All About Jewish Theatre - Drama's Queen / Eleonora Duse, the great 19th century actress

Helen Sheehy's new biography of Eleonora Duse, the Italian tragedienne and, by almost universal acclamation, the greatest actress of the 19th century, opens with a sharp and poignant vignette - of the future diva at age 14, walking "through the Palio gates into Verona on a Sunday in May 1873, " in preparation for her first performance as Shakespeare's Juliet.

"Slender and small-waisted," Sheehy notes, "she moved with easy strides, using her whole body as one accustomed to walking great distances. Her long dark hair was shot through with bronze strands highlighted by the sun." In the Piazza Erbe, beneath the same buildings and monuments that Juliet, according to legend, had seen from her balcony, Duse stopped to buy a bouquet of roses.

She used them as a prop when she reached Verona's ancient Roman amphitheater, "felt her energy rise," made her entrance and, "with strange ease, almost spontaneously," heard Shakespeare's poetry flowing from her mouth. She saw a "sky white as pearl" and heard church bells sounding in the distance. She was also a nervous wreck, "choked with anxiety," a condition that wouldn't leave her until the end of the fifth act, "when she stabbed herself with Romeo's dagger and fell upon his body."

"Oh, grace," Duse later exclaimed, "it was a state of grace!" The crowd roared its approval with a noise that left her exalted, "terrified, " lost in a sea of "indescribable... abandonment." As she wrote to a lover many years later, "The supreme power spoke to me of what I must do in my life; I bowed my head ... and I said So be it."

It's tempting to say nothing much changed for Duse after that, even with the evidence of Sheehy's prodigious research, muscular prose and scrupulous detachment from her subject. Sheehy's earlier books include biographies of American regional theater producer Margo Jones and actress Eva Le Gallienne, who saw Duse on-stage, studied with her, knew her well and still confessed in "The Mystic in the Theatre," her loving tribute to her mentor, "that the art of acting is ephemeral. Unlike other artists, the great actor disappears, leaving no trace except in the hearts and minds of those who were members of his audience."

On film, Le Gallienne thought - and Duse made only one motion picture, "Cenere," in 1916 - something was lost, "that mysterious communion between player and public, that sense of an experience directly shared, which gives to the living theatre its unique appeal."

With this problem in mind, taking her cue directly from Duse, Sheehy affirms that the theater "is a metaphor for life - and death - itself." It isn't and never was a reflection of reality, but a vision, a prayer - as Duse would have said, a "dream" of existence. No art could be explained, she believed - "It would be like trying to explain love." Those who pretended to understand were "asses," "pigs," "rabble" and worse. "Who is it," Duse asked, "that arrives at art without an understanding of life?" If she never managed to understand her own, it's because she was too busy living it and presenting what she knew in a style of acting that broke irrevocably with the standards of the past.

Sheehy wastes no time in declaring that Eleonora Duse "was the first modern actor," an inspiration to Chekhov, Zola, Stanislavsky, Rilke and Joyce, a woman who dazzled Shaw, enchanted Charlie Chaplin and mesmerized Isadora Duncan, her great friend and another inexplicable phenomenon of modern art. It was a time when all art and artists were in a process of transition, seeking new forms, new ideas and new approaches to their craft.

Where others had strutted, posed and declaimed on the stage, Duse stood still and often silent, vibrant, alert, paring her lines and her movements to a minimum and sending shudders through her audience by sheer force of will and the strength of repressed emotion. An early admirer in Italy called her "an actress who gripped your heart and crushed it as if it were a handkerchief." She despised theatricality, hated makeup, dressed like a bag lady and sought to portray the destiny of all women - all humanity - through the experience of one.

As an actress, Duse had no training in the formal sense; what she knew she had learned on the road, as the daughter, granddaughter and great- granddaughter of itinerant Italian actors. As such, Sheehy writes, "she was an outcast, with the social standing of a Gypsy," and even after she won international fame - as the foremost interpreter of Ibsen, as Sarah Bernhardt's Italian rival, as the woman whose name put the word "doozy" in the American lexicon - she remained a nomad, restless, mercurial and often depressed to the point of collapse. Duncan remarked in astonishment that Duse only "acts 30 days in 365. Since I have seen her [she] has postponed 4 dates!!! Desperate - disaster too."

Much of Sheehy's narrative is taken up, as it must be, with the history of the European and Italian theater, the personalities of the 19th century stage and, especially, with Duse's creative and emotional involvement with poet and playwright Gabriele d'Annunzio, the love of her life, who treated her badly and "betrayed" her, many thought, in a notorious roman ... clef, "Il fuoco (The Flame)." Earlier affairs had left her equally unfulfilled, but she could no more do without them than she could have left her profession for marriage and motherhood.

"Duse's compulsion to transcend herself was too ingrained to end when she left the stage," Sheehy observes. "In whatever setting she found herself, Duse improvised a drama from the mundane details of everyday life." She had lost her mother at age 17 and gave birth out of wedlock, not long after, to a baby that died within days. In 1881, she married a man she didn't love and had a daughter, Enrichetta, whom she shunted off to schools, convents and vacations with other people, all the while protesting how much joy the poor girl brought to her life.

"I swear to you I love that child," Duse wrote to a lover, "but I have some moments ... when I just can't stand her!" Sheehy admits that her heroine's "self-absorbed single-mindedness" wasn't "attractive," merely indicative of the "size of her ego, her unwavering belief in her own talent, and her commitment to an artistic ideal that took precedence over every other aspect of her life, including her child." But as Duse remarked to a nosy reporter, in summation of her soul's adventure, "What does it matter where I was born, how I have lived, how much I have despaired, how much I have believed in art?" Thanks to Sheehy, we have some answers about the woman, even if the artist - eternally - remains out of reach.

Source: Newsday