Events

My new play, Large Red Interior, will be given its first public reading on Saturday, March 12th, 2011 at 2:00 PM in the Santa Ana Theatre of La Biblioteca. I am thrilled that the reading is coming together only two months after I have finished writing this drama about Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and the model Lydia Delectorskaya. Lydia becomes the apex of a triangle involving these two modern masters, and the storyline takes place during the last 10 years of Matisse’s life. The reading features Jim Newell as Matisse, Bill Pearlman as Picasso, Clara Dunham as Lydia, and Seth Sharp as Lydia’s fiancé, Aaron. This highly talented cast was brought together by Player’s Workshop director Michael Gottlieb. Although this is only a reading, a modest donation may be requested to help support the library’s many excellent programs.

Large Red Interior takes a close look at the psychological and emotional dimensions of the bond between artist and model. Specifically, the play is an exploration of the relationship between Henri Matisse and Lydia Delectorskaya, his model and assistant during the last 10 years of his life, when he was creating his paper cutouts and going through a crisis caused by the decline of his creative powers. His creativity is revived by Lydia's inspiration as well as his rivalry with Pablo Picasso, Matisse's polar opposite as an artist and a man. Matisse and Picasso met briefly in life but they never meet in the play; however, they are both very much on each other's minds. They exchange paintings and exhibit their work together, and are a bit obsessed with the beautiful and mysterious Lydia, Matisse as a father-figure and Picasso as a possible lover. Lydia, however, remains faithful to her fiancé Aaron Kaufman, another Russian emigré, but both painters suspect that she has been the lover of the other, and this belief only intensifies their rivalry. Lydia is attracted by Picasso’s sexual magnetism,  and although Picasso tries various strategies to seduce her in order to triumph over Matisse she manages to resist him and conceals her feelings about him from Matisse. Lydia’s love for Matisse is strictly platonic, and that’s what she receives from him in return. She has been abused in the past while living in Russia and needs more than anything his old man’s kindness and gentleness. Nevertheless, Picasso’s allure is very powerful and she is strongly tempted to give in. But Lydia has been toughened by hardship and keeps Picasso at bay and his treatment of her a secret until the last scene of the play when she reveals the truth to Aaron, her fiancé, on the day of Matisse's funeral.

I will be directing the actors and I am very eager to hear how the language sounds when it is brought to life by a talented cast. While working on a play, one hears the characters’ voices in one’s soul and inner ear, as it were, but it is a very different thing to hear them in the voices of living actors. I am also keenly interested in the audience response to my script. As with any new work for the stage, it must be tried and tested, its value proven in the crucible of performance.

It is a well known fact that actors need a live audience to bring out their best work. Therefore, the public is warmly welcome to attend this exciting theatrical event, which will be presented in a concert format. Local directors are also being invited to attend so that they may have an opportunity to view the play and consider it for a fully staged production.

Mark Twain famously said that good work writes itself and that is how I felt while writing this play, that I was being used as a conduit, or that I was like a prophet who hears a voice instructing him in what he must do or write. The script just took hold of me, lifted me up like a whirlwind or embraced me like an angelic muse, and I could not think clearly of anything else until I had finished it. I hope it is worthy of those profound and irresistible forces, wherever they may come from.

Local residents may recall Fugue for a Man and a Woman, my concert piece about the isolation and emptiness of a failed marriage, which was given a public reading last year by BC May and Phoebe Grayson in the Sala Quetzal. The play has been staged in Montreal and Connecticut and has just been published in the literary Magazine of Boston College. I have also given several readings from Dante’s Inferno at La Biblioteca, and all of these readings, I am happy to say, have been very well received.

As a visual artist, I have been greatly influenced by the work of Matisse and Gauguin and have begun calling myself  “ a poet of light and color.” Being a late-booming painter in the European tradition has given me many insights into the soul and psychology of Matisse, who experienced a creative crisis late in life after a major illness and the subsequent surgery left him unable to paint in oils as he had always done and forced him to find new ways to express himself.

Some of my oil paintings are currently on exhibit at Gallery Izamal on Mesones, where I am a guest artist. My art work has been shown in the US and Canada, and locally I have had two solo shows, at the Café de la Luz and at La Biblioteca.I am the author of Dear Dante, a novel, Anxious Love and Adriana’s Eyes, short story collections, as well as 100 Love Sonnets, available in San Miguel at El Tecolote, La Deriva, and Casa de Papel, or in Kindle editions from Amazon. For more information, please visit www.anthonymaulucci.com