THEATER

The Duke
The Metromaniacs


Go to this site to see a video and learn of the play...


"It’s springtime in Paris, 1738. Metromania, the poetry craze, is all the rage. Damis, a young, would-be poet with a serious case of verse-mania falls for a mysterious poetess from Breton. She turns out to be none other than a wealthy gentleman with a touch of the mania himself—looking to unload his sexy but dimwitted daughter—who also just happens to be cuckoo for couplets. Soon scheming servants, verbal acrobatics, and mistaken identities launch a breathless series of twists and turns in this breezy “translaptation” of a rediscovered French farce by comedic master David Ives (The Liar, Venus in Fur, All in the Timing)."


“Frisky, competitive wordplay and high-octane mix ups ...almost criminally enjoyable.”
—Washington Post

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"Frolicsome verse comedy…Ives’s cleverness is indisputable, and he excels at a rare sort of verbal glitter. Michael Kahn’s production is physically exquisite—Murell Horton’s costumes are particularly dazzling—the performers nail the gossamer tone.”
—Time Out New York

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“Ives [is] wizardly … magical and funny … a master of language. He uses words for their meanings, sounds and associations, spinning conceits of a sort I’ve not seen or heard before. He’s an original.”
—The New York Times

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“Disguises and ruses and verse-ical abuses.”
—BroadwayWorld

Metromania Mania

by David Ives

Frankly, I fell in love with the title. 

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Having enjoyed myself enormously adapting some French comedies of the 17th and 18th centuries, I was casting around for another. In the course of reading about that period, I stumbled again and again upon mention of an obscure play from 1738 with a superb title: La Métromanie. It means, more or less, The Poetry Craze. (“Metro” from “metrum,” Latin for poetic verse, and “mania” from… Oh, never mind.) 

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So I ordered the French text from the Internet and it arrived in a blurry offprint with an introduction by a huffy scholar who heartily disapproved of the play and all its amoral characters. Now I was really interested. When I read that the play’s author, Alexis Piron, was a poet who had failed to make the Académie Française because he’d written a lengthy Ode To The Penis, I was definitely interested. 

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Upon inspection, La Métromanie turned out to be chaste and delightful. Its world is the airy, unmoored, Watteau-ish one that Piron’s contemporary Marivaux would also put onstage. There’s not much like realism in The Metromaniacs. We’re in a levitated reality that’s the exact opposite of the vernacular, set-in-an-inn comedies the English were writing at the same time. This is champagne, not ale. 

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The play was a Page Six scandal in its time, spinning into art what had been  real-life comedy. It seems that all Paris had fallen in love with the poems of one Mademoiselle Malcrais de La Vigne, a mysterious poetess from distant Brittany (read:  Appalachia). The celebrated satirist Voltaire publicly declared his love for the lady and her great works, publicly offering to marry the poetess, only to have it revealed that said poetess was a guy named Paul Desforges-Maillard, living not in Brittany but in Paris and taking his revenge on the poetry establishment for not appreciating his genius. Needless to say, Voltaire wasn’t pleased when Piron’s satire showed up using a similar situation. Worse than that for Voltaire, the show was a hit. 

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The premise of the play seemed to me comic gold. The dramaturgical mechanics not so much. Piron was a wit and a poet but not much of what I’d call a farcifactor, often content to let his characters intone his ravishing couplets without paying much attention to who just exited where or why anybody’s doing anything. The play had not one but two male leads, a lackluster female ingénue and, like so many French plays of the period, it simply came to a stop rather than resolving. This is all by way of saying I’ve fiddled a lot with Piron’s masterpiece in translaptating it into English. (The first English version ever, to my knowledge, but I’m open to correction). 

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When my friends ask me what it’s about, I always say that The Metromaniacs is a comedy with five plots, none of them important. On the other hand, that’s the beauty of the play, and part of its delight. Piron doesn’t want plot. He wants gossamer and gorgeousness, he wants rarified air and helpless high-comic passion. A purer world. Characters drunk on language, mere mortals in love with poetry, fools in love with love. In other words, the way the world was meant to be.

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Given what greets us in the morning newspaper these days, a few yards of gossamer may be just what the doctor ordered. Merci, Monsieur Piron. Mock on, Voltaire.