"The Play Chose Me!"
3/19/2009
Professor Laura Tesman chose to become the undergraduate deputy chair at Brooklyn College’s Theater Department last fall, after teaching for seven years she at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where she obtained her PhD in Theater and had been granted tenured.
"Although the program here is much larger than in Colorado," she says, "I also found Brooklyn College’s diversity and range of experiences highly stimulating."
She was ready for the new challenge, she says, and felt an instant connection to the "faculty and students" here. But, Tesman insists, she didn’t choose to direct Moliere’s The Learned Ladies.
"The play chose me," Tesman admits, after department chair Tom Bullard who asked her to direct the play when a previously scheduled director was unavailable. "This play is different from Moliere’s other comedies because it is a character study and we can relate to these people."
Tesman re-read it and found herself instantly drawn to its "wonderful, though sometimes absurd, characters." In it, lovebirds Henriette and Clitandre must overcome the former’s mother (Philaminte) opposition to their marriage despite the support of her father and uncle, whose opinions matter little. Philaminte, together with her other daughter and sister ("the learned ladies"), conspire to marry her to Trissotin, a pompous though mediocre scholar and poet whose vapid knowledge they praise and find more worthy of Henriette. It’s a world out of order, according to Tesman – men are fickle and weak, women are petty and pretentious.
"I can relate to the learned ladies somewhat," Says Tesman, whose dissertation was about late 19th-, early 20th-century female playwrights. "And when I laugh at them, I’m laughing at myself."
The preoccupations of the ‘learned ladies’ of the play, in fact, reminded Tesman of her own intellectual obsessions at the time she was finishing her masters in English and European Renaissance Drama at the University of Warwick in England.
In the end, love, humility, truth and balance of life’s pleasures win the day.
