Edmond Rostand's Play Cyrano De Bergerac

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

Rostand did not want to emulate the Romantics. His work with Cyrano was completely unconventional. Rostand found a person in history with whom he admired, and then he found an actor who could demonstrate the message he wanted to display, and the play was produced. Some might even say that if more “Truly Romantic” plays have been written like Cyrano, the period might have lasted longer. If one looks up the word ‘Romantic’ in the dictionary in contemporary times, a picture of Cyrano de Bergerac should pop up, however if you were to consider that word during the French Romantic period, one wouldn’t find Cyrano de Bergerac anywhere near that word. During that time period, Cyrano stood alone. Unlike any other drama.Cyrano de Bergerac is marinated with history and culture of France in the 17th- century.Although the play happened more than two hundred years after this time period, Rostand goes to great efforts to make it correlate to the era as close possible. He even tries to pay homage to in his text by filling it with references to real writers, philosophers, educators, and prominent historical figures of the time