While choosing a play to direct, I was drawn to Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac.Edmond Rostand was born in Marseilles, France, in 1868. His father was a poet, but pushed Edmond to career chasing law. When he was a college student in Paris, he found a deep passion for French literature and theater. He eventually did earn a law degree, but he primarily focused on theatre. He produced his first play when he was only twenty years old and his next two plays followed right after.With every new play, he became more famous and Rostand’s name began to attract distinguished actors and actresses to star in his productions.In 1897, Rostand produced Cyrano de Bergerac. The play was a huge success. Late nineteenth-century theater had been based on realistic stories and unsentimental characters. But in Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand the traditional way of theatre to present an unabashed historical romance, set in the 1640s and featuring a flamboyant hero. Audiences loved the play’s passionate love story, comedy, fast-paced action, and tragic ending. Above all, they responded powerfully to the larger-than-life character of Cyrano, the genius hero with a ridiculously long nose. After the play, Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand’s fame began to decrease, and he never received that kind of success with any other production, than Cyrano. Rostand died in 1918, however his famous production, Cyrano de Bergerac, lives on to present day. Although Rostand wrote this play a little more than a century