A Christmas Tale

This morning, I finished reading Zapolya: A Christmas Tale, S.T. Coleridge's holiday story of love, usurpation, and alleged lycanthropy.

After the success of his tragedy Remorse, Coleridge wanted to provide a Christmas entertainment for the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane. (Werewolves are traditional for Christmas, right?) Drury Lane passed, but the play ended up being performed at the Surrey Theatre (also known as the Royal Circus) in 1818.

Playbills for the Surrey gave the play the subtitle "The War Wolf" since its plot involves a mysterious cave supposed to be haunted by a supernatural creature of that name. In reality, there is no such creature in the play. Instead, the cave is inhabited by an Illyrian chieftain named Raab Kiuprili. (Like Twelfth Night, another Christmas entertainment, the play is set in Illyria.)

In a note in the published text, Coleridge stated: "For the best account of the War-wolf or Lycanthropus, see Drayton's Mooncalf, Chalmers' English Poets, Vol. IV, p. 133." According to the Jacobean poet Michael Drayton's The Mooncalf, a sorcerer used "an herb of such a wond'rous pow'r" and "thrice saying a strange magic spell" turned himself into "a war-wolf instantly" who would rob anyone who passed through a certain forest. He also "ravish'd" women, in some cases actually eating their flesh as well.

In Drayton's version of lycanthropy, the werewolf also steals children from a nearby town and carries off the fattest sheep of local shepherds. Eventually, the villagers decide to hunt the beast, but the werewolf (or "war-wolf" in Drayton's spelling) turns back into a man and pretends to join them on their hunt. At last, the werewolf is exposed and torn to pieces by the locals.

This depiction of lycanthropy is quite different from what's shown in the Hollywood film The Wolf Man, for which screenwriter Curt Siodmak created his own mythology. It's perhaps more similar to the werewolves in Boccaccio's Decameron or Le Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory.

An even closer parallel to Coleridge's drama might be found in The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. In that play, the character of Ferdinand believes himself to be a wolf, though he is not. Ferdinand's case is one of mental illness, though, not a mistake of those around him.

Far from being a werewolf, Kiuprili is a patriot and a hero who preserves the life of the true king and helps bring about the fall of a usurper. Even if Christmas werewolves aren't our thing today, we can still support the downfall of tyrants, I think.

Coming Next Month

In January, I'll be directing a wonderful one-act play by Marc Castle called Into the Light for American Renaissance Theater Company.

The play is being presented as part of two bills of one-act plays, with each bill consisting of four short plays. Hence, the festival is called Two by Four.

Into the Light stars Marc Castle (the author himself) as a recently departed soul who arrives in the afterlife only to discover it's not exactly what he thought it would be.

The play also features Terri Campion, Jeannie Dalton, and Ralph Pochoda. Harriet Carr is stage managing. It will be going up with the plays My Girl by Terri Campion, Eye of the Beholder by Kathryn Grant, and The New Pasteur by Michael McGoldrick.

The Two by Four festival runs January 22nd through 27th at HB Studio's 124 Bank Street Theater. You can see Into the Light on the 23rd and 24th at 7pm, the 25th at 3pm, and the 27th at 7pm. Tickets are $25.

A Later Incident

As I previously wrote, my play After an Earlier Incident has been getting a lot of attention lately. It was supposed to have a reading this Saturday in Brooklyn and then another reading on Monday at Theatre for the New City. Well, the Brooklyn reading has been postponed until sometime in the new year, but the Monday reading is still on -- so please come!

The piece stars Caryn Osofsky and Nick Walther as two New Yorkers trying to connect after both having undergone some horrific experiences. It's a comedy about terrible things and second chances. The opening scene previously had a workshop outside of Chicago at the Theatre of Western Springs, but this will be the first public reading of the full script, which runs about 90 minutes.

Caryn Osofsky previously appeared off-Broadway in Highest Standard of Living and The Fantasticks, in which she played Luisa. She also is a long-time member of the American Renaissance Theater Company. She performed in the site-specific production of Fast Food Voices for ARTC, and has appeared on film in Song Sung Blue, Definitely Maybe, and Rolling. She also wrote and directed the short film Pric-ture This!

Nick Walther has performed off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and beyond, at venues including Theatre Row, MoMA PS1, Chain Theatre, Brick Theater, and Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, among others. He is a member of American Renaissance Theater Company and Theatre Breaking Through Barriers. His audiobook narration work can be found on Audible and wherever audiobooks are sold. 

Both are wonderful, which you can see for yourself on Monday, December 15th, at 7pm at Theatre for the New City. Full information on the reading is available here:

Theatre for the New City - After an Earlier Incident

Reservations can be made by email at tncdreamup@gmail.com.

A Bold Stroke for a Wife

I've previously blogged about Susanna Centlivre's play The Busie Body, which was one of the most produced English comedies of the 18th century.

Today, however, many critics prefer her play A Bold Stroke for a Wife, which pushes back against certain constraints on women while at the same time providing an amazing role for a (male) actor.

The play premiered at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1718, featuring Christopher Bullock as Colonel Fainwell. The colonel falls in love with Anne Lovely, originally played by Jane Rogers, who had actually married Bullock the previous year.

Obviously, the hero wants to marry Lovely. (Come on. Even her name is beautiful!) But in order to do so, he has to win the consent of four different guardians, each one of whom is opposed to what the other three want for the unfortunate woman.

In order to win her, our hero makes a bold stroke for a wife, hence the title. Fainwell decides he must fain well various different personalities, winning over each guardian in turn. This means the actor playing Fainwell portrays a character who constantly disguises himself and plays other characters. He easily wins over the first guardian, the fop Sir Philip Modelove, simply by dressing well and adopting French manners. Convincing the other guardians is not so easy.

To persuade the antiquarian Mr. Periwinkle to allow him to marry Lovely, Fainwell puts on "Egyptian dress" and pretends to be a traveler from far-off lands. He convinces Periwinkle he can do a number of fantastical things, including make himself invisible, which he does by means of a trap door. The plan is ruined, though, when a drawer in an inn recognizes Fainwell and calls him colonel. He then has to pivot and instead pretend that Periwinkle's uncle has died so that he can trick him into signing something without noticing what it is.

A third guardian, Tradelove, is a "City" type who loves nothing but... well... trade. Act IV opens in Jonathan's coffee house, which was a center for stock trading in the early eighteenth century, and was a forerunner of the London Stock Exchange. In fact, the first line of the act is "South Sea at seven-eighths! Who buys?" Not long later, Jonathan's would be at the heart of the South Sea Bubble, in which shares of the South Sea Company rose spectacularly high and then collapsed in 1720, only two years after the play premiered.

Fainwell pretends to be a Dutch merchant (because Dutch accents were hysterical in 18th-century Britain) and wins a bunch of money from Tradelove, then agrees to forgive the debt if he grants permission to marry his ward. Tradelove actually thinks he's the one doing the swindling, since three other guardians have to give their permission before anyone can marry Lovely. Little does he know, Fainwell has already concocted plans to get permission from two of them, leaving only the hypocritical Quaker, Obadiah Prim.

Act V takes place in Prim's house, where Fainwell pretends to be a Quaker to win Lovely's hand, taking on the name and identity of another man, Simon Pure. The plan works, and Anne Lovely gets to marry the man she wants. The play ends with Fainwell reciting a poem in praise of choice, concluding with the couplet:

               'Tis Liberty of Choice that sweetens Life,

               Makes the glad Husband and the happy Wife.

Centlivre is not nearly as famous now as she was in the eighteenth century, but her plays can still bring a smile to one's lips.

Stoppard's Legacy

Yesterday, the world learned of the death of Tom Stoppard, who was probably the world's greatest living playwright. As it so happens, I had a ticket that night to see Archduke by Rajiv Joseph, who like all dramatists today could not help but be influenced by Stoppard.

I think it's fair to say that Archduke couldn't have been written without Stoppard's plays, which brought high comedy to intellectual niche issues. Stoppard burst onto the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which brought the sensibility of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot together with William Shakespeare's best-known tragedy, telling the whole story through the eyes of seemingly insignificant characters.

Stoppard followed up that success with The Real Inspector Hound, which skewered the mysteries of Agatha Christie with the same intellectual vigor he had used with Shakespeare. It also happens to be one of the funniest one-act plays you'll ever encounter. His 1972 play Jumpers satirized passing fads in British politics, but also probed the deepest recesses of human emotion. One of my favorites of his plays, Travesties, imagines unlikely meetings involving author James Joyce, revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara.

Critics who had accused Stoppard of lacking emotion had to eat their words when he premiered Arcadia in 1993. He followed that up with other successes, including the three-part epic The Coast of Utopia, the deeply personal Rock 'n' Roll, and most recently the sprawling Leopoldstadt. All of those plays re-imagine historical events in intensely theatrical ways, something Joseph tries to do in Archduke.

While I didn't find Archduke up to the standards of some of Joseph's other plays like Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, it clearly has ambition, and I have to applaud it for that. The play portrays Gavrillo Princip, the assassin whose bullets ultimately started the First World War. Rather than directly portray the farcical manner in which that assassination unfolded, Joseph shows what happened before the fateful day.

Newcomer Jake Berne plays Princip, but the real star of the play is Patrick Page, who plays Dragutin Dimitrijevic, leader of the Black Hand Society. Page's fast past, sharp wit, and impeccable timing would make him perfect for a role in a Stoppard play. How sad we'll never get another one again.

After an Earlier Incident

This summer, I had a workshop of the first scene of my play After an Earlier Incident at Theatre of Western Springs. Next, month, the full play will be having two readings with Caryn Osofsky and Nick Walther, with whom I've been developing the piece at American Renaissance Theater Company. 

After an Earlier Incident tells the story of recently widowed Jen who meets the perpetually awkward Elliot at a restaurant for their first date. Things do not go well. The play asks how two people can relate to one another when the technology we use to communicate keeps getting in the way. It's a comedy about trying to live and love when tragedy lies just below the surface.

Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research will be hosting the first reading on Saturday, December 13th at 2:30pm. They're located on the second floor of 251 Huron Street in Brooklyn near the Greenpoint Avenue stop on the G train. Proceeds from tickets and the bar (yes, there will be a bar) will all go to support Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research.

Then on Monday, December 15th, we'll be reading the play at Theater for the New City at 7:00pm. Readings there are free, but there's a $5 suggested donation, again going to support the theatre, which is located at 155 1st Avenue, between between 9th and 10th Street in Manhattan.

Samara Graham will be reading stage directions for both readings. I hope you can join us!

Henry Arthur Jones

The British dramatist Henry Arthur Jones has fallen out of fashion now, but he was once extraordinarily popular.

I've previously written about The Silver King, a melodrama Jones co-wrote with Henry Herman that opened at the Princess's Theatre in 1882, starring Wilson Barrett as a reformed drunkard who makes his fortune in a Nevada silver mine.

Two years later, Jones collaborated again with Herman in a bizarre reworking of Henrk Ibsen's A Doll House called Breaking the Butterfly. The play sought to give the drama a happy ending, in which the husband offers to ruin himself for his wife before the difficulties are resolved without sacrifice.

That's not what happens in Jones's 1894 play The Masqueraders, though. The play famously staged a card game in which one man won the wife and child of another. He then whisks his new "wife" off to the Alps, thinking to raise a family abroad with the woman he loves. Ultimately, though, the woman's sister convinces him that this plan would render her impure in the eyes of her child. Instead he undertakes a journey to Africa in which he will most likely perish.

Africa seems to have been a convenient place for Jones to send men off to once their romantic lives grew too complicated. He did the same thing at the end of his 1897 play The Liars. In that play, Edward Falkner is in love with a married woman, Lady Jessica Nepean. Her domineering husband Gilbert nearly drives her into Falkner's arms, but in the final act, the comical Sir Christopher Deering whisks Falkner off to Africa to mediate with some warring chieftains, leaving Lady Jessica to return to her husband.

However, The Liars should not be confused with Jones's later play The Lie, which was made into a (now lost) silent film. Perhaps when you write as many plays as he did, you have to start cycling back through title ideas.