Characters

[The Characters - other than Marcel - are played by four actors who appear dressed in an amorphous manner, similar to above,
wearing Classical French Theater Masks, similar to the following]

Setting

a largely bare stage with cork walls; a chair and a bed; three plasma monitors, seeming to float in space; a banner which depicts part of an early French theater

The play takes place in the mind of a middle-aged man named Marcel. It’s a representation of his memories of his life when he was in love with a young woman named Albertine, along with his reflections on those memories.

The audience experiences images relating to Marcel's memories from three monitors and from the actions and words of  the other characters.

The monitors are framed as a window (in which appear images that reflect the physical scene about which Marcel is thinking, e.g., a salon, a beach, etc.); as a painting (in which appear images of period paintings that relate to what Marcel is experiencing); and as a mirror (in which, alternately, appear images of the person he was at the age about which he is reflecting and the manuscript which will become the book he will create from his memories; the mirror images are of Marcel Proust at different ages and of the manuscript which would become part of In Search of Lost Time).

The identity of the characters other than Marcel is revealed by reference or context, and they appear indistinct because they are a product of memory.

Chair, bed, and banner

Monitors

Prologue

[Marcel appears in the bed, dimly lit]

 [monitors appear as above (window and painting black)]

Marcel:

 [from offstage]

It’s the story of a life … and a love ... about how people embody time … how they occupy a place where they touch – simultaneously – the epochs through which they’ve lived.

Is it “really like that” ? Is what you'll see and hear like what you find within yourself ?

[pause]

Perhaps there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theater, where everyone has his own separate seat, but there is, but a single stage ...
 

 [lights fade]

 [End of Prologue]

Scene One

[Music:  Debussy – Prélude (possibly Modere) – begins]
 

 [after a brief pause, Other Girl and Middle-Aged Man are revealed behind Marcel]

 Other Girl
[Gilberte]

He’s the uncle of a girl in a class a way below mine, the famous ‘Albertine.’ She’s certain to be dreadfully ‘fast’ when she’s older, but just now she’s the quaintest spectacle.

 Middle-Aged Man:
[Swann]

Gilberte is amazing, this daughter of mine. She knows everyone.

 Other Girl:
[Gilberte]

I don’t really know her. I only used to see her going about. I’d hear them calling ‘Albertine’ ... ‘Albertine’ ...  But I do know her aunt, Mme. Bontemps. I don’t like her much either.

 [pause]

 [Girl and Middle-Aged Woman appear]

 Middle-Aged Woman:
[Mme Bontemps]

My niece Albertine is just like me. You’ve no idea how insolent she is. Yesterday, do you know what she said to the wife of the Under Secretary of State for Finance who told us she knew nothing at all about cooking?

Girl
[Albertine]

You ought to know all about it; your father was a scullion.

 Middle-Aged Woman:
[Mme Bontemps]

Straight out like that!  And she didn’t give me a word of warning, the little minx; she’s as cunning as a monkey.

Marcel:
[musing]

Sometimes the different periods of our life overlap.

When I was a boy, there was a scene with my family because, being in the throes of love for Gilberte, I wouldn’t accompany them to a dinner at which the Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine.

She was still very young then, hardly more than a child.

[pause]

We scornfully decline, because of one whom we then love and who will some day matter little, to see another who is of no account today, but whom we will love tomorrow. Had we consented to see her, perhaps we’d have loved her a little sooner. And she’d have put an end to our then-present sufferings ... bringing, of course, others in their place...

 [pause]

 [lights dim briefly, then brighten]

Marcel:

Anyway, I'd finally arrived at a state of almost complete indifference to Gilberte by the time I went on holiday with my grandmother at Balbec, on the Normandy coast. My former love lasted no longer than things do in a dream after one has awakened. At Balbec my old habits were no longer there to keep it alive, and a strange bed couldn’t sustain the fancies upon which my love for Gilberte had fed.

My journey was like the first outing of a convalescent who needed only that to convince himself that he was cured.

 [pause]

At Balbec, all the young women seemed lovely to me. I was passing through one of those periods of youth, in which, having no one definite love, at all times and in all places one desires, one seeks, indeed, one sees only Beauty.

All around me at Balbec - on the beach, in the Casino, at the ice cream shop – there were beautiful women.

I was too shy to go anywhere near them, of course. Yet, I was still happy.

I was like a child born in a prison, who having always supposed that people can only digest dry bread, has learned suddenly about peaches, apricots, grapes – that they aren’t just decorations of the countryside, but are delicious food. Even if he isn’t able to pluck those tempting fruits, the world still seems a better place, and existence in it more pleasant.

A desire appears more attractive when we know that outside ourselves there’s a reality which conforms to it, even if, for us, it’s not to be realized.

So from the day I first understood that the pretty girls who went past me on the boardwalk might be kissed, I became curious about their souls. And the universe seemed more interesting.

 [pause]

Then, it happened.

 I was just hanging about in front of the Grand Hotel, waiting for my grandmother to go to dinner, when I saw, projected against the background of the sea, five or six young girls coming towards me on the boardwalk.

These girls were moving with a mastery over their limbs which comes from the union of perfect bodily condition with contempt for the rest of humanity. They were advancing straight ahead, without hesitation, performing exactly the movements that they wished to perform, each of their members in full independence of all the rest.

And although I was soon to learn that they were all of respectable middle-class families, they appeared to me at first as if they might be the girl friends of professional boxers or cyclists.

[pause]

Passion can - more or less - be instantaneous.

Let but a single feature—the little by which one distinguishes a woman seen from afar or from behind— let such enable us to project the form of beauty before our eyes, and our heart beats fast and we hasten in pursuit

As the little band of girls passed near me, I caught a smiling, sidelong glance from one of them, a dark girl with plump cheeks, who was wearing a polo cap.

Immediately I sensed that this look was aimed from the center of an unknown world into which the idea of what I was didn’t penetrate. If she’d seen me, what could I have represented to her? From the depths of what universe did she discern me?

In the dark shadows of the eyes of such a girl, there shines the ideas that she cherishes about the people and places she knows - that it is she who is looking your way, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, and her obscure and incessant will.

I’d never possess this girl if I didn’t also possess what was in those eyes. Consequently, it was her whole life that filled me with desire.

[looks vaguely into space]

I’ve often tried to recall how her name first sounded to me, when its form was still uncertain, when I’d not clearly distinguished it as designating one person rather than another. Vagueness and novelty are what we later find so moving when a name has become the first coherent sound that comes to our lips ... even before the idea of what time it is or of where we are ... almost before the word “I.”

It’s as though the person whom it names is more “us” than we are ourselves.

 [pause]

Today, it’s still her sparkling eyes that I see.

Separated from me by the time that’s elapsed since then, that first impression remains faint, but fervent in my memory.  It’s the impression of a face which I’ve many times since projected upon the cloud of the past to be able to say to myself of someone who was actually in my room ...

 [Boy is revealed]

Boy:
[Young Marcel]

It’s her!

Marcel:

I could see that she had a tiny beauty spot on her chin. I was told later that she’s called Albertine.

And even though, when the countless images I’ve since had of her are superimposed upon one another, and I can run through them all without losing my grasp of one and the same person ... still, the more recent images remain separate from that earlier one.

I can’t confer on her retrospectively an identity she didn’t have for me at the moment she first caught my eye.

That girl – the one with the plump cheeks and the polo cap, who stared at me so boldly, and by whom I hoped that, some day, I might be loved – strictly speaking ... I’ve never seen again ...

 [last images dissolve; lights and music fade]

 [End of Scene One]

Scene Two

 [music:  a different Debussy: Prèlude]

 [Young Man is revealed seated on the side of the bed]

 Marcel:

It was just an Autumn Sunday morning in Paris. But a simple change in weather can create the world and ourselves anew. As nature changes, we adapt our desires to harmonize with the new form of things. And that day, after a succession of mild days, there was a cold fog. At once, I was no longer the outward reaching - the centrifugal - being that one is on fine days. I was a man turned in on himself, a shivering Adam in quest of a sedentary Eve.

 [Old woman appears]

Old Woman
[Françoise]
[disdainfully]

Sir, Mlle Albertine is here.

[Young Woman is revealed, standing]

 Marcel:

And there she was -  smiling, silent, and plump, containing in the plenitude of her body, made ready so that I might continue living them, the days we’d spent together in that Balbec to which I had never since returned.

[muses]

Whenever we see someone with whom our relations have changed, it’s like a juxtaposition of two different periods. And there’s no need for a former mistress to call round to see us as a friend. All that’s required is the visit of someone we’ve known in a certain kind of life, and that this life had ceased for us, if only a week ago.

Albertine was like an enchantress offering me a mirror that reflected time, a time different than this misty afternoon.

And so too, she embodied the passage of time.

At Balbec, I’d always been surprised when I caught sight of Albertine, her appearance was so changeable. Now, she was scarcely recognizable. She’d changed over time.

Freed from the pink haze that had shrouded them then, her features had emerged in sharp relief.

There remained scarcely anything of the sheath in which Albertine had been enclosed and on the surface of which, at Balbec, her future outline had been barely visible.

At last, she had a face.

 [pause]

Albertine had returned to Paris earlier than usual that year. Typically, she didn’t arrive until the spring. So already disturbed by the storms beating down the first flowers, I didn’t distinguish, in the pleasure I felt, the return of Albertine from that of the fine weather.

It was enough just to be told that Albertine had called at my house for me to see her again like a rose flowering by the sea. And truly, I can’t say whether it was the desire for Balbec or for Albertine that took possession of me that afternoon.

Maybe my desire for her was just a lazy and incomplete way of possessing Balbec.

  [wryly]

I’ve often thought that it’s probably more reasonable to devote one’s life to women than to postage stamps ... even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to diversify, to have not only one woman, but several.

I regret that I didn’t have the sense to keep my collection of women as people keep their collections of old Italian glass ... never so complete that there isn’t room always for another, even rarer still. 

[pause]

 [musing] 

It was a long time since I’d last been with Albertine, and I knew nothing of her life during the periods she abstained from coming to see me. These often lasted for quite some time. Then, one day, in she would burst.

When she did, her visits left me little better informed as to what she might have been doing while she was gone. This was an interval which remained plunged in the darkness of a hidden life which my eyes, at that time, felt little anxiety to penetrate.

 [reflectively]

Girls change very rapidly at the age Albertine had reached. Her intelligence was now more in evidence. And there were other attractive novelties too. I sensed in this pretty girl something that was different in those lines which, in the look and the features of the face, express a person’s habitual volition.

It was as though something had broken down the resistances I’d come up against in Balbec.

I wasn’t in love with Albertine now. But maybe she could satisfy the fanciful desire which the change of weather had awakened in me.

 [pause]

At Balbec, Albertine had already possessed an assortment of expressions which reveal at once that one comes from a well-to-do family. And it was clear that she’d ceased to be a little girl when one day, to express her thanks for a present she said ...

Girl:
[Albertine]

 I’m quite overcome...

 Marcel:

This is an expression drawn from the social treasury. And it didn’t seem possible to me that Albertine’s natural environment could have supplied her with an expression like “distinguished”...

 Girl:
[Albertine]

He’s so distinguished...

 Marcel:

"Lapse of time” seemed to augur better still.

There appeared in Albertine, now, evidence of certain upheavals. Their nature was unknown to me, but they were sufficient to justify my hopes, when she observed, with the self-satisfaction of a person whose opinion is by no means to be despised ...

 Young Woman
[Albertine]

To my mind, that is the best thing that could possibly happen. I regard it as the best solution.

 Marcel:

This was so novel, so manifestly an alluvial deposit, that it led one to suspect capricious wanderings over ground hitherto unknown to her. So, on hearing...

 Young Woman:
[Albertine]

 To my mind...

Marcel:

 I drew Albertine towards me. And at ...

 Young Woman:
[Albertine]

  ... I regard...

 [Young Woman appears, more brightly lit, on the bed]

 Marcel:

I sat her down on my bed. Albertine was no longer as she had been; perhaps she might not act, might not react, in the same way as she had before...

 [music shifts gradually to the same Prèlude as in Scene One]

 [Marcel becomes more dimly lit]

 [Girl and Boy are revealed; Young Woman and Young Man disappear]

 ... on that late afternoon at Balbec...

[remembering]

 Albertine’s friends had gone on their separate ways, and at last I was alone with her on the boardwalk.

 Girl:
[Albertine]

You see, I’m wearing my hair now the way you like -- look at my ringlet. They all laugh at it and nobody knows who I’m doing it for. My aunt will laugh at me too. But I won’t tell her why, either.

 Marcel:

Albertine’s cheeks, which often appeared pale, now were flushed in a way that lighted them up, gave them that brightness of certain winter mornings when the stones sparkling in the sun seem to radiate joy.

I asked her if the report of her plans which I’d overheard was correct.

Girl:
[Albertine]

Yes, I’ll be sleeping at your hotel to-night; in fact, as I’ve got a bit of a cold, I’ll be going to bed there before dinner. You can come and sit by my bed and watch me eat, if you like; and afterwards we can play at anything you choose.

We can spend the evening together and my aunt won’t know anything about it. Come early; we’ll have a nice long time together.

Marcel:

I went to dinner that evening with my grandmother and felt within me a secret she could never guess. I didn’t know what was going to happen that evening, but still, the hotel and the evening no longer seemed empty.

Indeed, they contained my happiness.

 [Boy dances/mimes to the music]

After dinner, I rang for the lift to be taken up to Albertine’s room. The slightest movements of the bench in the lift were sweet to me because they were in direct relation to my heart. And I saw in the ropes that drew the cage upwards, in the few stairs that I had still to climb, only the machinery, the materialized stages, of my joy.

Those few steps from the landing to Albertine’s door I took as though I’d been plunged into a new and strange element, as if I was gently displacing a liquid stream of happiness, and at the same time, as if I were at last entering into an inheritance that had belonged to me from time immemorial.

I’d be silly to be in any doubt. Albertine had told me to come when she was in bed. It was as clear as daylight. I ran towards my beloved’s room.

  [Girl appears, dimly lit, on the bed]

And, indeed, I found her in bed.  Her white nightgown altered the proportions of her face, which seemed pinker than before, flushed , perhaps, by her cold. Her cheek was traversed by one of those long, dark, curling tresses, which, to please me, she had undone. She looked at me and smiled.

Beyond Albertine, through the window, the sea lay beneath the moon. And the sight of her bare throat so intoxicated me that it destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life which circulated in my being and the life of the universe outside me, so puny in comparison. The sea, and the sky in which the moon had not yet climbed to the zenith, seemed less than a featherweight on my eyes. All the life-giving energy that nature could have brought me would have seemed all too meager to express the immense aspiration that was swelling in my breast.

I bent over Albertine to kiss her. Death might have struck me down in that moment and it would have seemed trivial. Life wasn’t outside; it was me. I’d have smiled pityingly had a philosopher then expressed the idea that some day I’d have to die, that the eternal forces of nature would survive me, that after me there would still remain that sea, that moonlight and that sky! How could the world outlast me, since I wasn’t lost in its vastness, since it was the world that was enclosed in me - in me whom it fell far short of filling, in me who flung sky and sea and moon contemptuously into the corner!

[Girl is sharply lit] 

 Girl:
[Albertine]

 “Stop! Stop it or I’ll ring the bell!

Marcel:

I told myself that not for nothing does a girl invite a young man to her room, in secret, arranging that her aunt should not know, that boldness rewards those who know how to seize their opportunities.

In my exaltation, Albertine’s round face stood out as if lit by an inner flame. I was about to discover the fragrance, the flavor which this strange fruit concealed when...

[sound of bell:  abrupt, prolonged, and shrill]

 [abruptly, window and painting monitors go black] 

 [pause]

[Marcel continues, distantly]

 Albertine returned from her aunt’s a week later.

 Girl:
[Albertine]
 [somewhat coldly]

I forgive you; in fact I’m sorry to have upset you, but you must never do that again.

 Marcel:

From that point on, as if, in place of a real girl, I’d known a wax doll, gradually my desire to penetrate Albertine’s life disappeared. My dreams couldn’t survive my belief that I might take her in my arms if I chose. And they found themselves at liberty to transmit themselves, according to the attraction that I found in her, or in another girl, on any particular day.

 [Girl and Boy disappear]

[pause]

[music returns to first Prèlude in this Scene]

 [Young Man and Young Woman appear, both seated on the bed]

 [Marcel is lit somewhat more brightly]

 Marcel:

Now, sitting in my room in Paris, I realized that not only did I no longer love Albertine, I no longer had to risk shattering a special affection for me in her, since clearly that no longer existed.

Albertine had long since become indifferent to me; I felt no serious scruples.

 Young Man:
[Marcel]

I’m not in the least ticklish. You could go on tickling me for a whole hour and I wouldn’t feel it.

Young Woman:
[Albertine]
 [with “womanly meekness”]

Would you like me to try? Are you sure I’m not too heavy?

 Young Man:
[Marcel]

Do you know what I’m afraid of? It’s that if we go on like this I may not be able to resist the temptation to kiss you.

 Young Woman:
[Albertine]

 [seductively]

That would be a happy misfortune.

 [lighting on Young Man and Young Woman dims]

 Marcel:

I didn’t respond immediately to Albertine’s invitation. Another man might well have found it superfluous. Albertine’s way of pronouncing her words was so carnal that merely in speaking to you she seemed to be caressing you.

But the invitation was highly gratifying in itself.

That Albertine should be now so accessible gave me more than pleasure.

It brought before my eyes images of Albertine as I remembered her on the beach, almost painted upon a background of the sea, having no more real existence for me then than a theatrical tableaux. Now, in my room, the real woman had detached herself from the luminous mass and had come towards me.

At Balbec, I’d learned that it wasn’t possible to kiss Albertine, that one might only talk to her, that for me she was no more a woman than jade grapes are real fruit. Now, here she was, appearing to me on a third plane, real as in the second experience, but available as in the first. And available, all the more deliciously, because I’d long imagined that she wasn’t.

Knowing that it was possible to kiss Albertine was a pleasure perhaps greater even than kissing her. What a difference between possessing a woman to whom one applies one’s body alone, who’s no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl that you used to see on the beach, and trembled at the thought that you might not see again!

 [Marcel rises from his chair]

 [muses]

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, of whom one does not indeed know at first whether one will ever possess them, are alone interesting.

A woman’s body is most delightful when it appears as a silhouette against the back-drop of life.

Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her, all my impressions of a series of seascapes. And I’d have liked, before kissing her, to able to breathe into her anew the mystery which she’d had for me on the beach before I knew her.

 Marcel:
 [amused]

Human beings, however, lack certain essential organs, and possess none for kissing. For this absent organ we substitute our lips, and thereby arrive at a slightly more satisfying result than if we were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk.

But lips, designed to convey taste, must be content with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at an impenetrable barrier. At the moment of actual contact with the flesh, the lips - in that desolate zone in which they are unable to find their proper nourishment - are alone, the sense of sight, then that of smell, having deserted them. And apart from photography, I know nothing that can to so great a degree as a kiss evoke, from something believed to be a thing with one definite aspect, the hundred other things which it may equally well appear to be.

At Balbec, Albertine had often appeared different to me at different times. Now, in kissing her, the speed of the changes of perspective and coloring which a person presents to us through various encounters prodigiously accelerated.

And during the brief journey of my lips towards her, it was ten Albertines that I saw.

[Young Man and Young Woman are revealed, on the bed, kissing]

In kissing, our nostrils and eyes are as ill-placed as our lips are ill-made. Suddenly, my eyes ceased to see.

Then my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any odor. And thus, without thereby gaining any clear idea of the appearance or the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these signs, that I was, in fact, kissing Albertine.

[pause]

Whatever the modifications that had occurred recently in her life that might have explained why she now so readily accorded to a desire that at Balbec she’d refused with horror, Albertine now assumed an air of docile good will, an almost childish simplicity.

Obliterating every trace of her customary pretensions, the moment preceding pleasure had restored to Albertine’s rejuvenated features what seemed like the innocence of earliest childhood.

In this new expression on Albertine’s face there was an unexpected zeal. It was further than to her own childhood that Albertine had reverted. It was to the infancy of her race.

[pause]

[Marcel gets up and walks around, idly)

Very different from me, who looked for nothing more than physical alleviation, Albertine seemed to feel that it would indicate a certain coarseness were she to think that physical pleasure terminated anything.

Because she felt that kisses implied love and love took precedence over all else, Albertine seemed embarrassed at the idea of getting up and going immediately after what had happened; and I recognized in her a courtesy towards the host, a sense of propriety, and a respect for the bedside.

Nevertheless, I insisted on Albertine going home. And finally, she did.

[Young Woman laughs “as though to apologize for someone”]

Young Woman:
[Albertine]

When am I going to see you again?

Marcel:

It was as though Albertine was declining to admit that what had just happened might not be at least the prelude to a great friendship which we owed it to ourselves to discover.

Young Man:
[Marcel]

Since you give me leave, I’ll send for you when I can. But it will have to be at short notice, unfortunately. I never know beforehand. Would it be possible for me to send round for you in the evenings when I‘m free?

Young Woman:
[Albertine]

Quite possibly, in a little while. I’m going to have a latch-key of my own.