INTERVIEW: Romance is aplenty in Two River’s ‘Cyrano’
Photo: From left, Britney Simpson as Roxane, Luis Quintero as Christian and Jason O’Connell as Cyrano in a new adaptation of the classic romance at Two River Theater. Photo courtesy of T. Charles Erickson / Provided by Social Sidekick Media with permission.
Cyrano, now playing at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, is a classic romance featuring a wonderfully romantic wordsmith who is unable to convince his childhood sweetheart, Roxane, that he’s worth a gamble. This could be because of his unusual nose, which causes him to become self-conscious around the love of his life.
The celebrated production, featuring a new adaptation, is co-produced by Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and plays through Oct. 13 at Two River Theater.
Jason O’Connell pulls double duty for this Cyrano. He co-write the script with Brenda Withers and also portrays the title character. For the actor-director, this production is the culmination of a long journey.
“The way this first came my way was I was actually offered an opportunity to direct a production of Cyrano,” O’Connell said in a recent phone interview. “A theater that had been looking to find a project for me to work with them on, this theater company called Amphibian Stage Productions, which is based in Fort Worth, Texas, they knew of my work because the artistic director there had seen me in a show off-Broadway, and she also knew that I was a writer. She knew that I was doing more and more directing, and she was looking for a thing that might bring me out there to her theater to work.”
This Texas theater company had a few titles in mind for O’Connell, and one of them was Cyrano de Bergerac, the name of the original French play by Edmond Rostand, which has been translated several times into English and other languages.
“I was intrigued because I had always loved Cyrano,” he said. “I had really always thought about it from the perspective of being an actor. It was one of those parts that I had always wanted to play or hoped that I would play as I got older, so I had never thought about it as a director — but why not.”
This Cyrano was meant to be a small-cast version, with only a few actors playing multiple parts. This was a conceit that O’Connell knew well thanks to his work on small-cast Shakespeare productions.
“That’s become more in vogue in the last few years, and I think it’s really fun and highly theatrical,” O’Connell said. “So I’m always game for trying to make the impossible possible with a big sprawling play. I was very into the idea.”
O’Connell was given a script by the theater company’s artistic director, but he thought the proposed version of the classic play was too stripped down. It was only built for three actors, was thin on details and would run barely an hour.
“It didn’t feel like it had a body to carry a full production,” he said. “We’d be better off using a script that is built for the standard 20 or 30 characters and just saying, ‘All right how many actors do we want to do it with?’ And then maybe I can double, triple and quadruple cast people in such a way that we can keep the numbers down in terms of bodies on stage, but we can still have all the events and things.”
The theater company offered up the idea of a new adaptation for a relatively smaller number of actors — more than three, but not nearly as many as the original calls for. O’Connell was starting to get hooked, but time was not on his side.
“This was in August of 2017 that she and I were talking about this, and this was for a production that was supposed to be running in late January, early February of 2018,” he said with a laugh. “So it was just a few months to put the whole thing together. It’s very ambitious to get a brand-new script in that amount of time. She was like, ‘Well, what about you? Would you want to write one?’ It was a wonderful thing to have dropped in my lap, but by the same token, it was really daunting. It’s a tall order. I expressed that to her, and she said, ‘Well, what if you collaborated with a co-writer?'”
The co-writer that was suggested was Withers, a personal friend of O’Connell’s, and now the tea leaves seemed perfectly aligned.
“She had no idea that I knew Brenda, much less that Brenda and I had been friends for about 18 years,” O’Connell said. “We’re very, very close friends who really admired each other’s work. She’s also an actor — a great actor — and a great writer, and she directs. We worked together many years ago as actors, but ever since we’ve been looking for projects to do together. But for the most part we’ve just been friends and supporting each other’s work and fans of each other’s work, so it was delightful to hear that she thought we might make a good pair as writers.”
O’Connell said that, despite the difficult timeline, they were up for the challenge, and he was truly excited at the idea of working with his new co-writer.
“It was something about the idea that even though it was so impossible seeming and the odds were against us and it’s going to be crazy trying to do this on this timeline, I was excited about the prospect of making something with Brenda,” he said.
Another draw? The chance to play Cyrano in his own Cyrano.
“I do a lot of different things as an actor,” O’Connell said. “I’ve done a lot more Shakespeare in my professional life than maybe anything else, at least until recently, and whenever people say, well, make your list of bucket roles or things you’d like to do. For me, it’s usually this handful of really epic Shakespearean characters and Cyrano. Cyrano was always in the mix. It was just a part I had always wanted to play, so I’ve always had a great affinity for the story and for various versions of the story. … I never imagined I would be playing a version I co-wrote.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Cyrano, co-written by Jason O’Connell and Brenda Withers, plays through Oct. 13 at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
