February 8 2010

Stephanie Troisi
Office of the Arts
74 Mt.Auburn Street

A letter of recommendation on behalf of James LEAF.

I know James Leaf quite well. He was enrolled in two of my classes, conference classes both of them, one with fifteen people or so (on Paris in the 18th and 19th century), and one with only four (on Vichy France). Students wrote a weekly response paper and a long term paper. I remember clearly the term paper that James wrote for this last course, on the case of a captured fascist intellectual who was summarily shot in February 1945. It was a spirited defense by a committed anti-fascist (i.e., James) of an individual's right in a real democracy to be an undemocratic fascist. His remarks in class were invariably to the point and deeply perspicacious.

But of course, it's James's role as a theater director which - or so I am supposing – will be of interest to you, and I am delighted to be writing this letter on his behalf as I was very taken with his staging of both Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Peter Weiss' Marat-Sade. What surprised me – indeed, what really surprised me – was James’s ability to adapt these plays to a modern sensibility whilst remaining true to their larger and, as it were, "ahistorical" message. His Lysistrata was a hoot, adapted to the manners and mores of modern day undergraduates, but it was also a very apt presentation of Aristophanes' amused and bemused pacificism. The message was always there, but often broadcast in hilarious gags about today's political correctness. We were all taken with the staging of the play, and by the end of the performance, most of the characters were eliciting jovial laughter even before they got to speak their lines.

And Marat-Sade was even better: there James was completely faithful to the spirit and tensions of the play as they were felt in 1963, with a presentation of the French Revolution and its place in history as seen by both Marat, a social misfit, and Sade as a sexual misfit, but the two of them made deeply insightful nonetheless. Weiss' brilliant conceit in those cold war days was to set his message as a play within the play, where the attention of the spectators would be focused on the play as presented by the inmates of a lunatic asylum, while also on the original revolutionary texts also of Sade and Marat. And the brilliant touch was that James in turn added a third dimension to this play. It was, I thought, a brilliant decision to assign Sade's role to a manifestly intellectually brilliant young woman, as we expect young women at Harvard to be today, and Charlotte Corday’s role to yet another actress presented as being at once diaphanous and murderous, as our modernist sensibility now often expects these qualities to overlap.

It was interesting also for me to see these two plays so successfully staged in an adjunct space to the main ART on which I had given up when Robert Brustein was in charge of it: I thought Brustein's adaptations to be ponderous, crude, and distracting. They did not bring the genius of the playwright to the fore. Quite the reverse, since Brustein's staging invariably led me to think that he was more interested in his own overstated talent than in the original message of the plays he was directing. How remarkable that James Leaf, aged twenty-one, had succeeded precisely where the supposed greats had failed.

One of my two daughters was an undergraduate in Adams House where Peter Sellers also lived. And so I had many occasions to meet that young man in his Harvard glory days, with his production in the Adams House pool, complete as I recall with inner tubes and watery extravagance. James has a much more sardonic and even somber view of life than Sellers; but the two are not unlike: they both have – or had - a touch of genius about them.

It's a true pleasure for me to recommend him to you for the Louis Sudler prize, which aims to reward a graduating senior who has made a significant contribution to the arts at Harvard.

Sincerely yours

Patrice Higonnet
Goelet Professor of French History