By Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Suzanne Sprague, Reporter: Just a few days before tonight's opening, director Carl Forsman is still having trouble locating the women's dressing room in the underground labyrinth of Southern Methodist University's theater department.
Carl Forsman, Director: Hello, Oh my God, it took me forever to find you guys.
Sprague: After several years directing professional theater in New York City, Forsman is returning to a university stage for the Meadows School's production of the 18th century romantic farce "Successful Strategies."
Forsman: This playwright, Marivaux, has long been a favorite of mine for years and years and years. I've always wanted to do a Marivaux play and this is the first opportunity I've had to do one the right way. It deserves to be done with the kind of energy, design and element that we have here at Meadows.
[Actors in the play rehearsing]: Man: Only my respect for you is making me contain my anger. Woman: Anger! May I ask what you have to be angry about? Is it the love you feel for me? I can do nothing about it. It is not a crime to seem lovable to you.
Sprague: Although rife with sarcasm, the play also drips with flirtatious banter and overall, it marks a departure for its 32-year-old director, who usually works with 20th century plays by writers like Thorton Wilder...
Forsman: ...writers who wrote out of a kind of beautiful, seasoned intellectual naivete and who brought to their work a kind of unabashed emotionalism that wasn't sentimental, but was deeply felt and earnest.
Sprague: Forsman calls them "sincere," a word he doesn't use very often to describe what is commonly performed on the New York stage today.
Forsman: At a certain point in our history, cynicism and revolution and sheik got linked. God bless him, but James Dean may have really screwed us. And I'm not very OK with that idea. I think that cynicism is a very dangerous facet of American culture, of Western culture now and one of our worst exports.
Sprague: So three years ago, Forsman helped launch Keen Company in New York, as he says, to regain the high ground for sophistication in theater. He says some critics find his approach silly and na ve, but he's won acclaim for his direction of John Van Druten's "The Voice of the Turtle" and the American premiere of Conor MacPherson's "The Good Thief." Prior to working in New York, Forsman taught at Vermont's Middlebury College, where he studied theater in the early 1990's. But despite his return to the college stage at SMU, Forsman says he's not ready to pursue academia full-time.
Forsman: I'm not going to go teach permanently right now, not for a long time. Not that I don't love teaching, because I do, I mean my lifestyle here is so invigorating and so refreshing, but somebody's got to stay in New York and do it. If I just do it, it doesn't mean anything, but if a couple hundred of us who do it care, I hope the theater will be better off than the way we found it.
Sprague: Carl Forsman, artistic director of the Keen Company in New York City, is in Dallas to direct SMU's production of "Successful Strategies." The show opens tonight at the University's Greer Garson Theater and continues through Sunday. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
Marivaux's "Successful Strategies" is on stage through March 2nd at the Greer Garson Theatre on the SMU Campus. Tickets are $6-$15. For more information, call the Meadows Ticket Office at (214) 768-2787. And to contact Suzanne Sprague, please send emails to ssprague@kera.org.