The Blue Bird
Suitable for preschoolers through adults.
The Blue Bird is the story of two small children, Mytyl and Tytlyl, who after being visited by a fairy, embark on a journey to find and bring back to this world the blue bird of happiness. They learn about loss, friendship, truthfulness and fear as their adventures take them through many magical places including the Land of Memory, the Palace of Happiness and the Kingdom of the Future. After their long search and many incredible encounters, the two children return to their home without the blue bird only to find it waiting for them where they least expected it. In the end the children learn that real happiness is not found in the tangible world of things and is attainable only to those willing to give up what they appear most to desire.
The Blue Bird is a delightful play about the power of the imagination, the innate magic and metaphor to be found in every day life and the meaning of true happiness, which as Dorothy on here quest to find the wizard also learned, is usually to be found right in your own back yard!
This play written in 1908 by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck,
and adapted and directed for Auburn University by Lisa Channer,
will delight both children and adults as it probes the deepest questions
of life within the framework of a delightfully fantastical fairy tale.
About the Playwright
Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862-1949). Belgian poet, dramatist, and essayist. His literary career began with the publication of two volumes of poetry: Douze chansons (1896), and Serres chaudes (1889), both mysterious and dreamy in subject matter and mood. Maeterlinck's fame, however, rests on his symbolic dramas, played chiefly at the Theatre de l'oeuve of Lugne-Poe. La Princesse Madeleine (1889), his first success, was followed by L'Intruse and Les Avengles (1890), L'Interieur (1894), and Pelleas et Melisande (1892). Antinaturalistic in its subject matter, Maeterlinck's drama portrayed the inner conflict of the individual not the external struggle between man and his world. Antinaturalistic in method as well, it abandoned a realistic portrait of life as seen for a symbolic expression of the inner life.
The romantic melancholy of his early plays was succeeded by a faith in the spiritual life of all living things. The plays Aglavine et Selysette (1896), Monna Vanna (1902), and L'Oiseau bleu (1909) were more hopeful in mood, founded on that belief in the spirit expressed in the essays of La Sagesse et la destinee (1898) and Le Temple ensevelai (1902). The mystery of human life and death that preoccupied Maeterlinck led him to write studies of flowers and animals who share this mysterious existence: La Vie des abeilles (1901), L'Intelligence des fleurs (1907), and La Vie des termites (1927). In 1911 Maeterlinck was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
by William Rose Benet.
L'Oiseau Bleu , the Blue Bird
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