“An artistic masterpiece in every way, Cutting Ball Theatre’s modern interpretation of the classic, yet rarely staged, Pelleas and Melisande, conquers a small theater with feats of innovative staging and energetic acting.”
-Harmony Wheeler
BroadwayWorld.com
Photos by Rob Melrose
“We’ve come to expect rare revivals of 20th-century plays, original translations from the French and new, experimental works from Cutting Ball Theater, and the small company’s latest effort does not disappoint…[Playwright Maurice] Maeterlinck’s plays… are laden with portents that hint at a shadowy reality — a sense of fate or inevitability — on the periphery of our human perception. [Director Rob] Melrose and colleagues have captured all that, and more, in this mesmerizing production…Performed without an intermission, the play casts a dreamy, magical spell.”
–Jean Schiffman
San Francisco Examiner
“Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelleas & Melisande shimmers like a fairy tale, confounds rational expectations and yet somehow remains engrossing in the Cutting Ball Theater production…All of that is a testament to director Rob Melrose’s crisp translation (just out in the latest volume from Exit Press) and his elegant stagings. …[Pelleas & Melisande is] a sweet pleasure.”
-Robert Hurwitt
San Francisco Chronicle
PELLEAS & MELISANDE
Rob Melrose
PELLEAS & MELISANDE
by Maurice Maeterlinck
in a new translation by Rob Melrose
The Cutting Ball Theater
Rob Melrose, Artistic Director
October 21 - November 27, 2011
Directed by Rob Melrose
Set Design by Michael Locher
Costume Design by Raquel Barreto
Lighting Design by York Kennedy
Original Music / Sound Design by Cliff Caruthers
Video Design by Wesley Cabral
Choreography by Laura Arrington
Dramaturgy by Bennett Fisher
Voice and Speech Consulting by Lynne Soffer
Production Stage Management by Jocelyn A. Thomson
Assistant Directed by Annie Paladino
Cast
| Melisande | Caitlyn Louchard |
| Pelleas | Joshua Schell |
| Golaud | Derek Fischer |
| Arkel & Porter | Paul Gerrior |
| Genevieve / Old Servant | Gwyneth Richards |
| Doctor | Bennett Fisher |
| Servant | Brittany Kilcoyne McGregor |
| Servant | Carla Pauli |
| Servant / Ynoild | Jessica Jade Rudholm |
Director • Translator • Playwright
“[Caitlyn] Louchard’s Melisande has a scraped-raw vulnerability that makes her both hard to watch and impossible to look away from…Derek Fisher is marvelous and terrifying as Golaud…Without the aid of elaborate sets, using only the bodies of the actors, [director Rob] Melrose and the Cutting Ball create the high tower window, the massive gates, the abyssal galleries beneath the castle, the sea caves—narrow interior spaces for the text to play hide and seek, now in, now out of the light; now you see it, now you don’t.”
– Marianne Moore
Zyzzyva
Rob Melrose © 2013