The French Revolution as Greek Tragedy: A Conversation About A Tale of Two Cities

When brainstorming the feature piece for the playbill for A Tale of Two Cities, I knew I wanted to speak to two of the brilliant minds behind this adaptation — Director Leora Morris and Playwright Brendan Pelsue. I sent them the questions I’d come up with, intending for them to send me their answers, then I’d work it into an article like I usually do. Leora emailed back, asking if she could instead use the questions to spark a conversation between her and Brendan. What follows below is the entirety of that incredible conversation, exclusive to the Alliance Theatre Blog. – Ashley Elliott

Director Leora Morris: Hi, Brendan.  

Playwright Brendan Pelsue: Hi, Leora. 

Leora: Hello. Here we go.   

Brendan: Yes, yes we do. 

Leora: Before you began this process of adapting A Tale of Two Cities, what was your relationship to the story? 

Brendan: I had read it in high school. In France, actually, where I was doing an exchange. And after we read it, we walked all around Paris to look at sites related to the Revolution. And I really enjoyed it at the time but had not thought about it much since. 

Leora: When you read it as a high school student, do you remember what your impressions were of the story? Or what stood out to you about the themes, characters, events, or language? 

Brendan: Yes. I remember the drama of the language being quite exciting. [...] It was really a page turner once it got going. And I remember being quite bored by the romance sequences, though whether that has to do with Dickens or with me at fourteen, I don’t know. I was much more connected to the love story in Great Expectations, which we read that same year. 

Leora: So fast forward 20 years or so to when the Alliance asked you to adapt it – what made you feel compelled to return to it, and what were your first questions when you started to think about the adaptation? 

Brendan: Great question. I think, when I saw the list of books the Alliance was considering working with for its remix program, some unconscious part of my brain new that A Tale of Two Cities could be right for what the initiative was trying to do – and for high school audiences and for our political moment. So I cracked open the book again, and I was struck not only by Dickens narrative power – the story really moves like a bunch of freight trains – but also about how the story was asking us to think about questions of violence and justice and revenge in a way that I don’t quite think of as a trait in Dickens. People in his other novels are horribly exploited and the world is unjust, yes, but there is not that sense that it is all going to burn down in violent conflagration. What I found in A Tale of Two Cities were questions similar to those found in Greek Tragedy: What do we with the fact that wrongs are done to us (or done in the world) that make us (a general us) want to seek violent revenge – that there are things for which violence seems like the only possible redress? How do we deal with the fact that history has piled up all these injustices? Can we ever start from scratch? What’s exciting and what’s terrifying about revolution? 

Which is another way of saying, the story of the French Revolution felt scarily and, from an artistic perspective, excitingly close to our moment, and the fact that Dickens was approach this territory with a kind of Greek, tragic, clear-sightedness (though also with all his usual coincidences and embroidery) felt bold and energizing in ways I never would have clocked when I read the novel back in high school. 

Leora: I just want to keep asking you questions because this is so rich! You could have chosen to tell this story in so many different ways – but you very intentionally created an ensemble of 8 actors that play many different characters. While doubling is not an uncommon theatrical convention, here you are taking advantage of the way theatre can allow us to layer different characters onto one body. Can you talk about how this doubling is at work in the play? What it reveals, challenges, or invites us to consider? 

Brendan: Indeed, I can. And I think there are a few answers to the question – aesthetic, philosophical, practical. 

When I teach playwriting, I also try to get my students to see theater as an art form with gifts and limits – it embodies, it’s durational, it’s live – that make it different from film, or novels, or painting. To me, some of the most exciting plays use theater’s limits as gifts. And since I knew that I was not writing the major motion picture version of this story [...], I started to think about how telling the story with a limited number of actors – of human bodies – could be useful. 

Then I started thinking about how doubling is already woven into Dicken’s story [...] and this felt theatrical to me. And as I dug deeper, I began to feel like the entire 18th century – in England and in France – was theatrical: You were born into a particular role (peasant, say, or Marquis, King, or bourgeois) and that was pretty much where you stayed. Society cast you in a role through the accident of your birth, and from there you negotiated the given circumstances, which is like acting. And this somehow made me think about an idea from the philosopher John Rawls, who talks in his book On Justice about the idea of a veil of ignorance, which is basically that in a good society you would ask yourself: If you could [re-roll the dice and] be born into any position in a society (if there were a 99% chance you would be a French peasant and a 0.001% chance you could be a French king), would you take the risk? 

And it felt like there was, somehow, a nexus between all these things that led to doubling as it works in this particular version of the story. 

Also, actually, there are some very strange passages in the book where Dickens talks about the transmigration of souls (he is more spiritual and weirder than we sometimes imagine him to be) and this made me wonder if there was something about a kind of multiplicity of identities – a fluid idea of self – that was important to this telling. 

Leora: What I really admire about this choice and the way it works in the adaptation it that it allows [us] to ask these big questions about fate, social mobility, the spectrum of wealth to poverty, and the role of the individual in impacting the course of history (and more) without translocating it in time and space. It’s not [set] in contemporary Atlanta, but it feels to me like it has the potential to speak directly to Atlantans about the experience of being born, growing up, or living here – and into our current time. Did you think about Atlanta specifically when working on it? Did you take the city and its landscape or history into consideration at all? 

Brendan: I would say I had to approach the idea of Atlanta somewhat obliquely while writing the play. I am not from Atlanta – I grew up in New England – so I know the city’s history through school, reading, research, and conversations related to this piece, but it’s not something I carry with me every day. But I do think I thought a great deal about the state of the country and of the world while writing the piece. And I think my greatest aspiration was that the material for the piece would act as a kind of kaleidoscope – that people from many cities with many specific histories could which this story set in Paris and think, “Oh, that’s like where I live!” Until they had a moment where they thought, “Oh, that is not like where I live.” Because I think on some level it’s that combination of alienation and identification that is the reason to keep returning to a “classic,” whatever that is. It’s not that the piece imparts some wisdom, that people in the past knew more than we did – they didn’t. It’s that by seeing how this vision of the world, this history, this way of imagining what it is interacts with our own we are forced to ask ourselves: What is our vision of the world, of history, of what it is to be a human being? We have to encounter it actively to encounter it all. And that, to me, is always exciting. 

I suppose also, from an outsider’s perspective, there is something epic about Atlanta. And something that has to do deeply with America. It’s the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. It’s a city that was burned to the ground in the Civil War. A city that has seen disasters and nurtured ideas that shape the world – sort of like Paris. Maybe that was somewhere deep in my mind – though, like I said, I really have an outsider’s lens on those histories, and would not want to claim I was speaking for them or about them in this adaptation. 

Leora: I mean, interestingly, Dickens was also an outsider. He lived in London but he was born in 1812 and [was] writing about a London and a Paris that existed before his life and about events he did not experience or witness. So there’s also this kaleidoscopic conversation happening among all of you. You, from New England now, adapting a text by a British novelist from the 19th century, writing about a revolution in another city in the 18th century. I’m sure we feel those ripples or fractals at play somehow. And I’m sure people who know this history or this book will have a particular experience, but as someone who really hadn’t studied the French Revolution or read this book before working on this play, I’m struck by the fact that it’s also totally awesome to just show up and encounter the play as its entirely own thing. For someone with no relationship to the source material or events, is there anything specific you hope they take away from the experience?  

Brendan: Yes! No preparatory reading or knowledge required to enjoy the show! I suppose I have been talking about the threads that were at work in my own imagination more than what I am hoping an audience receives. 

My hope for anyone coming to the play is, first, that they just have that edge-of-your-seat feeling of a really good yarn. Dickens is amazing at that, and it was a privilege to work with his narrative gifts. And then I hope they leave thinking, Whoa, what was all that? And talking to their neighbor about why the events of the story turned out the way they did, if it all could have been different, even chewing over echoes and differences with our current moment. 

What I am in no way interested in doing is providing a kind of history lesson on 18th century France. This is not the kind of show where you feel like you could pass a test afterwards. It’s a show where you get swept along. Or so I hope. 

Leora: Okay, great. I want to pick up on that and ask you to unpack that in a different way. What are five adjectives you think people probably think of when they think theatrical production of A Tale of Two Cities that don’t apply to this production, and five adjectives that you hope [they] really do. 

Brendan: Ooh. Okay, adjectives that don’t apply: Fusty, hard to follow, quaint, British, breeches (actually a noun). Five adjectives that do: Scary, funny, argumentative, gripping, spiritual. 

Leora: Nice. I was wondering if “goofy” was going to make the cut. Okay, last question for you. (Maybe.) You made a bunch of really specific offers in the script about the material/items in the world, among other things, a mirror, a giant ball of yarn, a guillotine, a moon. As the creative team has gone through the process of creating the design for the show, what has surprised you about the ways in which these offers you made have been taken up or transformed? 

Brendan: Mostly I would say I am so happy about how eagerly and beautifully the design team has tackled these propositions I’ve made in the script. One of the great joys of being a playwright is that I get to imagine things in the visual world, in the aural world, in the world of clothes, and architecture, and light, and then have people with capacities far beyond my own find containers for these impulses that I never could have anticipated. 

But I would say, specifically, I have been really excited by the way the team has been inventing a kind of cosmos, a small planet or universe, in which it feels like the story is told. You’re so rigorous in getting us all to attend to what the script is asking, and I think we can really see that in this design that feels both estranging and recognizable – that creates a planet we all visit, which in the way is always the experience of telling and retelling a story. 

Leora: Amazing; thank you, Brendan. I’m wondering if (a) there’s a detail from the design that you think audiences would appreciate having a heads up about, or knowing to look out for, and then (b) if there’s anything about my work on this show as a director that would open up anything for the audience in a useful way, before they watch it? 

Brendan: For design – there is a moon. I love the moon, and I love being outdoors, and I love when theater does not forget there is a world beyond our making. And I would love to invite audiences to share that excitement with me. 

For you, Leora, I guess I am curious about two things. (a) How your understanding of the piece, both its themes but also its container, has changed for you as you’ve worked on it, and (b) how you think of the play as relating to Atlanta (a city you know better than I) and to our current moment, globally? Also, which parts are most fun? 

Leora: I’m going to start with the most fun, although it’s a bit theoretical because we haven’t started rehearsals yet [at the time of this interview]. But, for me, a lot of the moments of theatrical fun (the moments where we get to take pleasure and have fun with the magic of theatre) are also moments where the world is actually most menacing or dread-filled or dangerous for the characters [...] and then there’s also the moments of just outright silliness. 

In terms of my growing understanding of the piece, I very much relate to your description of the power of returning to a story again and again, and I feel like, as this development process has unfolded, what’s been happening in the world at any given moment has surfaced different threads of the play in different ways, or with a different kind of urgency. At one point the text mentions wars, plagues, tyrants, violence in the streets, and love … and as the months have gone by, each one of those things has really become the container in which we are all living our lives, the beast we must all be reckoning with, or the primary force at work inside us as individuals. It’s been a valuable and terrifying reminder that even the things that don’t feel possible or likely in our time and place in history are waiting right there and could come back at any time (and also, probably, for someone, somewhere else in the world, those things – and others – are happening). I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the sentence “the lip of history” and this idea that every moment spills into the next one.  

In building the container [of the story], I was surprised to discover how fixed we needed the elements of the world to be. These actors are dealing with the theatrical hand the production has dealt. They are alive inside this playground that they didn’t create but exist in. And while they take characters on and off in a way that we don’t get to in our real lives, those garments and fates go on and off within a very prescribed (and strange) world. And there’s something about the strangeness of the theatrical space that reminds me that our world seems like the only way a world could be .. but it leaves me wondering how much more would be possible if one thing in one "lip of history” moment had gone differently. How the chain reaction of history could have (and could still) lead us somewhere we can’t even imagine or recognize. That all sounds very Charles Darnay. 

In terms of Atlanta, I was also an outsider when I moved here. I arrived here and fell in love with its aliveness, its heart, the pulse of the city, its incredible diversity. And also wondered at its extremes, and its many, many contradictions. Now I am back to being a visitor to and not a citizen of this city, but I hope this production invites citizens of Atlanta to bring all the many (contradicting) parts of themselves and potentially contradicting views of their city to the story and see what it can reveal.  

Last thing, Brendan. On this day, what’s one line of text that’s really in your head/heart? 

Brendan: I was thinking about the line about Louis’s transformation from king, to citizen, to prisoner, to murdered corpse. I am not sure why. You?

Leora: “The man who began life as heir to the throne looks out at his people and realizes he is like them – he can suffer.” I think for me, it’s still “the lip of history.” I love that there’s no subject in this sentence. It’s a naming of something so big we don’t even get located inside it as individuals. 

Learn more about A Tale of Two Cities.