A play by Colleen Curtis and Barbara Kahn
First Produced by Calico Productions
at the Acting Studio, New York, NY 1987
Directed by Barbara Kahn
Priscilla Corbin as George Sand
Set design……………………Lynn Hayes
Lighting design……….Richard D’Andrea
Costume design…………….Susan Young
Puppets……………..…Weird Enterprises
Graphic design……….……Phyllis Pautrat
Type design/production…..………J.Skiles,
Creative Women’s Collective
EXCERPTS:
George Sand’s Paris Apartment. 1832.
George Sand.
A famous botanist once described the color of germander as dirty yellow. I wrote in the margin of his book in big letters, YOU HAVE DIRTY EYES! Those who find perversity in my writing are perverts themselves. Those who see suffering, weakness, doubts and above all, impotence, see only what I see myself. I’m able to move my readers, and emotion leads to reflection and soul-searching. That’s all I want–to make people question the accepted lies and call out for the forgotten truths.
My ambition has reason enough to be satisfied, but I aspire to more than the acclaim of the crowd. When I was a child, I believed that outside the limits of my life, there was an enlightened society where human beings of great worth met to exchange exalted feelings and ideas. Oh, how I believed that. Now I know that beautiful and noble people do not group themselves. But celebrities all want to be chiefs, to compete with one another for the attention of liars and beggars. It is the worst of all possible worlds.
I’ve made my life. I’m George Sand. I’m a writer. I write what I know, what I feel. I write the truth, and the truth supports me. I earn my living from it. …The clothes I wear are mine by choice. They fit the life of an artist. I can’t afford elegant dresses. My provincial clothes were ruined in the muddy streets. Well, I don’t need them anymore. I refuse the limitations put on women. In these clothes I can go to the theatre every night and sit in the cheap seats. I can fly from one end of Paris to the other. These clothes mean freedom. I live with Jules Sandeau. He’s an artist like myself. We wrote a book together, Rose et Blanche–our first attempt–and got it published! It’s true the book contains many parts I feel are distasteful, but we did those to satisfy our publisher. He wanted the book to be spicy. But we didn’t embarrass our families. We signed the book J. Sand. When I wrote Indiana on my own, Jules and I decided that J. Sand should have a brother, and I became George. The critics are raving about my book. They have said that Indiana produces more tragedies than Shakespeare and called my style superior to Stendhal. Latouche says Balzac and Merimee are crushed and buried beneath Indiana. I’ve been named queen of the new literary generation. A few self-righteous critics have called my book immoral–filth and prostitution–…Well, wait until Lelia is finished-[they]’ll be able to fill ten scrapbooks with phony moral indignation.