Tragedy on the seedy side of town

Theater audiences are most accustomed to tragedies involving people of royal birth who utter exquisitely wrought Shakespearean phrases about life, death and betrayal. "Sainte-Carmen of the Main," the first production of the University Theatre's 2002-2003 season, is a contemporary tragedy set in Montreal's run-down entertainment district. Its heroine is a country and western singer idolized by the hookers, junkies and feather-boaed drag queens at the Rodeo bar where she performs. When these people speak they sound much more like Eminem than Shakespeare.

All that makes the occurrences on the Main no less tragic, says director Dr. Robert Dillon Jr.

"The play says nobility is possible in all human beings."

"Sainte-Carmen" opens Sept. 27 at the Rose Theatre.

As the play begins, Carmen has just returned from a pilgrimage to Nashville. "Our saints don't go to Mecca or Jerusalem," Dillon says. "They go to Nashville or Hollywood."

There she learned to yodel and wrote new songs loved by most people -- but not everyone -- on the Main. These are not somebody else's ersatz country and western songs about cowboys on white horses and Tennessee moons but songs that tell the truth about the people she knows on the Main. She makes them see themselves. But telling the truth can be dangerous.

Dillon is aiming at a Nietzchean concept of tragedy in this production, the idea that tragedy requires people who won't compromise. "People who are not willing to compromise are not going to live long," Dillon says.

Everybody who survives has compromised in some way, he says. "We turn compromise into an art form."

Carmen, like many tragic figures in history, refuses to give in.

Scenic designer C. Kenneth Cole has devised a stark set composed of vertical and horizontal pipes that evoke the Main without pinning the play -- first produced in the 1970s and originally in French -- to a time and place.

"Very early on we discussed that this was a play about ideas -- not specific locations,"Cole said. "... Realistically, you don't have choruses of people speaking together."

He said many design ideas were rejected before arriving at this one. All the designs began as 3-D renderings.

Colorful costumes by Rhonda Weller-Stilson and exaggerated characters like Harelip, Toothpick and Rose Beef add to the sense of surrealism.

"If you are grounded in realism, this play ought to shake you up right off," Dillon says.

The music in the play is by Robin and Linda Williams, best known for their performances on "A Prairie Home Companion." It's country music with an edge.

"Sainte-Carmen" actually follows the form of Greek tragedy rather than the Elizabethan model. A chorus composed of street people speaks with some of the characters and keeps the audience informed about the Main. The villains always enter stage left, the characters always appear in trios and the murder and mayhem all occur offstage.

Dillon's view is that "Sainte-Carmen" is more opera -- the modern equivalent of Greek tragedy -- or dance than drama.

If plays were rated, this one probably would be PG-13. Dillon's 10-year-old daughter won't be seeing it, primarily because the language is occasionally profane.

That language is not in the play to shock, though it will have that effect on some. It's there because these characters can't talk any other way.

"The bad language and bad lives are not celebrated," Dillon says. "What's celebrated is the nobility of humanity."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

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