All About Jewish Theatre - ELEONORA DUSE: A Biography by Helen Sheehy

Sarah Bernhardt achieved international celebrity at a time when acting was primarily a declamatory and pictorial art, and she clung to that style through the final decades of the 1800's, long after it had come to be regarded as old-fashioned. Even after the turn of the century, playing in London, she employed a meticulously choreographed series of poses, sometimes remaining motionless for as long as thirty seconds before she glided into the next position.

Edmond Rostand called her "the queen of posture," and Helen Sheehy - apparently no great admirer of Bernhardt -- adds with a straight face that her specialty was death.

Bernhardt's name nevertheless appears frequently in Sheehy's biography of Eleonora Duse. Sheehy's examination of how Duse differed from Bernhardt, who in most ways exemplified everything that was thought to be desirable in an actor, makes her contributions and innovations more easily appreciated, particularly for readers with little or no knowledge of the theater.

Duse (doo-ZAY) had learned the fundamentals of acting as a member of her family's troupe, a struggling, itinerant theater company that depended on each day's small income to pay for the day's bread and a bed for the night.

While still quite young she had exhibited a strong empathetic imagination, among other "magic gifts" spoken of by her mother. Her unusual empathy first manifested itself in her sensing life in inanimate objects such as chairs and other household items, which she would sit and talk to for hours at a time, asking no reply.

When she was 14, with a decade of acting experience behind her, Duse found herself in Verona playing Juliet, a girl of her own age, and she experienced an uncanny sensation of actually becoming the incarnation of Shakespeare's character. Later she would speak of the harmony she felt that day and of a state of grace through which she was united in communion with the audience.

Sheehy associates this event with the Dionysian concept of acquiring power over others through surrender of the self. For the rest of her life, Sheehy says, guided by "a secret voice" which she said was "an echo of the pain of the world," Duse would seek and find this state of grace and self-abandonment.

Duse harbored a profound mistrust of language and probed deeply beneath the lines of her characters to discover - and to portray - what she called the invisible side of life.

While Bernhardt was always Bernhardt, Duse disappeared within her characters, and although she always spoke her lines in Italian, she communicated their thoughts and feelings in ways so surpassingly subtle and yet so clear that her audiences seemed always to understand -- without understanding why.

Duse wore no jewelry, and her costumes were always simple and austere, much alike in color and line from role to role. Nor did she wear makeup, which in her view amounted to a mask. As it was, responding naturally to incidents affecting the character she played, she startled audiences by suddenly becoming deathly pale or blushing brightly, according to circumstances.

It was seeing Duse onstage that inspired the great Russian director and teacher Stanislavsky to establish the famed Moscow Art Theatre, and to his students he always said her acting represented the ideal toward which they should strive.

At a time when Stanislavsky was working to "codify" Duse's art, to identify a method by which to "reproduce" a character night after night, Duse was achieving something far greater, Sheehy says. She was creating a new woman, a new human being, in performance after performance. In this sense, she never repeated herself, never needed or wanted to reproduce what she had accomplished earlier.

Duse refused to portray women as they were conventionally represented on the stage. She wanted to reveal to audiences "the immense gap between accepted ideas of woman and what a woman really was."

Among the plays in which she found this opportunity were La Dame aux cam=E9lias and Le Demi-Monde, by Alexandre Dumas fils, who felt deep sympathy, as Duse did, for unmarried mothers and illegitimate children and who championed divorce and paternity laws. Plays of Henrik Ibsen, such as A Doll's House, naturally became part of her repertory, and so did works by the poet and novelist Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom she was for a time romantically involved.

Mention of Duse's relationship with d'Annunzio suggests another point that ought to be made - that this biography, unlike many biographies, is essentially a very good story, a story that Sheehy allows to unfold naturally, without unnecessary intrusions. Her analysis is everywhere clear and concise, as it is always interesting and enlightening, the product of wide and thoughtful reading.

Though Sheehy, unlike Duse, is necessarily limited to words, she has produced a biography that enables readers to come as close as one could reasonably expect to both the visible and the invisible worlds of an actress who may have been simply the best.