Fighting and Writing.('Cyrano de Bergerac')(Theater review)

The word "panache" was adopted into English only after the phenomenal success of the French playwright Edmond Rostand's 1897 "heroic comedy" "Cyrano de Bergerac," whose flamboyant, big-nosed hero took revenge on his ugliness by making a legend of his physical and intellectual prowess. "I'm going to take the simplest approach to life of all. . . . I've decided to excel in everything," Cyrano announces in the current superb revival of the play (at the Richard Rodgers, under the deft direction of David Leveaux). "Panache" means, literally, the tuft of feathers on Cyrano's cap; figuratively, it refers to his sumptuous impertinence. The word is both Cyrano's dying breath and the play's last word--an epitaph, as well as an envoi, to his dandyism.

Cyrano (Kevin Kline), a nobleman serving in the French Army in the seventeenth century, is the consummate actor; he turns every occasion into an exhibition of aplomb. "I want to depart this life with honorable steel piercing my heart and a piercing epigram on my lips," he tells a cadet from his regiment, in this translation and adaptation by Anthony Burgess. Cyrano never picks a fight with one person when he can take on a hundred. Under siege, he crosses enemy lines to deliver his beautifully written love letters; when challenged to a duel, he fights and writes a poem at the same time, dispatching his opponent, as predicted, on the poem's last beat. He displays courage in order to disabuse himself of his fear. His every gesture is calculated to capture the imagination of others, stoicism turned into the spectacular. Cyrano is capable of feasting on half a grape and a glass of water--or, while he and his troops are starving on the front lines, of producing Homer's Iliad to feed his soul. His defiant excess--"Excess, you see, is not excessive when it's been conceived on principle," he says--is a purposeful statement of imaginative freedom and consolation. Instead of submitting to the rules, Cyrano makes them; he asserts his dignity over his destiny. Although his grotesque nose disqualifies him for the attention of women, his actions and his words demand an audience. Even before Cyrano makes his entrance, a chorus of whisperers spins the legend of his uniqueness: "extraordinary," "exquisite, one of the world's prodigies." Once he swaggers into view, he insists not only on being seen but on being remembered. At the theatre, he bullies a bad actor off the stage, throwing money, as well as epithets, after the inept mummer. This typical recklessness leaves Cyrano without cash to buy his own dinner. "A stupid act," someone observes. Cyrano counters, "But what a gesture."

And what a play--swashbuckling and subtle, breathtaking and heartbreaking. "To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero," Rostand told the Academie Francaise in 1903. "Panache is therefore a timid heroism. . . . A little frivolous, perhaps, most certainly a little theatrical, panache is nothing but a grace; but a grace which is so difficult to retain in the face of death, a grace which demands so much strength." The psychology of "Cyrano de Bergerac" is as cunning as its storytelling; in the narrative of Cyrano's eloquent but unrequited love for his cousin Roxane (Jennifer Garner), the play traps a much deeper commentary on self-loathing and the humiliated heart. Cyrano's nose--which he calls his "gross protuberance"--is an offense both to others and to his own aesthetic ideal. By winkling out Cyrano's shame, the play speaks to the dark kingdom of unworthiness that monopolizes our inner lives as much as it does Cyrano's. The play, like its hero, is more serious about suffering than it lets on.

As Cyrano, Kline is sensational. His Shakespearean training--he has played both Falstaff and Lear in recent years--makes him an expert interpreter of Rostand's dexterous alexandrines. And, of all Kline's classical ...