Resource Guide

• Introduction
• Who's Who in the Production
• Plot Description
• Character Profiles

• Arthur Schnitzler: Chronicler of an Age
• Schnitzler's World
• Frederic Morton on Schnitzler and Vienna
• Letter to Schnitzler by Freud
• Selected Works of Arthur Schnitzler

• An Interview with Stephen Wadsworth and Francesca Faridany
• Stephen Wadsworth's Bio
• Francesca Faridany's Bio
• Brief Thoughts on Costume and Set Design

• Related Materials

"...a concentrated, compelling drama - a gripping story of
the unraveling of a mind trained for frivolity..."
- The San Francisco Chronicle

Francesca Faridany in a scene from Fräulein Else at the La Jolla Playhouse. Photo: Kevin Berne

Fräulein Else is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, and its entire story is seen through the eyes (and thoughts) of its central character, Fräulein Else, a romantic and somewhat frivolous young Viennese woman vacationing with her aunt at an exclusive spa in northern Italy in 1912.

Else spends her days playing tennis and exchanging idle conversation with her Cousin Paul (on whom she has a secret crush) and Cissy, a married socialite who is having an affair with Paul. Else's carefree and self-centered holiday takes an abrupt turn, however, when she receives an urgent letter from her mother with the news that Else's father is about to suffer financial embarrassment. He owes 30,000 guldens, an amount he must raise immediately. Else's mother has discovered that Herr Von Dorsday, an old family friend, is staying at the same hotel as Else. In her letter, Else's mother pleads with her daughter to approach Von Dorsday for a loan.

"The Kiss" by Edvard Munch, 1897

Humiliated by this turn of events, Else nonetheless flirtatiously broaches the subject of a loan with Von Dorsday, sensing his attraction to her. He agrees on the condition that Else allow him to see her nude. Else, torn between loyalty to her family and the repellant task before her, considers her situation from every angle, her hysteria rising - despite a dose or two of veronal taken as a sedative - as she nears the appointed hour. In her manic state, Else veers between comedy and melodrama, and her decision sets the stage for a final moment of self-awareness that is both inevitable and shocking.

"…a brilliant, vibrant, and eccentric comedy that delivers a powerful and breathtaking conclusion like few plays you will ever see."
– San Diego Playbill

Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse, 2003
Written by Enrique E. Ureta II

"Life goes on. It always does - Until it doesn't."
-Traumnovelle
(Rhapsody: A Dream Novel),
Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler, the son of a distinguished Jewish physician, was born in Vienna, Austria on May 14, 1862 and grew up enjoying a privileged early life among his family's social circle of intellectuals, nobility and actors. Although he showed a passion for writing at a young age (by age 18 he had written no less than 23 complete drama, as well as a number of lyric poems and musical compositions), Schnitzler agreed to follow in his father's footsteps and studied medicine at the University of Vienna. A devotee of the opera, theater and concert hall (as well as cafés, racetracks and gambling halls), he practiced medicine only until he garnered critical acclaim with his play Anatol (1891), a cycle of one-act plays about a man and his many love affairs. From then on he focused his creative pursuits on writing and kept only a few private patients, although his medical research on nervous diseases, hysteria and sexuality was to play a large role in many of his works. In the 1890's, Schnitzler became one of the leading lights of the "Jung-Wien" or "Young Vienna" movement and by 1912, Schnitzler's plays were performed at three of the most prestigious theatres in Vienna, as well as other theaters in Austria and Germany.

Schnitzler's works centered on the theme of individual happiness, often dramatized around issues of love, sexual fidelity and marital hypocrisy where the characters' most intimate prejudices and fears were revealed in a stream-of-consciousness narrative style that mirrors psychoanalysis. His sharp clinical observations of the unconscious and subconscious mind have led many to view him as Sigmund Freud's artistic equivalent, and Schnitzler is often credited with being one of the first playwrights to introduce the consciously psychological play into modern drama.

Although he achieved great fame and literary success in his life, his work was not without controversy. In Berlin, his dramatization of sexuality in his play, La Ronde, incited one of the greatest scandals in the history of European theater. The play, constructed as ten dialogues, focuses on the sexual desires of five different men and women who, despite their different backgrounds, become interconnected through their sexual relationships. Anti-Semitic riots broke out and, after a six day obscenity trial, Schnitzler was acquitted. He banned any performance of the play in Europe until after his death. Being both a Jew and a vocal critic of the Austrian monarchy contributed to the censorship of his work in his lifetime and the banning of his writings by the Nazis until after his death.

Nicole Kidman in "Eyes Wide Shut" based on Shnitzler's Traumnovelle

After World War I, Schnitzler's dominance in the theater began to decline and he spent most of his later years in his villa overlooking Vienna, devoting most of his time to writing. The shocking suicide of his daughter in 1930 proved too much to bear and, not fully recovered from his tragic loss, Schnitzler passed away on October 21, 1931.

Schnitzler's works proved a movement toward modernity in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and his treatment of human psychology and sexuality left an artistic legacy that lives on not only in his plays, which continue to be produced worldwide, but also in works of those who have been inspired by them. In 1994 Michael John LaChiusa created a musical version of La Ronde called Hello Again, and more recently, David Hare adapted La Ronde into The Blue Room, a play starring Nicole Kidman. And Stanley Kubrick's screenplay, Eyes Wide Shut, is an adaptation of Schnitzler's Dream Story.

Fin-De-Siècle Vienna

Arthur Schnitzler Photo by E. Bieber, 1891

Vienna, capitol of the Habsburg Empire, experienced a population growth after 1848 as it became a major railway junction for Prague, Budapest, Cracow and Trieste. With the cessation of serfdom in Austrian lands after the revolution of 1848, the city's growth stemmed from large-scale migration from the provinces. Many of these migrants were Jewish and their presence in Vienna shifted the city's demographics from a near absence of Jews at mid-century to ten percent of the population by 1900. Although the 1860s had ushered in a period of political liberalism in Vienna, it would prove to be short-lived. As the Jewish population continued to grow in Vienna, a wave of populist anti-Semitism swept the nation that would inevitably infect the young Hitler, who moved there in 1907.

St. Leopold "am Steinhof" by Otto Wagner.

As the city grew, people of all classes enjoyed the many artistic offerings of the city, particularly its theater and opera. The many cafés in Vienna would collectively serve as the center of artistic and intellectual life where doctors debated Wagner and art scholars discussed the finer points of Newtonian mechanics. Vienna became a city of astounding cultural and intellectual vitality.

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal was an Austrian writer who established his reputation with lyric poems and a number of plays, including Yesterday (1891) and Death and the Fool (1893).

By 1900 Vienna was an imperial city, enjoying unprecedented power and affluence. Its architectural opulence was manifested by the great baroque buildings of the Ringstrasse on the banks on the Danube with its main thoroughfares that radiated out through the city to the suburbs into the Vienna woods. But it was a city caught between the traditions of the past and the advent of modernization. Its small craft industries could no longer compete with advancing technology and the products being manufactured in Paris and London. Factories and urban slums, new means of communication and political movements brought into prominence a new capitalist bourgeoisie. There was no time for gradual accommodation to a new age and the collision of old and new caused turbulence.

"Agony" by Egon Schiele, 1912. Austrian expressionist artist Schiele, (1890- 1918) was at odds with art critics and society for most of his brief life. He made eroticism one of his major themes and was briefly imprisoned for obscenity in 1912.

As the political stability of Vienna collapsed, the Habsburg Empire crumbled and by 1918 ceased to exist. Vienna's "coffeehouse culture" was shaken as well, as the city's artists and scholars struggled to make sense of the madness surrounding them. According to theater scholar Martin Esslin, "It is the juxtaposition of an intellectual elite, universally educated, closely knit, with all the stimulus to lively debate on the one hand, and the feeling of impending doom on the other, which seems to provide the explanation why so much of the seminal thought of our century originated in Vienna... And if the city's sensuality provided Freud with a backdrop to his thought about the roots of the sexual impulse, the tensions inherent in a political system about to break up also pointed to the wellsprings of aggression."

Arthur Schnitzler was a fixture on a Viennese cultural scene that included Otto Wagner, the founder of functional architecture, painters Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, such writers as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. As an active member of the thriving intellectual community, Schnitzler became an acute analyst of the city's disquietude. One of the great intellectual and artistic personalities at the turn of the century, Schnitzler came closest in his writings to reflecting the social life of the city by dramatizing the individual within a disintegrating society.

Excerpts from the foreward to (Schnitzler's) My Youth in Vienna; (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.)

"Arthur Schnitzler's plays and fiction are the definitive genre pictures of fin-de-siècle Vienna. And since many of the best captions to those pictures were supplied by his contemporary, the aphorist Karl Kraus, it's hard to start talking about one without thinking of the other - of one aphorism in particular. 'Vienna,' said Karl Kraus, 'is the laboratory of the apocalypse.'"

"Since nothing energizes the arts like change, the Vienna of young Schnitzler vibrated with esthetic insurgencies. Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg broke the great molds of Beethoven and Brahms. And as they composed atonal music so Adolf Loos created a-traditional, anti-ornamental, anti-Ringstrasse architecture.... In painting, new Austrian impressionists ostentatiously marked their mutiny against the academics and the romantics.... But the ultimate subversive intellectual enterprise took place in the study of the man who called Schnitzler 'my Doppelgänger' - Sigmund Freud. Of course Freud and Schnitzler were contemporaries, fellow Jews, fellow students in the same university, fellow physicians, fellow devotees of hypnotism in their early careers, and fellow explorers of the erotic in their lifework. But their Doppelgänger-dom rests most significantly on the fact that both focused on the tension between man's inner motives and the choreography of his adjustments, between the instinctual core and the acquired façade."

"Civilization is a lie the brain forces on the flesh: that theme also informs Schnitzler's prose. In Lieutenant Gustl a gutsy young officer of the Imperial Army finds himself pressed to the edge of suicide because a common baker has insulted him. In Fräulein Else a young girl must expose herself naked to a lecher who otherwise won't save her father from bankruptcy.... Both Gustl and Else suffer in order not to betray a life style, when in fact the life style is betraying them."

"At his best Schnitzler talked not just about old Vienna but about the aging of any culture; about the late, the very late, the maybe too late hour in search of dawn. Which may be our time of night right now."

Excerpts from a letter by Sigmund Freud to Arthur Schnitzler on his 60th birthday.

Arthur Schnitzler, 1915

"Your determination as well as your skepticism - what people call pessimism - your preoccupation with the truths of the unconscious and of the instinctual drives in man, your dissection of the cultural conventions of our society, the dwelling of your thoughts on the polarity of love and death; all this moves me with an uncanny felling of familiarity."

"Whenever I am absorbed in one of your beautiful creations I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very suppositions, interests and conclusions that are also mine... I have formed the impression that you know through intuition... everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people."

Sigmund Freud, 1922

"So I have formed the impression that you know through intuition - or rather from detailed observation - everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people. Indeed, I believe that fundamentally your nature is that of an explorer of psychological depths, as honestly impartial and undaunted as anyone has ever been."

"I will make a confession and ask you to keep it to yourself, in consideration for myself, and not to share it with any friend or stranger. A question disturbs me: why, in fact, during all these years, I never frequented and conversed with you? I think I have been avoiding you for some kind of fear of meeting my double. Not that I have the tendency of easily identifying myself with another person or that I have wished to minimize the difference of talents which separate us; but, when plunging into your splendid creations I always thought I would find - behind the poetical look - the hypothesis, the interests and the results that I knew were mine."

--Sigmund Freud

Francesca Faridany and Stephen Wadsworth Discuss How Fräulein Else Came To Be
Courtesy of Berkeley Repertory Theatre

FRANCESCA: It all began (late 1998) when an old friend gave me a biography of Peggy Ashcroft. There was a passage in which Alec Guinness described watching Peggy in Fräulein Else, a play that had been written for her by her then-husband, Theodor Komisarjevsky, adapted from Schnitzler's novella of the same name. This was 1932 - the novella had been published in 1924. Guinness said the audience had been audibly shocked by a glimpse of Peggy's naked back. The Lord Chamberlain had censored the piece, and the Old Vic had to perform it under the auspices of a private club. I was intrigued - I'd never heard of the piece - and became even more so when I had trouble finding the novella in translation. I finally located it at the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York, and I was hooked. The writing fascinated and disturbed me, and I wanted to play this role.

Burgtheater Constructed by Carl von Hasenauer, 1874 - 1888

STEPHEN: Francesca gave me an English version of the novella to read (fall 1999). I sequestered myself during Hurricane Floyd and remember going in and out of sleep and sort of dreaming the book as much as reading it. 1924, the year of Mrs. Dalloway. I was put in mind also of Joyce, whom I later learned had considered Schnitzler's earlier novella, Lieutenant Gustl, a catalyst as he sought a form for Ulysses. And I thought of Freud, particularly his case study Dora, and wondered who had influenced whom - those two Viennese students of women's private minds living through the turn of the century, and later the fall of the Habsburg Empire. I loved the story - it was pure Francesca - and I told her she had to figure out a way to do it.

FRANCESCA: I started by cutting the novella down (most of 2000), figuring out which characters really had to be there, and deciding whether I would somehow play them or talk to them without their being there. Was it going to be a solo piece, or a full-scale play like Komisarjevsky's? My gut feeling was that a solo turn would focus too much on the actress and not enough on Schnitzler's story, but that a big, "well-made" play wouldn't serve Schnitzler's idea, or his literary achievement, which was about a seamless flow of thought in Else's own mind.

STEPHEN: We got together at Seattle Rep (late 2000), and she dictated a script from her notes on an earlier translation. I edited freely, suggesting changes and additions based not on the novella but on the script I was reading. We repositioned events, sharpened the text, and settled on a small dramatis personae.

FRANCESCA: Early in 2001 we were in Berkeley working on The Oresteia with [Berkeley Rep Artistic Director] Tony Taccone, and he read the draft. One day, very casually over lunch, he said Berkeley Rep would do Else. By this time I'd decided to re-translate the novella myself, for several reasons. A German-speaking friend drew my attention to details in Schnitzler's novella which were apparently too racy for the 1925 translation we'd been working from - references to Else's monthly period, for example. I suspected there were more such discrepancies. I also wanted to get the Austrian-ness of Else, through the German language, to explore the various meanings of the German words and have a broader palette from which to make a new text.

STEPHEN: She did find more untranslated censored details, and the script got juicier and truer to Schnitzler's original. It also seemed more Schnitzlerian, ironically, when she took more liberties with the dramaturgy of the script. Tony told me to write a companion piece, since Else was a fairly short evening by itself. I started thinking about somehow adapting one of Freud's case studies, possibly Dora.

FRANCESCA: We now knew that Schnitzler and Freud were very aware of each other, first as doctors (Freud cites a medical paper of Schnitzler's in a Dora footnote) and then as writers (Schnitzler's Else shares very key story details with Freud's earlier telling of Dora's case).

The Ringstrasse, Vienna c.1850

STEPHEN: We felt we had to get to the source and went to San Martino di Castrozza (late 2001), to look at the Cimone Mountain and find the site of the hotel Schnitzler was writing about. We got married not too far from there (June 2002) and went north to Vienna for the honeymoon. Vienna has changed in the last 15 years; it's hugely more cosmopolitan and young. But the weight of the Habsburg dynasty and its ponderous collapse, now 85 years past, remains somehow vividly alive. Ditto Freud. Ditto Hitler. Schnitzler's anarchic, quicksilver neurotics would still find it oppressive.

FRANCESCA: Our honeymoon then basically continued at the Sundance Theatre Lab, where we'd been invited to work on the Else script. Stephen was to develop the Dora script. Sundance is like summer camp for theater folk, with heaps of inspiring people whose brains and talent could be picked and mined for three weeks. For the first time I could put my actor hat on and start to put this fast-paced piece on my body. The morning after the reading, it was unanimously agreed upon that even at an hour and 20 minutes, Fräulein Else didn't need a companion piece.

STEPHEN: Writing about Dora was not in vain - it felt like the best preparation I could possibly do for Fräulein Else. Unquestionably Freud's Dora was the template for Schnitzler's Else. As I walked the streets of Vienna with Dora, wending her ambivalent way towards her session with Freud, she told me all about the deepening turn-of-the-century ravine between the dying Habsburg Empire - unmoving symbol of an archaic order - and the thrillingly progressive voices of Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Schnitzler, and others, shouting, each in his own style, for radical change.

FRANCESCA: One of the dramaturgs at Sundance asked me how it felt to be bringing a great new female role to the classical theater repertoire. I hadn't thought of it that way until that moment. It feels good.

Stephen Wadsworth directed Aeschylus' Orestia trilogy for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, unveiled his production of Wagner's RingMarviaux: Three Plays, his series of translations premiered at McCarter Theatre. His other McCarter credits include a new adaptation of Moliere's Don Juan, Goldoni's Mirandolina as well as Noel Coward's Private Lives and Design for Living. He wrote the opera A Quiet Place with Leonard Bernstein, and has also translated, adapted and directed plays and operas of Goldoni, Monteverdi, Handel (notably Xerxes, seen throughout North America during the 90s, including New York City Opera) and Mozart. He has directed plays for Mark Taper Forum, Roundabout Theatre, Old Globe, Huntington Theatre, Dallas Theatre Center, and frequently at Seattle Repertory Theatre, where he is Affiliate Artist and TCG/PEW Artist in Residence.

Francesca Faridany and Stephen Wadsworth in rehearsal.
Photo By: Ken Friedman

Francesca Faridany was last seen at McCarter Theatre as Donna Elvira/Don Alonso in Stephen Wadsworth's adaptation of Moliere's Don Juan. Other McCarter credits include Gilda in Noel Coward's Design for Living and Silvia in The Game of Love and Chance. She was recently seen on the Berkeley Repertory stage as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and before that as Cassandra in The Orestia. Fräulein Else is her first foray into the world of translating and adapting. She worked on the script at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and at the Sundance Theater Lab. Her collaboration with Stephen Wadsworth spans nine years and Fräulein Else is their ninth production together. They were married last June.

If you would like further information please look through any of the following resources which have been used in preparing this guide.

BOOKS

Café Museum, by architect Adolf Loos, 1904. Loos designed on the simplest of principles. Straight lines, clear planar walls and windows, and clean curves characterized his style.

Esslin, Martin, "Freud's Vienna," Freud: the Man, His World, His Influence, ed. Jonathan Miller. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

Gay, Peter, Schnitzler's Century: The Making of the Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914. W. W. Norton, 2002.

Schnitzler, A, My Youth in Vienna (C. Hutter, Trans.), New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

Schorske, Carl, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York: Vintage, 1981.

Swales, Martin, Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study, London: Oxford, 1971.

Thompson, Bruce, Schnitzler's Vienna: Image of a Society, New York: Routledge, 1991.

WEBSITES

http://www.arthur-schnitzler.at/

http://www.beautyandruin.com/findesiecle/

http://www.museumonline.at/1996/schulen/pinka/schnitzl.htm

http://www.viaggio-in-germania.de/schnitzler-vita.html

http://www.virtourist.com/europe/vienna/13.htm