Reading of “Interludes of the Heart”a play by Robert Blumenfeld
directed by Leslie Kinkaid Burby
with
Nat Cassidy* as Marcel Proust
Flo Ankah* as Celeste Albaret
Scot Charles Anderson* as The Student
Jeffrey Hardy* as Actor 1
Kieran Mulcare* as Actor 2
Ilinca Tuvene as Actor 3
Cameron Ring as Actor 4
Joe Burby* (stage directions)
16 Gramercy Park South
New York, NY 10003
In Interludes of the Heart the great writer Marcel Proust struggles to stave off death so he can complete his masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). His housekeeper Céleste Albaret ministers to his every need, and his brother Robert, a physician, urges him to go to a hospital, but he refuses. The play goes back and forth in time, as Proust relives some of his past; and an American graduate student interviews Céleste near the end of her own life. We meet the writer André Gide, a friend and rival of Proust; the diplomat Paul Morand and his wife, the Rumanian Princess Soutzo; Count Robert de Montesquiou, a poet and aesthete; and Alfred Agostinelli, with whom Proust was in love. Proust thought that a work of art should be understood without reference to the author’s life. In Proust’s case it has been easy to confuse author and the first-person Narrator, because the book contains autobiographical elements. However, the aspiring writer who is the Narrator of In Search of Lost Time is not Marcel Proust, any more than the character in my play (who says and does things Proust said and did), is Proust.
* Appearing courtesy of Actor’s Equity Association