Aurora Theatre Company presents 'Anatol'

Aurora Theatre Company founding Artistic Director Barbara Oliver returns to the company for its 20th anniversary season to direct Arthur Schnitzler’s (La Ronde) first theatrical work for the stage, ANATOL. This World Premiere translation, commissioned by Aurora Theatre Company, from renowned Schnitzler expert (and Berkeley resident) Margret Schaefer, features Mike Ryan (Shakespeare Santa Cruz) in his Aurora debut as Anatol, along with Aurora veterans Tim Kniffin (Trouble in Mind, The Best Man) and Delia MacDougall (SEX, The Old Neighborhood).

A gadabout living for pleasure in late 19th-century Vienna, Anatol practices the arts of seduction, adultery, infidelity, and betrayal, encountering a series of mistresses in his search for the perfect faithful lover. Paradoxically, it is the women in his life who gain the upper hand. According to theater critic John Simon, Schnitzler’s work “belongs in the vicinity of Proust, Joyce, and Chekov.” His work has also been championed and adapted by writers including David Hare and Tom Stoppard, and film makers Stanley Kubrick and Cecil B. DeMille, who helmed a movie version “suggested” by Schnitzler’s ANATOL, entitled “The Affairs of Anatol” (1921), starring Wallace Reid and Gloria Swanson in her last on screen role under DeMille’s direction.

Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud were contemporaries and fellow admirers. The playwright exhibited an intuitive mastery of behavioral psychology, as evidenced in ANATOL, and in a letter to Schnitzler, Freud said “I have often asked myself in wonder where you could have found this or that secret knowledge which I was able to discover only after arduous examination of the object, and ended up feeling envious of the poet for whom I had always had the deepest admiration.”