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Faced with a play that is advertised as a comedic confrontation between those two grandes dames of turn-of-the-century theater, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, one expects Lillian Garrett's "The Ladies of the Camellias" to be your basic knock-down, drag-out cat fight.
Now cat fights can be funny, but the fact remains that they're usually variations on "Dallas." The pre-performance image of this play was of actress-managers dueling each other with hairpins. Quaint, but who needs it?
Surprise! That very sense of theater's quaint irrelevancy is not only addressed in Garrett's comedy, it's her main subject. This play is less concerned with two artistic egos than with how they deal with the shock of the new politics of the dawning 20th Century.
The politics comes in the form of an anarchist whose nom de guerre is Ivan (Michael Bell). The burning issue at Le Theatre de la Renaissance had been whether Bernhardt (Victoria...