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ClassicsFest 2010: ‘Les Femmes Savants/The Learned Ladies’

As ClassicsFest 2010 unspools, we’ll be featuring insights from the project initiators about what inspired them to choose their plays and their experience of working on them.

Les Femmes Savantes
by Molière

In the dinosaur age after World War II, I attended a performance at the Comédie Française in which an actor returned to the House of Molière in the role of Alceste. When he entered the audience stood and yelled. He stood still for what seemed like an eternity. Then he wept. The audience wept. And when he finally began to speak he had lost his voice. Who was this author that had such an effect on the public? Sixty years later I chose to do Les Femmes Savantes (The Learned Ladies) because it is Molière’s last great verse play, the one he felt was his most “finished” work, and because it is the only major play of his which I have never seen. More importantly, because my wife, Angela Paton, and my daughter-in-law, Gigi Bermingham, wanted to do a play together.

– Robert Goldsby, for Angela Paton, Project Initiator

The Learned Ladies plays:
July 13, 14, 15 at 8pm

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