The Lady From the Sea

When I found out that Hudson Classical Theater Company would be performing an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea, I knew I'd want to see it.

I missed opening weekend since I was at the Shaw Symposium in Canada, which is perhaps ironic, since this adaptation by Hudson Classical's artistic director, Susane Lee, resets Ibsen's play in Canada, in a town along the Saint Lawrence.

Well, I finally caught up with the production last night, and I wasn't disappointed. Hudson Classical is best known for their outdoor productions of plays by William Shakespeare, including standout stagings of Richard II and Coriolanus. In addition to their recent Shakespearean triumphs, they did a much better job adapting Ibsen than some other productions I've seen recently, and Lee's script is faithful to the spirit of the original play.

Aya Ibaraki stars as Ellida, the second wife of the esteemed physician Dr. Wangel, played by Quint Spitzer. Ellida feels trapped between two worlds, longing for the freedom of the sea, as personified by a mysterious stranger (Drew Brock Baker), but also feeling gratitude and affection for her husband and the small town filled with summer tourists where she lives with him and his family.

Yes, it's definitely his family, not hers. Ellida's two stepdaughters don't exactly go all out to make her feel at home. The younger daughter Hilda, played by Katrina Dykstra, even plays a cruel joke on her, leaving Ellida to awkwardly accept flowers as if it's her birthday. The elder daughter Bolette, played by Maya Small, is more sympathetic, but still has trouble feeling much of anything for her stepmother.

The play relies on a mysterious sense of the supernatural, embodied by the stranger from Ellida's past who returns to collect on a promise made long ago. The production is skillfully directed by Nicholas Martin-Smith, so be sure to see it before it closes on August 17th.

The City Madam

In the plays of William Shakespeare, the colony of Virginia (named for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen) shows up only indirectly. Caliban in The Tempest isn't technically a Native American in the New World, though he can certainly be understood that way, and might have been by some of the play's original audience members.

Philip Massinger's play The City Madam gets us a little closer to portrayals of the natives of Virginia, though again somewhat indirectly, since in the context of the play, people are only pretending to be natives. At the end of Act III, Sir John Frugal and his two prospective sons-in-law Lacy and Plenty enter "as Indians." Sir John's plan is to pretend to have retired to a monastery while he grants his estate and the care of his family to his wayward brother Luke.

In the first half of the play, Luke's character seems a bit ambiguous. In his youth, he squandered away his money, but now he is living with his brother. Lady Frugal (the titular City Madam) and her daughters abuse Luke. Has Luke ultimately reformed, or if given the chance, would he once more fall back into his old ways? Sir John plans to test him, and at the same time test his wife and daughters, who have been acting proudly, trying to follow the fashions of the court rather than just live humbly as a citizen of the City of London should.

What the fake "Indians" would have looked like on a 17th-century London stage, I don't know, but the play does give us some idea of how British people in that period might have felt about Virginia. Lacy's father, who is in on the plot, entreats Luke on behalf of Sir John:

            Receive these Indians, lately sent him from

            Virginia, into your house; and labour

            At any rate with the best of your endeavours,

            Assisted by the aids of our divines,

            To make 'em Christians.

Luke, however, worships only money, and makes no attempt to convert the "Indians" to Christianity. Instead, they tell him they have a special arrangement with the devil. If he sends them a virtuous matron and two virgins to be sacrificed in Virginia, they'll send him back an entire mine of gold.

When Luke starts at the name of the devil, the chief "Indian" (Sir John) tells him, "if you / Desire to wallow in wealth and worldly honours, / You must make haste to be familiar with him." The satire here strikes me as more directed at British greed than at the actual religion of native Virginians. Still, the fact that Luke readily believes the natives can supply huge amounts of gold in return for female sacrifices might speak to the fantastic tales Britons received back from the New World.

Luke tells the women that the two daughters will be married off to Indian royalty, but they scorn the idea of emigrating to Virginia. According to one daughter, the people shipped to Virginia are "Condemn'd wretches, / Forfeited to the law" while the other calls them "Strumpets and bawds, / For the abomination of their life, / Spew'd out of their own country." Though the daughters had been portrayed as snobs, I imagine this was a common perception of the British colonists. In fact, Luke says that "Such indeed / Are sent as slaves to labour there."

At the end of the play, Sir John reveals himself. His wife and daughters are repentant, and Sir John turns out his wayward brother. "Hide thyself in some desert, / Where good men ne'er may find thee," he says, "or in justice / Pack to Virginia, and repent." Certainly, in the 17th century, Virginia must have seemed a wild place to Londoners, and a fitting wilderness in which to repent one's sins.

Academic Criticism on Armstrong

Not long ago, I received an email asking me if I'd written a play about Delia Bacon. The person had heard about it through the website Academia.edu.

It turns out, an academic scholar had published a paper analyzing my play The True Author... Revealed. Natalia Vysotska, a professor at Kyiv National Linguistic University, wrote a paper called "'I Am Not a Freak!' Delia Bacon as a Dramatis Persona" that appeared in American and European Studies 2017, which is published by Minsk State Linguistic University.

The paper cites this blog, as well as my play, which appears in The Best American Short Plays: 2008-2010. Katherine Harte-DeCoux has appeared in the one-act play at a couple of different venues in New York, and the piece also had a student production in Ottawa. It portrays Delia Bacon giving an imagined lecture at the U.S. Consulate in Liverpool, arguing that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon.

Vysotska correctly writes that the aim of the play is "not to take part in the long-lasting authorship debate" concerning the plays of Shakespeare. Rather, the piece "urges us to see the Bacon phenomenon not merely as a historical curiosity, still another 'mad woman in the attic', but as a dramatic figure at the intersection of cultural, gender, and power relations in the mid-19th c. USA going through crucial transformations."

It's gratifying to see my play analyzed in an academic paper, particularly one that also cites Nathanial Hawthorne and the renowned Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro. If you'd like to read the play, you can order a copy of the collection it appears in here.

The Jew of Malta

I hadn't planned on seeing Red Bull Theater's reading of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, but when my friend Susan told me she had an extra ticket, how could I resist?

Matthew Rauch starred as Barabas, the titular character who might have influenced not just William Shakespeare's Shylock, but also a slew of villains from Aaron the Moor to Richard III to Iago.

Like Shylock, Barabas is a victim of unfair treatment, but his quest for revenge goes outside the bounds of what can be considered reasonable. At the beginning of the play he is stripped of all his possessions by Ferneze, the Governor of Malta. Ferneze was played in the reading by Derek Smith, who gave a memorable performance as Lodovico in Red Bull's previous production of the John Webster tragedy The White Devil.

While Barabas and Ferenze give unflattering depictions of leaders of the Jewish and Christian worlds, the Islamic world is represented by Selim-Calymath, the son of the Ottoman Emperor. While Marlowe doesn't make any of these leaders come off very well, I found Calymath to be the least odious, at least as portrayed by Jason Bowen, who was excellent a couple of years ago in Lynn Nottage's Crumbs from the Table of Joy.

By far, however, the most sympathetic character is Barabas's daughter Abigail, played by Priyanka Kedia. Her father first forces her to become a nun so that she can retrieve a treasure hidden in a convent, then makes her the center of a love triangle that kills two young men, including Ferneze's son Don Lodowick, played by Samuel Adams. Distraught, Abigail converts to Christianity so she can enter a convent for real, earning the scorn of her father.

Barabas's partner in crime (who later foolishly betrays him) is a slave from Thrace named Ithamore. Steven Boyer, who is perhaps best known for playing an emotionally disturbed teenager with a penchant for puppetry in the Robert Askins play Hand to God, was delightfully evil in the reading as Ithamore.

The play, which had its first recorded performance in 1592, is famous for its use of a cauldron in which the protagonist is boiled alive. Philip Henslowe's prop list for the Lord Admiral's Men listed a cauldron that was likely used in the play's premiere and subsequent revivals.

Red Bull is not slated to revive the play in a full production anytime soon, but they will be presenting a new adaptation of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid beginning this May. It's on my list of things to see!

The 47th

When I was in London in 2022, I just missed being able to see The 47th, a new verse drama by Mike Bartlett that imagined a Presidential contest two years later between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Interestingly enough, I was back in the UK when President Biden announced he was dropping out of the race, meaning that in some respects, Bartlett's play was prophetic. Of course, just like Bartlett's previous drama King Charles III, many of the details proved inaccurate, even if other aspects were bourn out by events.

With the real Harris-Trump race heating up, I decided to pick up a copy of The 47th from The Drama Book Shop. The play opens with Trump speaking a denigrated iambic pentameter, since the conceit here is--like with King Charles III--the imagined future is told in the form of a Shakespearean chronicle play. Lear-like, Trump tests his three adult children to see who loves him the most. (As in real life, Trump never mentions Tiffany in the play.) After Don Jr. and Eric gush about how much they love their father, Ivanka says nothing. This might appear to be a nod to Cordelia in King Lear, but then Ivanka delivers a startling speech:

          If as my father you know not my love

          Then words will not identify your daughter.

          Your rightful heir will never beg, but trade.

          You know my talent, and my promise, too.

          I'm grateful for all that you have bestowed

          And vow that I'll repay that loan not just

          In full but with my share of interest.

One thing the play got wrong was envisioning a world in which the 2024 Republican nomination didn't belong to Trump from the beginning. Instead, Bartlett shows Ted Cruz as the front runner and presumed nominee. Trump offers to endorse him, but once in front of a crowd, he starts turning people against Cruz, referring to him as "an honourable man" just as Marc Antony does of Brutus is Julius Caesar. Trump ends up with the nomination, and though Act II does feature a Republican Senator from Ohio, it is not J.D. Vance but Ivanka who becomes Trump's running mate in the play.

The play also features a funeral for President Carter, who is thankfully still with us and hopes to cast his ballot this November. At the funeral, Trump whispers into Biden's ear, "I know about Jill." This small hint worms its way into Biden's brain, leading him to sleepwalk through the White House like Lady Macbeth. One advisor even worries aloud that the President will not be able to debate his opponent in such a condition. The play has Biden not just drop out of the race, though, but resign his office entirely, making Harris the 47th President, and thus the title character.

After the Trump in the play lets loose chaos on the streets, he is momentarily placed in jail. Bartlett begins a scene in Act IV quoting directly lines from Richard II. Trump immediately renounces the Shakespeare, however, saying that sitting upon the ground and telling sad stories of the death of kings is for "losers" not people like him. The fifth act returns to King Lear, with a reporter appearing having lost his eyes like the Earl of Gloucester. Ultimately, order is restored, but the audience is left wondering if what comes next might actually be worse.

The 47th didn't get everything right, but in its broad outline, it is uncomfortably close to the election currently going on in the United States.

Fable

The Broadway musical Gypsy has been revived numerous times, including with Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, and soon Audra McDonald. But how did this classic come to be written?

Doug DeVita's play Fable, now showing at FreeFall Theatre Company, tells this story, albeit through the eyes of a woman who thought the whole thing was a lie. That woman was June Havoc, an amazing actress and author who is probably best remembered as the character "Dainty June" in Gypsy.

DeVita's play actually has three different Junes. Bonnie Agan plays June in 2008, as Gypsy is about to be revived again with LuPone. Liz Power plays June in 1959, as the musical is being workshopped in preparation for its Broadway run. Mya Simkins plays June as a child, as she is pressured by her mother (played by Melissa Minyard) to succeed in vaudeville.

From her career as a child star on the vaudeville circuit to her negotiations with Broadway producer David Merrick over the rights to her life story so that Gypsy could go on, June Havoc had an adventurous existence. During the Great Depression, she performed in dance marathons (the subject of Havoc's own play Marathon '33), which is alluded to in Fable. The oldest of the three Junes continually reminds herself that she must always keep moving.

Later, she originated to role of Gladys Bumps in Pal Joey, but Fable spends more time on the failed musical Sadie Thompson, which was supposed to star Ethel Merman, until she quit the show in rehearsals to be replaced by none other than June Havoc. Ironically, Merman then played Havoc's mother when Gypsy opened on Broadway, a turn of events DeVita milks for all it's worth.

As Gypsy fans know, June was later eclipsed by her older sister, Gypsy Rose Lee, played in Fable by Heather Baird. Lee became a renowned burlesque performer, while her kid sister was stuck acting in plays by hack writers like William Shakespeare.

FreeFall's production is magnificently staged by director Eric Davis, with musical direction by Michael Raabe. They were also the team behind FreeFall's previous hit Oz, so if you're in St. Petersburg, don't miss it!

Enrico IV

When Luigi Pirandello wrote his play Enrico IV (or Henry IV as it is generally translated into English) there must have been some confusion in the audience about which Henry IV the play was portraying.

In fact, there's confusion on stage in the play about which Henry IV is being discussed. English-speaking audiences might immediately think of England's King Henry IV, the subject of multiple plays by William Shakespeare. The character of Berthold in the play, however, at first thinks the monarch in question is Henry IV of France.

How could the characters in the play not know which king it is they're dealing with on stage? As the audience learns in the first scene, the Henry IV in the play is not the real Henry IV, a Holy Roman Emperor who famously feuded with the Pope, but rather a wealthy man who was thrown from his horse while enacting the role of Henry IV in a pageant. Waking up after severe head trauma, he thinks he really is the man he was portraying.

For years now, the man's family and friends have been keeping up the act that he really is Henry IV to appease his madness. He later reveals, however, that he recovered his memory and is well aware that he's not an emperor. In order to appease his family and friends, though, he continues to play the role. Everyone in the play is acting, and is even aware that they are acting, but none of them are able to give up the roles and just be themselves.

All of this is a metaphor for society as a whole, as Pirandello makes clear. Pirandello began his playwriting career as a part of an Italian movement known as the Theatre of the Grotesque in which characters resemble puppets with no control over their own destinies. That certainly sounds like Enrico IV! The movement was known for a number of other tropes as well, such as irresolvable love triangles and unfaithful women. Yup, the play has those, too.

Pirandello went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and today the Pirandello Society of America keeps his memory alive in this country. They also publish PSA, a journal that published my own Pirandello adaptation, Wedding Night, based on one of his short stories. That play, however, doesn't have people pretending to be dead emperors.

A Martial Coriolanus

If you're going to stage an outdoor production of William Shakespeare's bloody tragedy Coriolanus in New York, there might be a more appropriate spot than outside the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park... but I'm not sure where that would be.

Fortunately, that's precisely where Hudson Classical Theatre Company does their shows, so it's pretty much an ideal spot to contemplate the exploits of Caius Martius, the noble Roman who after taking the Volscian town of Corioles earned the cognomen Coriolanus, only to then threaten destruction against Rome itself.

Benjamin Farmer plays the title character in this production which opened tonight under the direction of Nicholas Martin-Smith and Joseph Hamel. Bruce Barton plays Caius Martius's friend and mentor Menenius, though this production leaves out his famous speech to the rabble, using the body as a metaphor to forestall a riot. Shakespeare, by the way, pretty much lifted that speech from Plutarch.

In many productions, including the film starring Ralph Fiennes, the most memorable performance is given not by the actors playing the male leads, but by the woman playing Volumnia, the mother of Caius Martius who was really the one who saved Rome from destruction. Roxann Kraemer, an HCTC regular, plays Volumnia in this production, having been a superb Sir Oliver (changed to Lady Olivia) in the company's staging of The School for Scandal last year.

Other fine performances are delivered by Fever Hawk Browne as General Cominius, Joshua Gutierrez as the Volscian leader Aufidius, Cindy Xu as Caius Martius's wife Virgilia, and David Palmer Brown and Annette Fox as the two unethical tribunes who turn the mob against a victorious Coriolanus right after he's just been elected Consul. (In this modern dress production, I almost expected them to be holding signs saying Stop the Steal.)

The production runs through July 21st (no show on July 4th), so see it while you can. Performances start at 6:30pm Thursdays through Sundays.

Daddy Issues

On this Father's Day Eve, I went to Central Park to see New York Classical Theatre perform Henry IV.

Director Stephen Burdman adapted both parts of Shakespeare's two central plays from the Henriad into one two-hour performance, featuring a game cast frequently performing multiple roles.

Ian Antal plays Prince Hal, the heir to the throne who finds himself torn between two father figures, his actual father, King Henry IV (Nick Salamone), and his surrogate father, the rascally Sir John Falstaff (John Michalski).

Due to financial constraints, the production has to rely on considerable amounts of doubling, often with actors changing their personas purposefully in full view of the audience. Juan Luis Acevedo, for instance, plays the rebellious Northumberland, only to then personify law and order as the Lord Chief Justice.

Some originally male parts are also adjusted to be played by women. Anique Clements plays Ned Poins, now transformed into Bess Poins, as well as Edmund (now Countess) Mortimer. Carine Montbertrand plays the Earl of Worcester (also transformed into a Countess in this version) as well as the tavern keeper Mistress Quickly. One of the best female roles in the play is Hotspur's wife, Lady Katherine, played by Briana Gibson Reeves, who is this production also doubles as Bardolph.

Frequently, when companies combine the two parts of Henry IV, they basically just do Part One, and then a couple of scenes from Part Two. While this adaptation heavily leans on the first play, it also includes key scenes from the sequel sometimes left out of productions. These include the mourning of Lady Katherine and the politic maneuvers of Hal's younger brother John (played by Damian Jermaine Thompson, who also plays Hal's foil Hotspur).

The show is still in previews, but is scheduled to run until June 30th in Central Park. Then, it will be playing from July 2nd through 7th in Carl Schurz Park and July 9th through 14th in Battery Park. See it if you can!

Top Plays of 2023

Once again, I'm compiling a list of the top ten plays I saw in New York City that opened in 2023.

Last year, the musical Paradise Square topped my list, though critics were mixed in their reviews of the show, and it ended up closing at a financial loss.

Alas, I can't claim that this is the year theatre came back in New York, but a number of good shows did open in 2023, a couple of which are still running, so see them while you can!

10. The Smuggler - Irish Rep had an ambitious season this year, but the best thing I saw there was a very small show, Ronán Noone's one-man verse drama about a Massachusetts bar tender who ends up getting involved in human trafficking.

9. The School for Scandal - Hudson Classical Theatre Company continued its tradition this year of bringing solid productions of classical plays to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park. This year's staging of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal brought together delightful acting with a creative costume design.

8. The Mind Mangler - This year the team that brought us The Play That Goes Wrong opened a new show in their franchise featuring Henry Lewis as an inept mentalist. The show is funny, which I expected, but also successfully pulls off a couple of brilliant magic tricks, which I wasn't expecting. Best of all, though, it has a tremendous heart that is no illusion at all. (Still playing!)

7. Crumbs from the Table of Joy - Keen Company's revival of Lynn Nottage's break-out play from 1995 was another unexpected delight, in part due to the performance of Shanel Bailey as Ernestine, a young woman in 1950s New York struggling to deal with changes both in the world and in her own family. Bailey definitely had a good year in 2023, as she appeared in another great revival on my list as well.

6. The Knight of the Burning Pestle - I directed this Jacobean classic when I was in college, so I knew I'd have to see a co-production by Red Bull and Fiasco Theater. Paco Tolson led the cast as a grocer's apprentice who becomes the titular Knight of the Burning Pestle. What made the piece a sheer joy, however, was the interaction of the ensemble, including Ben Steinfeld, Royer Bokus, and Teresa Avia Lim.

5. Here We Are - Stephen Sondheim's collaboration with David Ives finally made it to the stage this year. Even with flawed direction, the piece soars with a cast that includes Jeremy Shamos, Amber Gray, Bobby Cannavale, Rachel Bay Jones, Steven Pasquale, Micaela Diamond, and David Hyde Pierce. Whether or not you've seen any of the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel that inspired the piece, you should be able to appreciate the play's existential musings on modern life. Hurry to see the show before it closes on January 21st.

4. Arms and the Man - Shanel Bailey came back to Theatre Row this fall to appear as Raina in Gingold Theatrical Group's magnificent production of Shaw's anti-war classic Arms and the Man. Director David Staller brought together a wonderful cast that also included Keshav Moodliar, Ben Davis, Delphi Borich, Thomas Jay Ryan, Evan Zes, and Karen Ziemba. As someone who is a fan of toy theatres, I also loved the set designed by Lindsay G. Fuori to resemble a paper stage from the Victorian era. I'm looking forward to seeing what GTG does next in 2024!

3. Hamlet - The Public Theater chose Kenny Leon to direct the last production of Shakespeare in the Park before the Delacorte Theatre is shut down for renovations. Beowulf Boritt's set playfully echoed the one he previously designed for Leon's Much Ado About Nothing. The biggest joy, though, was seeing famed Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson play the most engrossing Claudius I've ever seen. Ato Blankson-Wood was able to hold his own as young Prince Hamlet, and the cast also included Lorraine Toussaint as Gertrude, Daniel Pearce as Polonius, and Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia.

2. The Great Gatsby - The immersive production of The Great Gatsby was criminally underrated. The piece contained a couple of more traditional scenes, such as the tea Jay Gatsby prepared for Daisy, where the entire audience was assembled in one place. What was most interesting, though, was the way we were all divided into small groups to wander through side scenes, having interactions with various characters, sometimes with other audience members, and sometimes one-on-one. The live music was an added bonus. Sadly, the show closed in New York, but there's a chance it might come back, if not here, in another city.

1. Becomes a Woman - My top choice this year is likely to surprise a lot of people, but the Mint Theater Company performed an immense service in bringing Betty Smith's long forgotten play to the stage at last. Before Smith penned her 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she wrote Becomes a Woman, but this was 1931, and no theatre wanted to touch a play with a feminist bent so far ahead of its time. In the Mint's long overdue production, Emma Pfitzer Price starred as Francie Nolan, a character whose name Smith later used as the heroine of her classic novel. Other strong performances were delivered by Jeb Brown, Peterson Townsend, Gina Daniels, Jason O'Connell, and Duane Boutté.

So that's my list! I'm looking forward to more great theatre in 2024.

The Spirit of Burlesque

In an 1888 article in The Universal Review, the British dramatist F.C. Burnand set out to defend burlesque, not the sexy strip-shows of today that we call by that name, but the comic plays of the 19th century that spoofed the hit plays then popular on the stage.

According to Burnand, "'To burlesque' is to make ridiculous by means of exaggeration, mimicry, parody, grotesque distortion, travesty, and caricature." Originally, though, the term had been used along with "melodrama" and "burletta" to define the types of plays that could be performed by the minor theatres that did not hold royal patents like the Theatres Royal at Drury Lane and Covent Garden had.

Prior to the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843, the minor theatres in London had to add a certain amount of music in order to prove they weren't invading the territory of the patent houses. (Exactly how much music they needed to add was a matter of some debate and considerable litigation.) For Burnand, though, the spirit of the burlesque goes back to the Miles Gloriosus of Roman comedy and the comedic Ancient Pistol of Shakespeare's history plays.

Burnand himself was a prolific writer of burlesque plays, but he looked back admiringly on earlier work by James Planché, whose Olympic Revels was a hit when produced by Madame Lucia Elizabeth Vestris. Planché also wrote an adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes that utilized the structure of the original while poking fun of topics current in the 19th century. The play featured Charles Matthews as a one-man Greek chorus, comically dressed in a Doric chiton over his modern clothes.

Burlesque, in the hands of a skilled dramatist like Planché, is "the candid friend" of the drama, according to Burnand. He writes that burlesque "by means of parody, travesty, and mimicry, publicly exposes on the stage some preposterous absurdities of stagecraft which may be a passing fashion of the day, justly ridicules some histrionic pretensions, parodies false sentiment, and shows that the shining metal put forward as real gold is only theatrical tinfoil after all.” It is just such parody that "killed the old blood-and-thunder melodrama," he concludes.

Burnand should know, as he wrote burlesques of previously successful melodramas such as Black-Eyed Susan by Douglas Jerrold, as well as burlesques of Shakespeare classics like Richard III. The spirit of burlesque is present whenever we pull back the artifice of theatre and comically expose the rude mechanical conventions that lie beneath it.

Theatre Spaces 1920-2020

I recently finished reading Iain Mackintosh's new book Theatre Spaces 1920-2020: Finding the Fun in Functionalism. It's equal parts personal memoir, history of modern drama, and fascinating screed on why the way we configure the audience in a physical space matters so immensely.

You might not have heard of Mackintosh before, but anyone who can get Sir Richard Eyre to write the forward to his new book is not to be trifled with. After helping to run Britain's touring Prospect Theatre Company in the 1960s and '70s, Mackintosh joined Theatre Projects Consultants, using his experience with which spaces worked and which didn't to advise companies looking to build or remodel theatres.

Though the title claims to only cover one century, Mackintosh begins by going back to 1870 and the planning of Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. Seating for the theatre was to consist of a giant fan shape surrounding a massive proscenium stage and sunken orchestra pit. Originally, there was no elevated mezzanine or balcony, though an upper level was added later. A fan-shaped auditorium works for Wagner's epics, but Mackintosh argues it can be deadly when applied to lighter operas such as those by Mozart.

The book then takes a detour through an even older theatre, the Festival Theatre Cambridge, which was originally designed by William Wilkins in 1814. I had a chance to visit the theatre (now a Buddhist center) back in 2016 at a conference on Regency-era drama held by the Society for Theatre Research. In the 1920s, Terence Gray acquired the theatre and remodeled it, but left intact some of the original stage machinery. Later, he offered Gordon Craig the chance to take over the theatre, have complete artistic control, and do whatever he wanted, but Craig demurred.

Mackintosh treats the older theatre extensively because it illustrates his point that an old-fashioned horseshoe-shaped wraparound suspended over the orchestra seating provides better intimacy than Wagner's giant fan, which has proved so influential. He argues that the thrust stages pioneered by Tyrone Guthrie provide a better alternative to a fan-shaped auditorium, like that of the Olivier at London's National Theatre. When I saw the brilliant musical Hadestown in the Olivier, I was disappointed, especially since the show had been so enjoyable in the much smaller space of New York Theatre Workshop. According to Macintosh, however, almost nothing works in the massive Olivier, which has a stage far too wide and audiences inevitably stretched out far from the action.

Fan-shaped theatres frequently have poor acoustics, in spite of being modeled on ancient Greek stages that can have excellent acoustics when used properly. Mackintosh argues that the massive theatre at Epidaurus is larger than those used by the great classical dramatists of Athens, and was later more than doubled in size by the Romans, who preferred watching spectacle to listening to poetry. Rather than using the fan layout of the Greeks, Mackintosh prefers theatres like London's Barbican, which uses multiple wrap-around levels to fit the whole audience into a smaller area, making sure no one is positioned too far away from the stage.

The book is also kind to historical reconstructions, such as Shakespeare's Globe and the smaller Wanamaker Playhouse attached to it. When the reconstructed Globe was opened, some purists thought it would just be a tourist trap, but in spite of not receiving the large subsidies enjoyed by the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe offers cheaper tickets than the NT, and continues to attract young audiences who prefer its uncomfortable seats (or worse yet--standing room) to the comfortable but pricey seats in the Olivier.

Mackintosh also chronicles efforts to save historic theatres, including the Theatres Royal in Bristol, Bury St. Edmunds, and Richmond Yorkshire. When the theatre in Dunfermline, Scotland couldn't be revitalized, its interior was shipped to Sarasota, Florida, where it graced the home of Asolo Rep. Some other theatre cultures were not so fortunate. In a later chapter, the book discusses the wholesale destruction of traditional theatres in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps a vindication of Macintosh's preference for wrap-around seating is that the Royal Shakespeare Company modified their main theatre in 2010 to provide a thrust stage. I remember seeing a production of As You Like It in the old theatre there in 1996 and being unimpressed. Overall, I think Mackintosh makes a good case.

Hamlet in the Park

Last night, I had the good fortune of seeing the Public Theater's production of Hamlet at the Delacorte in Central Park.

It's directed by Kenny Leon, whose production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing in 2019 was such a hit. That production re-imagined the comedy in a near-future United States where a struggle for basic rights is ongoing. (As... well... as it just so happens... it is....)

When I walked into the Delacorte, it became clear that this production would be a sequel of sorts to Leon's last play in the park. The set--designed by Beowulf Boritt, who also designed Much Ado--looks like the estate we had seen previously in a comedy wrecked by some unknown cataclysm. The large brick house from Much Ado appears to be partially sunken into the ground. The flagpole that proudly waved Old Glory in the last production is tilted at an angle. While Much Ado featured an SUV rolling onto the stage, Hamlet shows an SUV mired in the earth.

Center stage at the beginning of the play is a flag-draped coffin, presumably of the dead King Hamlet, whose portrait also dominates the set. A quartet of vocalists comes out to sing, which fortunately also allows latecomers to be seated without disturbing the play too much. Then the play begins in earnest with the funeral of the dead king, and we get to meet the cast, led by Ato Blankson-Wood. As young Prince Hamlet, Blankson-Wood communicates the play's famous monologues in a straight-forward manner, clearly getting across the complex verse in a way that is relatable and easy to understand for the audience.

When it comes time for Hamlet to confront the ghost of his father, the production has a few tricks up its sleeve, which is why it's good Leon cut the opening scene of the script where some minor characters meet the ghost. Seeing this up front would have ruined the surprise later on in the play. Plus, Hamlet as we know it today is pieced together from three different texts, so it has to be cut if the audience is going to experience anything close to how the original play would have been performed. Overall, the production does a good job trimming the play, though some of the piece's most famous lines have to be altered to eliminate any references to it taking place in Denmark. (The production is whole-heartedly American.)

One of the joys of seeing Shakespeare in the Park is getting to watch a variety of tremendous actors in supporting roles, and this production is no different. The incomparable John Douglas Thompson (who recently won praise for his performance in Irish Rep's production of Endgame) plays Claudius, and he's easily the best Claudius I've ever seen. As the usurping king tries to pray for forgiveness, we see he is truly overcome by remorse, even as he is unable to take the next step and actually repent. His interactions with Lorraine Toussaint are sexy and filled with warmth, making us see immediately why she chose to marry him. Both of them have some comic interactions with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played perfectly by Mitchell Winter and Brandon Gill.

Additional comedy is provided by not just Greg Hildreth as the gravedigger, but by Daniel Pearce as Polonius. I previously saw Pearce as Macduff in a production the Public did of Shakespeare's Macbeth, and then later in another Public production, Jane Anderson's Mother of the Maid. As Polonius, Pearce milks the long-winded advisor for all he's worth. Fine performances are also delivered by Solea Pfeiffer who plays his daughter Ophelia and Nick Rehberger who plays his son Laertes.

This production also adds in some hip hop with Warner Miller's Horatio and with the players, led by Colby Lewis, reminding us that even gods cry. This summer will also be your last chance to see Shakespeare in the Park at the old Delacorte before it gets completely redone, so make sure you don't miss this wonderful production! 

Elizabeth Farren

Elizabeth Farren began her career as an actress, and ended up Countess of Derby. Along the way, her life was a pretty wild ride.

She was born in 1759 to an Irish father from Cork and an English mother from Liverpool. Her father was an apothecary, but he gave up medicine for the stage. As a girl, Farren was said to have beat a drum for his troupe of traveling players as they went from town to town.

After her father died, the family tried to support themselves with Elizabeth and her sister Peggy taking small roles on the stage. By the time she was 15, Elizabeth Farren was playing the role of Rosetta in Love in a Village, a ballad opera by Isaac Bickerstaffe and Thomas Arne.

In 1777, Farren appeared at the Haymarket Theatre in London as Kate Hardcastle in Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. She lodged near the theatre with her mother. George Colman the Elder, who managed the Haymarket, allegedly gave her mother the nickname "Tin Pocket" after she gave her daughter a pocket lined with tin to hold hot boiled beef.

According to C.J. Hamilton, the turning point in Farren's career came when she was invited to perform at some private theatricals held by the Duke of Richmond. She acted together with the Earl of Derby, who was married at the time. Though the Earl was struck with Farren, she made a point of never being in his company unless in the presence of a third person for respectability's sake.

When Frances Abington retired in 1782, Farren took her place as the most prominent actress in London for depicting ladies of fashion. She played Mrs. Euston in Elizabeth Inchbald's comedy I'll Tell You What, and took on numerous Shakespearean roles, including Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Hermione in The Winter's Tale. All the while, Lord Derby followed her, now unhappily separated from his wife.

Lady Derby died in 1797, and the Earl proposed to Farren. She gave her farewell performance as Lady Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's A School for Scandal. She and Lord Derby had three children together, though only one daughter survived to adulthood.

Perhaps Farren's most famous legacy, though, was a portrait painted of her by Thomas Lawrence, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nancy Hallam as Imogen

When I visited the art museums in Williamsburg, I saw an interesting portrait of Nancy Hallam performing the role of Imogen, a character from William Shakespeare's Cymbeline.

The portrait, shown here, is the earliest known depiction of a theatrical production in North America. Hallam was a member of the American Company of Comedians, which toured the British colonies in the 18th century.

Charles Wilson Peale painted the portrait in Annapolis in 1771, depicting Hallam not in Shakespeare's play, but in a musical adaptation based upon it. Hallam was especially known for her singing, and performed widely before the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Unfortunately, the war proved devastating for acting companies. Hallam, who had played roles in The Clandestine Marriage, Love in a Village, The Provoked Husband, and other plays, had to leave with the rest of her company to Jamaica in 1774 as things were heating up in the colonies. She ended up staying there and marrying a church organist.

Hallam was praised for her "classical strictness of expression" as well as her beautiful voice. Her expression is certainly noteworthy in the painting, but more striking is her outfit. Imogen is supposed to be dressed as a boy in the scene, but as for why a British damsel should be dressed in an oriental costume for a trip to Wales, your guess is as good as mine.

That Peal chose to paint a heroine with sword drawn escaping from tyranny might have been a comment on the political situation before the revolution. In any case, few people today remember Hallam's career outside of this portrait.

Shaw Conference at William and Mary

Today was the opening day of the International Shaw Society's conference on "Shaw and Heroism" at the College of William and Mary.

I made the mistake this morning of going to the Wren building for the opening, not realizing that this historic site was just being used for performances. The regular sessions are in Miller Hall. Fortunately, I got there in time to hear a keynote address by Peter Gahan.

Peter spoke on Shaw's heroes and their predicaments. Since we are meeting in the colonial city of Williamsburg, he noted that Shaw's Three Plays for Puritans all take place in colonies. Conforming to Shaw's ideas about Puritanism, these plays portray sex not as the main action of the play, but not non-existent, either.

Caesar and Cleopatra, which takes place in Roman-occupied Egypt, is a construction not just of different historical accounts, but also of different theatrical depictions of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, Peter said. William Shakespeare's plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are models, but Peter also pointed out later versions of the story that Shaw likely knew, including John Fletcher's The False One, Pierre Corneille's The Death of Pompey, and Colley Cibber's Caesar in Egypt.

The other plays in Three Plays for Puritans are The Devil's Disciple, which takes place in New England during the American Revolution, and Captain Brassbound's Conversion, which takes place in Morocco. Captain Brassbound's name comes from a fragment of a poem by Percy Shelley that Mary Shelley attached to the preface of The Witch of Atlas, which runs in part: "And, when / I went among my kind, with triple brass / Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed, / To bear scorn, fear, and hate--a woful mass!" Peter had some nice insights into Brassbound's character.

We had a long break before our next speaker, Bernard Dukore, who used to run the theatre program at CUNY Graduate Center, though before my time. Bernie talked about how Shaw considers ideals to be masks for the truth, and he applied this to Arms and the Man as well as other plays. When it opened in 1894, Arms and the Man was so unconventional that the Prince of Wales walked out of it, he said! A 1932 film version showed the battle that takes place offstage in the play, but the film was later shortened, and that sequence cut. Shaw wrote his own screenplay for Arms and the Man in 1941, with the American star Ginger Rogers to play the leading role of Raina, but Rogers decided she wanted to play Luka, and the production never happened.

Bernie also discussed Shaw's never-shot screenplay for Saint Joan. That screenplay showed battle scenes as well, including a cannon shattering a tower and a bridge being destroyed by fire and gunpowder. In the afternoon, we got to see a staged reading of a cut version of Saint Joan, and this evening we saw a workshopped version of a new musical called MADam Lucy Deceased by William Schermerhorn and Elise Morris. (The show will be performed for the public on Sunday.) McKenna Grantier, who played the Earl of Warwick in Saint Joan, took on the role of Lucy Ludwell Paradise, a famous hostess of the eighteenth century who was ultimately committed to a madhouse. Her ghost is said to still haunt Williamsburg.

I didn't hear Madam Lucy's ghost last night, but I've got a few more days to spend in Williamsburg. Tomorrow I'm presenting on Sybil Thorndike's portrayal of Joan of Arc in Saint Joan, and on Sunday Mary Christian is scheduled to speak.

I'm looking forward to it!

A Forgery in the Library!

Yesterday, I was at the Rosenbach Library and Museum in Philadelphia, and what did I see there? A blatant forgery!

Don't worry. The Rosenbach knows it's a forgery. In fact, they acquired it because it was a known forgery... one of the most famous forgeries of all time.

The item in question is a supposed love letter by William Shakespeare to his mistress, Anne Hathaway, whom he later married. Obviously, it's not authentic. It was penned in the 1790s, not the 1500s, and not by William Shakespeare, but William-Henry Ireland.

Ireland fooled some of the best minds in England into thinking he had uncovered previously unknown writings by Shakespeare. These included letters, a profession of faith (conveniently confirming that the Bard held conventional religious beliefs and belonged to the official Church of England), and even a new play called Vortigern and Rowena.

That play had a rather infamous opening (and closing) night at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on April 2, 1796, just one day late to be an April Fool's joke. The premiere was no laughing matter, though. It starred the famed actor John Philip Kemble as the ancient King of Britain, Vortigern. The comedic actress Dorothea Jordan, mistress to the future King William IV, took on the minor role of Flavia.

Together with screenwriter Matt Bird, I wrote a play about Ireland's forgeries. The piece is called Shakespeare or the Devil, and it was named a finalist for the Shakespeare's New Contemporaries program at the American Shakespeare Center. The play has a flexible cast of 5-10 actors playing multiple characters.

If you'd like to read the script with an eye for future production, please contact me. I would love to see it performed!

Knight of the Burning Pestle

Many years ago, when I was a student at Drew University, I directed an abridged version of the Jacobean comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle for the medieval revels.

That's why I was so excited when I found out that Red Bull Theater and Fiasco Theater would be doing a co-production of the play. Last night, I finally got a chance to see it.

If you're not familiar with the piece, it's the first instance I know of where members of the audience are scripted to invade the stage. As the play begins, a humble grocer and his wife object to the piece about to be performed and demand that the actors put on a play about someone like them.

At first, the actors want nothing to do with these rowdy audience members, but then the grocer produces his apprentice, who recites a passage from The First Part of Henry IV by William Shakespeare. Seeing he can act, they incorporate him into their show. Since grocers used mortars and pestles to prepare ingredients, they dub his character the Knight of the Burning Pestle.

If you're sensing similarities to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, you are not alone. In fact, the would-be knight even has a battle with a barber, as does Quixote. This type of silliness is perfect for Fiasco, which uses creative ensembles to produce often hysterical results. Noah Brody and Emily Young directed this production, but I got the feeling that everyone on stage contributed to the zany creation.

Paco Tolson plays the titular character as a big lug with a giant heart--if not a lot of brains. He is accompanied on his quests by a squire, Tim, played by Ben Steinfeld. In the original, he is also joined by a dwarf, but this production changes that to a horse, played hilariously by Royer Bokus. The cast also includes Teresa Avia Lim, who was featured in Red Bull's production of The Alchemist in 2021, which occasions a rather funny in-joke during the play.

This production adds plenty of music, along with ad-libbed lines never penned by Francis Beaumont, who originally wrote the play (with or without the assistance of John Fletcher, who was credited on the play's title page when it was first printed, but is not thought by modern critics to have been a co-author). In addition to being silly, it's also surprisingly moving in parts, including the piece's closing song.

Unfortunately, the play closes on Saturday, so see it while you still can!

Translating Lessing

I've previously blogged about Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play Nathan the Wise, one of the most famous dramas to come out of the German Enlightenment.

Lessing was a towering figure, not just for his plays, but also for his theoretical writings. His book Laocoon is an important meditation on the nature of art, and he compiled much of his thoughts about the stage in the Hamburg Dramaturgy.

One of the problems with Lessing, though, is that most English-language translations don't do his plays justice. Recently, I acquired a copy of Nathan the Wise, or Nathan der Weise, in German.  As I began reading the original, I tried to see if I could translate the play into English verse.

Lessing's play was written in German blank verse--unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse usually sounds rather natural in English, as English poetry (as exemplified by old ballads) tends to be concerned with the number of emphasized syllables, though not necessarily with the total number of syllables per line. That's why dramatic poets like William Shakespeare often throw in extra syllables or leave out a syllable here or there.

The verse in Nathan the Wise can be more regular in terms of the number of syllables, but Lessing seems less concerned about where the emphasis of a line lands. In translating the beginning of the play, I tried to remain faithful to this. The result is a verse that sounds almost like plain prose, though it still meanders about a bit, as Lessing's language can do.

Below is a selection of my translation. I'm not sure if I'll ever finish translating the play, but if you're thinking of doing a production of Nathan the Wise and are looking for a fresh new translation, let me know! I might decide to speed up my work on the piece...

First Act

First Scene: A Hall in Nathan's House

NATHAN enters as if arriving from a trip. DAJA comes toward him.

DAJA: Oh, here he is! Nathan! — Thanks be to God,

        That you at last have come back to us now.

NATHAN: Yes, Daja; thanks to God! But why at last?

        Had I a need to come back before now?

        And could I have come back? For Babylon

        Is from Jerusalem, the way that I

        Was forced to take, now left, now right, a good

        Two hundred miles winding out of my way,

        And collecting debts is most certainly

        No business that can be taken lightly,

        Or easily accomplished.

DAJA:        O Nathan!

        How miserable, miserable you would

        Have been if you'd been here. Your house…

NATHAN:                    Is burned.

        So I have seen already. — May God grant

        That I have heard the worst of all it now.

DAJA: All could have easily burnt to the ground.

NATHAN: Then, Daja, we'd have built a new one, and

        One much more comfortable.

DAJA:                 That's true,

        But Recha would have been burnt up with all

        The house!

NATHAN:     Burnt up? Who? My Recha? Not she? —

        That I'd not heard. — I would not then have had

        A need for any house at all. — Burnt up?

        With all? Ah-ha! But she is well! Speak up!

        It's really all burned up! Oh, just speak out!

        Kill me and torture me no longer now. —

        Just truthfully, is she burnt up?

DAJA:           If she

        Had been, would you have heard the news from me?

NATHAN: So why do you torment me, then? — Recha!

Want to hear how the scene ends? Let me know! Contact me, and I can send you more of the translation.

Cholera and the Theatre

The most recent issue of Theatre Journal has an interesting article by Mia Levenson about the effects cholera epidemics had on New York theatres during the nineteenth century.

Cholera is a deadly illness that was first identified in India, but in the 1820s and 1830s it spread rapidly across the world, devastating Paris, London, and eventually reaching the United States. Though cholera is a waterborne illness, people in the nineteenth century believed it was caused by "bad air" which led more health-conscious audience members to avoid the theatre.

In 1832, when cholera first hit New York, three large theatres served Manhattan—the Park Theatre (near what is now City Hall), the Theatre at Richmond Hill, and the American Theatre at the Bowery. The Park Theatre (pictured here in an illustration from 1822) was probably the most prestigious, presenting Italian operas and classic plays by William Shakespeare. The Theatre at Richmond Hill was further north and newer, having just opened the previous year in 1831. The Bowery was a more working-class venue, presenting melodramas and other popular works.

Even after cholera arrived in New York—with the first death from the illness being reported in June of 1832—the theatres still remained open. On Independence Day, the Bowery put on a patriotic drama called Cradle of Liberty, and though Richmond Hill was closed on July 4th, two days later it staged the popular comedy The Heir at Law. The Park Theatre also plowed ahead with its summer season, but unfortunately receipts were low, and it had to operate at a loss. On July 21st, the epidemic was peaking, with 311 new cases recorded and 104 deaths. That night, only ninety people attended the Park Theatre, which had a capacity of more than two thousand.

The Bowery was the first of the three theatres to shut down due to the epidemic, closing its doors on July 7th. The theatre's manager later ran a newspaper advertisement stating that the company "deems it a duty to the Public at large to announce the closure of the American Theatre until the alarm now existing has subsided." Richmond Hill, which could only hold about half as many people as the Park and the Bowery, waited until July 25th to put out a similar notice. The Park continued to stage plays for the rest of the month, announcing its closure on August 1st. Cholera, much like COVID almost two hundred years later, completely shut down theatre in New York.

Our own pandemic kept theatres shuttered for far longer, though. By August 20th, all three major theatres in New York had resumed performances. Like today, they advertised the safety measures they were taking (whether effective or not). Levenson reproduces a playbill for the Bowery that displays the word "VENTILATION" in large, capital letters.

Fortunately, New York constructed the Croton Aqueduct in the years following the epidemic, bringing fresh water to the city and reducing the impact of future waterborne illnesses. Still, cholera returned in 1849, beginning in the Five Points neighborhood and rapidly spreading throughout the city. Another wave hit New York in 1866.

By then, improved sanitation meant that death tolls were far lower, and the theatres remained open. One can only hope that when future epidemics arise, we, too, will be better prepared, and won't have to shut down the theatre yet again.