As Meryl Friedman plowed through ancient comedy's greatest hits, looking for 21st century AD laughs in 3rd century BC material, she began to wonder whether funny things really did happen on the way to the Forum.
This was not what the veteran stage director, who has made a cottage industry of adapting literary texts into play-able form, was hoping for as she plumbed an assortment of translations. She mulled over Menander, pondered Plautus and interrogated Terence, probing for a play that could make laughter ring from the stone tiers of the outdoor theater at the Getty Villa near Malibu -- where she was engaged to mount the annual, summer's-end production. The one she eventually chose, "Tug of War," adapted from Plautus, began previews this week.
After last September's well-received inaugural show, Euripides' "Hippolytos," Villa officials were looking for balance: tragedy last summer, so comedy tonight -- preferably a Roman one. But how to shake the dust from 2,200-year-old jokes?
"There were moments, going through it all, where I was like, 'Oh, my, they're all so much the same,' " Friedman said, laughing. The play that stood out as different, if not self-evidently sidesplitting, was "Rudens," Plautus' tale of cheeky slaves trying to get the better of their presumed betters, and presumed virgins trying to avoid having to turn tricks for a greedy pimp. It was set beside the sea, at a shrine to Venus, the goddess of love. That, Friedman thought as she turned pages at home in Van Nuys, could yield color and provide a canvas she could spray with silliness and song. Maybe she could kindle something akin to the bedazzlement she had felt as a girl watching Florence Henderson take a shower onstage at Lincoln Center, washing that man right out of her hair in a 1967 production of "South Pacific."
Along with the neighborhood talent shows Friedman organized while growing up in New York, "South Pacific" and other musicals she saw with her parents had won her to the theater for keeps. But never had she suspected that any ancient play would be the ticket to the most prominent gig of her career.
For many years, Friedman had been a linchpin of the small-theater scene in Chicago, where, in 1982, she was one of the handful of recent Northwestern University grads who started the Lifeline Theatre, aiming to stay busy while auditioning for jobs on bigger stages. Within a few years, Lifeline had turned into a job in itself. With Friedman as producing director, the company, which included Steven Totland, the husband she'd met as a college sophomore, found a niche adapting stories not originally written for the stage.
