look at something one must direct the face to it. I can’t look out of the corner of my eye at that stone in the mask, but when I am on stage with the mask, you quickly realize that the mask needs to look and define. What’s interesting though, sometimes psychological things, like I’m rolling my eyes, like “Ugh…you make me sick” – in the movies I could just go, “Ugh,” and the camera picks it up, right? But in the mask, you know the mask really needs to go “Ugh!” you will see if I put it on, it needs that movement.

The cheap way of thinking about that is, you know, act bigger. But it’s not just about that. The psychological impulse is big. It’s more about how do I direct it? Where do I put it? Do I allow it to stay in my eyes, do I allow it to get into my head or, ultimately, do I allow it to – how far do I go with it? So I’ve been tugging on them. It’s a thing in process. There is no final product being put on here. It would be wonderful if we could run this play for a month. I am an actor and I have spent my whole life as an actor. If I am working well with a director I want to keep talking to that director all through the process. So the answer is they are learning. I am learning with them. But the final step, that’s the tricky one. It’s great to get out of your head and into your body, but then, applying that to speech. And that’s kind of the final frontier. On one hand we are used to mumbling realism, on the other hand we’ve got voice teaching telling us to speak up – improve your diction. So before the show we do all kind of things to, you know, do all that. But that’s not human. So we are sort of stuck at a place in between.

Pictured: Mace Perlman (Photo: Peter Simek)