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　　虽然我们已经进入了使用互联网和看光碟的时代，但是经典的戏剧仍然深受人们喜爱。

　　Some of the plays in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2011 classical theater season are over 400 years old but ticket sales have been brisk. Joe Melillo, BAM’s executive producer, says theatergoers are hungry for a diet of Ibsen, Gogol and Shakespeare.

　　在布鲁克林音乐学院2011年的古典剧作演出季中，有些剧作已经有超过百年的历史，有的甚至有长达400年的历史。不过，布鲁克林音乐学院执行制片人乔·梅利奥表示，观众们仍然渴望欣赏易卜生、果戈理和莎士比亚的剧作。

　　"They’re flying, they have, like, little wings," he says. "The tickets are flying out of the box office."

　　那些演出场次的票卖得飞快。

　　The artists presenting the plays say that’s because they resonate with contemporary audiences. Take "John Gabriel Borkman," playwright¹ Henrik Ibsen’s 1896 drama in which the title character, a banker, has been imprisoned² for illegally investing his client's money. Ibsen could have been writing about financier Bernie Madoff, now serving a 150-year prison sentence for orchestrating a decades-long swindle that took tens of billions of dollars from his unwitting investors³.

　　参加演出的艺术家们表示，这是因为那些作品和当代的观众能够产生共鸣。比如易卜生在1896年创作的作品《约翰·加布里埃尔·博克曼》中，银行家博克曼由于拿客户的钱进行非法投资而遭到监禁。这不禁让人想起了金融骗子麦道夫的行径，他几十年来把那些不知情的投资者所投入的几百亿美元，放入一个“庞氏骗局” 中，他因此被判处150年的监禁。

　　"You see the byproduct of these legal battles that the families fall apart, because financial difficulties, or financial shame, produces a terrible fallout in families," says actress Fiona Shaw, who plays Borkman’s wife.

　　女演员菲奥娜·肖在剧中扮演博克曼的妻子，她说：“我们看到，这些法律较量的副产品就是家庭解体，可能因为财务上的困难，或者是财务上的羞愧感，这些都导致了可怕的家庭破裂。”

　　On an even more universal level, Ibsen’s three central characters are imprisoned by their own delusions⁵ and bitterness, says Alan Rickman, who plays Borkman, and Lindsay Duncan, who plays the woman he abandoned.

　　在剧中扮演博克曼的演员艾伦·里克曼表示，从更广义来看，易卜生剧作中的三个主要人物最后都是被他们自身的迷惑和痛苦所困。

　　"They’re just very exaggerated versions of people we all know," says Duncan.

　　Rickman agrees. "We all know them. We’ve all grown up with these people."

　　Delusional⁶ characters are also at the heart of BAM’s next presentation, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story, "The Diary of a Madman." Academy and Tony Award-winner Geoffrey Rush stars. Even though Gogol wrote about a mid-level bureaucrat⁷ in 1835 Russia, Rush says it feels like modern absurdist writing.

　　自身充满困惑的人物是布鲁克林音乐学院下一部剧作的核心。这部戏改编自果戈里的短篇小说《狂人日记》，由曾经获得过奥斯卡和托尼奖的杰弗瑞·拉什担任主演。拉什表示，尽管果戈里描写的是1835年俄罗斯中层官僚，但是这就象是现代的荒唐主义作品。

　　"Gogol walks this very knife-edge, fine-line between a very sharp observation of someone’s descent into madness and, at the same time, playing fairly deliciously with their own sense of delusion⁴."

　　他说：“果戈里非常敏锐、细致地观察到一个人是如何从容地运用自己的妄念堕入疯狂状态的。”

　　If Rush’s character descends⁸ into madness, the same is true of Shakespeare’s "King Lear," which Derek Jacobi is bringing over from England. Director Michael Grandage observes that, while the play has large political dimensions, Shakespeare has tapped into something more primal⁹.

　　如果拉什的角色最后堕入了疯狂之中，那么莎士比亚的《李尔王》也有同样的结局。《李尔王》剧组来自英国，导演麦克·格朗德吉指出，虽然这部剧作具有很大的政治戏份，但是莎士比亚其实在其中融入了其它更主要的元素。

　　"The center of the play is a great domestic drama and he clearly was a man who was writing with a huge degree of knowledge about the nature of an aging parent," says Grandage. "We have different words for it now - of course, in Shakespeare’s time it was called madness and it’s called madness throughout the play. But, for madness now, we have dementia."

　　格朗德吉接着说：“我们现在有不同的词来形容疯狂。在莎士比亚的时代，人们称这是疯狂，整部剧作中这也是一种疯狂的行为。但是，我们现代人称这是老年痴呆。现代的观众通过自己家庭中、或者自己正在衰老的父母和亲戚的悲剧，都能够在不同程度上接触到那些正在失去心智的人。”

　　And it’s these universal human experiences, which most people can identify with, that continually draw audiences and artists back to the classics.

　　正是这些最基本的情感让观众们以及戏剧艺术家们，不断地重返剧院观看以及表演这些经典剧作。

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