Review: Boulder Ensemble's 'Cyrano' Is Ahead by a Nose at Lone Tree Arts
Edmond Rostand’s 1897 Cyrano de Bergerac is a big, romantic beast of a play, written in poetic couplets, featuring a love as doomed and all-encompassing as any in literature — that of Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde — though it doesn’t end in a lovers’ suicide. The story includes duels in the shadows and a great looming battle, Catholicism and death and a handful of plot twists. Most important, there’s a larger-than-life hero: Cyrano is a wit, a swordsman and poet, ridiculously brave, profoundly faithful — to his lady as well as his country — but made ugly, at least in his own eyes, by a huge nose. The play speaks of artifice and reality; it celebrates true, enduring and self-sacrificing love.
Convinced that he’s too ugly to ever win his beautiful second cousin, Roxane, Cyrano chooses to support the courtship of a handsome fellow soldier, Christian. Roxane loves poetry. Christian’s a bit of a dodo. So Cyrano lends his creativity and poetic tongue to Christian, standing in the shadows and speaking for him when he courts Roxane on her balcony, sending her letters signed with Christian’s name.
Michael Hollinger and Aaron Posner, two of our most interesting and talented contemporary playwrights, undertook a revision that they named simply Cyrano, which premiered in 2011. The Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company had previously presented Hollinger’s An Empty Plate at the Cafe du Grand Boeuf and his Ghost-Writer, as well as Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird, at its usual home at the Dairy Arts Center, and it’s now mounting Cyrano at the Lone Tree Arts Center. Hollinger, who did the translating, dropped the rhyme for this version, and the script is a lot shorter than the original one; the plot has been pruned and a host of colorful characters reduced to a cast of nine, with most actors playing multiple roles. The action is framed by a kind of prologue in which the audience is asked to “let one man stand in for ten” and told, “We begin — as we always begin — in the theater.”