The Grim Game

Harry Houdini is known for being a great performer, but in addition to doing magic and escape acts, he was also a fine actor.

Houdini made several films, and tonight I was able to see one of the ones that survived: the 1919 silent The Grim Game. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts held a screening of the restored film with Makia Matsumura providing live piano accompaniment.

In addition to showing Houdini in action as the fictional Harvey Hanford, the film features a mid-air plane crash which was unscripted. Fortunately, no one was hurt! Incidentally, Houdini did not do his own aerial stunts, though he can be seen escaping from handcuffs, a straight jacket, and other jams, as he was famous for doing on stage.

Houdini has appeared on stage as a character as well, perhaps most notably in the musical Ragtime, currently running right next to the library at Lincoln Center. He's also depicted in a new play Joe Sutton has been developing at American Renaissance Theater Company. I had the privilege to play Houdini in a developmental reading from the piece at an ARTC Workshop earlier this year.

If you want to see Houdini's acting yourself, the restored print of The Grim Game is now owned by Turner Classic Movies, so you might be able to catch it there.

Folk Drama

Folk plays have a tradition dating back to the middle ages, when communities came together to re-enact old tales about Robin Hood, Saint George and the Dragon, or other popular figures.

Many of the folk tales dramatized in the middle ages focused on fables about animals, including Reynard the Fox, Chaunticleer the Rooster, and Sigrim the Wolf. I myself once appeared in a folk drama as Noble the Lion.

On Sunday, I got a chance to see the folk drama The Fox and the Wolf performed by Fordham Medieval Dramatists. Based on a 13th-century fable, the play tells the story of how a Fox falls down a well and then tricks a wolf into getting him back out again (landing the Wolf in the well in the process).

At the beginning of the play, we met Lady Fortune, depicted this time not with her famous Wheel, but with two crowns. One crown appeared to offer good fortune, but often brought sorrow. The other crown appeared to offer bad fortune, but often brought unexpected good. Half of Fortune's gown was beautiful, while the other side was ripped to shreds. Similarly, her face showed good and bad on each side.

Lady Fortune

After being introduced to this thematic element, we met Reynard the fox, who was cleverly portrayed by two people, one the body and the other a long swishy tale. Reynard raided the chickens, slaughtering them and having a feast. The Rooster Chaunticleer reprimanded him, but Reynard cunningly told Chaunticleer that he looked ill, and offered to bleed him from the chest. Chaunticleer didn't fall for it, but when Reynard walked away, he had his own fall, right down a well.

I also appreciated the acting and costuming of Sigrim the Wolf, who while strong and dangerous, wasn't too bright. Wells typically have a bucket on a rope, and when one end goes down, the other comes up. Sigrim, who appeared to be in a state of good fortune, plunged into the well with the rope, bringing Reynard, who appeared to have ill fortune, back up in the bucket. As frequently happens in stories like this, the two met in the middle, but it was too late for the poor Wolf to undo the damage.

Reynard the Fox and Sigrim the Wolf

Medieval folk dramas can be a lot of fun, and they were often kept alive by performers long after the middle ages were over and done. The Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy was fond of folk plays, and I've even taught students his version of The Play of St. George. Recently, while visiting the Strand, I picked up a copy of Hardy's play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. This folk drama tells the story of Iseult, the wife of King Mark, who fell in love with a knight by drinking a love potion on the sea voyage to her wedding.

I wrote my own version of the story, originally titled Iseult, and later Net of Dreams. I based mine on the oldest extant version of the tale, that recorded by Beroul, The Romance of Tristan. Hardy names the knight Sir Tristram, as did Sir Thomas Malory. He writes the story so it can be staged simply in any neutral playing space, though the book includes an image of what a Great Hall in Tintagel Castle might look like in our imaginations.

Illustration from 1923 edition

Hardy apparently sent an early copy of the play to Harley Granville-Barker, a professional actor and playwright who also took a great interest in amateur performance. Folk dramas, whether performed outdoors like The Fox and the Wolf or indoors as Hardy's play was intended, can be delightful to watch and should be staged more often.

Gothic Kennedy

Adrienne Kennedy has written a number of dark, brooding dramas, including Funnyhouse of a Negro and Ohio State Murders. Her 2018 play He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, however, is truly Gothic.

One of the things I love about the play is its use of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy The Massacre at Paris, sometimes called Paris Massacre. In Kennedy's play, a group of school children are performing Marlowe's work just offstage, and the lines hauntingly comment upon the present action.

The Massacre at Paris is an odd play for a school to produce, but as Kennedy notes in her stage directions, the piece "was chosen for unknown reasons" by the man who controls the school's governing committee and who lurks in the shadows through much of the story. Kennedy's play opens with lines recites by the Duke of Guise in Marlowe's work:

Although my downfall be the deepest hell

For this I wake when others think I sleep

For this I wait that scorns attendance else

For this my quenchless thirst... whereon I Build...

Harrison Aherne, the Gothic villain who chose that play to be performed, is a builder, and has made sure that the town of Montefiore, Georgia, where much of the action takes place, will enforce strict racial hierarchies. Like the Duke of Guise, his thirst for power seems to know no limits. Later, we hear lines spoken by the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici:

My noble son and Princely Duke of Guise,

Now have we got the fatal straggling deer

Within the compass of a deadly toil

And as we late decreed, we may perform.

What they plan to perform, of course, is the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when Roman Catholics slaughtered Protestants in the street. This is an ominous beginning to a play that deals explicitly with the Jim Crow South right before the U.S. entered World War II. Aherne's son, Christopher, shares Marlowe's first name, and like the playwright, he can sometimes be difficult to pin down on exactly how he feels about the events he describes.

Those events involve racial oppression and hints of murder, though many specifics remain tantalizingly elusive. I won't give away the play's shocking ending, but will note that it returns to Marlowe's words at its close.

Kennedy is once of our greatest living dramatists, and her works should be performed more often.

Revolutionary Drama

Tonight, I'm having a private reading of my play Combustion with American Renaissance Theater Company.

The play tells the story of Marie-Anne and Antoine Lavoisier, who revolutionized chemistry around the same time a political revolution was happening in France.

Megan Greener will be reading the part of Marie-Anne, who figured out the mechanics of how to perform experiments that changed the way we think about matter. Frank Hankey will be playing her husband, Antoine, who was more focused on theory than the actual experiments.

A third character in the play, being read by Eric Percival, is the ghost of Jean-Paul Marat, a key figure in the French Revolution who sparred with the Lavoisiers and ended up getting assassinated in his own bathtub. (This later became the subject of a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.)

The French Revolution has always inspired great drama. In fact, re-enactments of the storming of the Bastille were staged soon after that event took place. Throughout the revolution, playwrights like Olympe de Gouges wrote about current events for the stage. The Bastille and the Terror later had important roles in the play The Black Doctor which became a star vehicle for Ira Aldridge.

Perhaps the most memorable depiction of the French Revolution is in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens's novel which was first adapted for the stage in 1860 by Tom Taylor. The events of the revolution keep resurfacing though, such as in the 21st-century playwright David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette, which I recently saw at Marymount Manhattan College.

My own play adds to this tradition, but also brings focus to the unique partnership of two scientists who tried to change the world, but got caught up in the world changing without them. I hope to be able to share this piece with the public soon in a full production.

Red Monkeys and Beryl Coronets

A couple years ago, I saw Sean Coffey of Red Monkey Theater Group perform a one-man version of A Christmas Carol at Van Cortlandt House Museum in the Bronx.

Last night, I was back at Van Cortlandt House where Coffey played John Watson in Red Monkey's production of The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, adapted from the Sherlock Holmes short story by dramatist Tal Aviezer, who also played Holmes.

The adaptation takes some liberties with the original story by Arthur Conan Doyle, but in some fun and amusing ways. As in the story, the coronet ends up in the home of the banker Alexander Holder to secure a loan for "one of the highest, noblest, most exalted names in England" as Doyle writes. Presumably, this is the Prince of Wales, but in Aviezer's adaptation it is Queen Victoria herself, played by Ariel Francoeur.

Derek Tarson is wonderfully obtuse as Holder, who when three beryls of the coronet go missing, immediately zeros in on his son Arthur (played by Collin Orton) as the prime suspect. Holmes is more clever and decides he needs to question Holder's niece Mary (Grace Maddox in this production). There are later a few twists and turns in the script that keep the play interesting even for those who already know the outcome of the story.

Red Monkey will be bringing the play to Harrison Public Library on Sunday, April 19th. If you miss it, you can catch another Red Monkey show this summer when they perform William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing at the Bartow-Pell Mansion May 30th through June 7th.

Titus Andronicus

I've long been interested in William Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus, so I was excited when Red Bull Theater announced they would be producing the play with Patrick Page in the title role.

Last night, I saw the show, which is playing at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Page is excellent as always, but I found myself (as I often am) most fascinated by the role of Lavinia, played in this production by Olivia Reis.

Poor Lavinia not only has her hands chopped off, but her tongue is ripped out, too, rendering her mute for most of the play. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of opportunities for fine acting, though, and Reis excels in using a simple smile or a small groan to speak volumes.

The play is filled with references to Ovid's Metamorphoses, a work Shakespeare went back to again and again. When Shakespeare's actors included the piece in the First Folio of his work, they confidently attributed the play to him, but its bloody stage effects and straight-forward verse have led many critics to want the play to have been written by someone else.

Red Bull included a program note by Ayanna Thompson speculating the piece was co-written by George Peele, one of numerous rivals postulated by critics at one time or another as a possible author of the piece. This is in spite of precisely zero external indications of the play being authored by anyone other than Shakespeare. Since there is no objective evidence, Thomson notes "several resonances" with the anonymous play The Battle of Alcazar, which has been attributed to Peele.

Idle speculations about authorship aside, this tale of narcissistic leadership and senseless bloodlust has much to say to us in the 21st century. Red Bull's production is mostly faithful to the original, though it cuts quite a bit and changes Andronicus's brother Marcus into a sister, Marcia, played memorably by Enid Graham. (Similarly, the noble Roman Aemilius is transformed into Aemilia, played by Blair Baker.)

Other fine performances are delivered by McKinley Belcher III (who was wonderful in A Soldier's Play) as Aaron and Amy Jo Jackson as the nurse, a role that couldn't help but make me remember that character's resurrection in Taylor Mac's play Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus.

The production has been extended through May 3rd, so you still have a chance to see this lovely staging by Jesse Berger before the whole thing goes to the Goths.

Resurrection Day

In Henrik Ibsen's final play, When We Dead Awaken, the sculptor Rubek creates a self portrait in his statue group "Resurrection Day" which is a figure he calls "remorse for an unrealized life."

Quite a bit of that "remorse for an unrealized life" can be seen onstage in The Last Days of Downtown, Matthew Gasda's new play now in previews at the Center for Theatre Research (formerly the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research).

Since the play is still in previews (officially opening April 17th), I won't say too much, other than that you should get your tickets now. The piece takes place in the downtown apartment of independent filmmaker Terry, who is simultaneously celebrating his 40th birthday and preparing to travel for a premiere of his latest movie.

When Terry leaves, his apartment gets taken over by Michael, the young star of his film, who uses the director's pad to throw parties and bed a series of women. Throughout the play, a crowd of actors appear onstage in a succession of scenes involving sex, drinking, vaping, and more onstage cocaine use than in anything I've seen since Stereophonic.

At one point, a character shares the story of an experience he had at a dive bar where for one brief moment, everyone watching the performance of an amateur band began to live in the present and just enjoy the music--before they all went back to the chatter of everyday life.

The Last Days of Downtown invites us to live in that present, so that, unlike Ibsen's characters, when we awake on Resurrection Day, we won't "see that we've never lived."