Much Ado in the Bronx

Last night I was at the Bartow-Pell Mansion to watch Red Monkey Theater Group perform William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing in the ladies' parlor of the historic Bronx home.

As I learned during a tour of the museum, the Bartow-Pell Mansion was built with two nearly identical parlors, though the one designated for men was decorated with eagles, while the ladies' parlor was given cherubs instead.

Pocket doors in the walls could open up to unite both parlors into one large room, when it was needed for balls, for instance. Open space was necessary for the performance, not for the dancing (though there was some) but to provide room for the stage manager who ran sound cues.

The audience sat on three sides of the room, not on historic chairs and sofas, which had been cleared away, but on (rather nice) folding chairs. This created an intimate space for the stripped-down, 90-minute, intermission-free performance. Co-directors Tal Aviezer and Amy Frey also took on the roles of Benedick and Beatrice in the play.

I'd previously seen Aviezer as Sherlock Holmes in Red Monkey's production of The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet. Aviezer himself wrote that adaptation of the A.C. Doyle short story, which Frey directed. Clearly, they have a rapport offstage. Similarly, onstage they have tremendous chemistry as the the two bickering lovers in Much Ado. They were supported last night by some other actors I recognized from Beryl Coronet, Derek Tarson as Leonato and Ariel Francoeur as Margaret.

The production also uses some clever doubling. Sean Coffey, who plays the cynical villain Borachio, returns as the holy Friar Francis in the infamous non-wedding scene. Sean David Demers, who plays Borachio's vile patron Don John, later comes back as the officer Dogberry, who arrests Borachio toward the end of the play. Sadly, we never get the rest of the watch, but with a cast of only nine and only an hour and a half to perform, some cuts have to be made.

Red Monkey will be returning to the Bartow-Pell for a special Dungeons & Dragons fundraiser, and then again for a one-man version of A Christmas Carol that I previously saw Coffey perform at the Van Cortlandt House Museum.

You don't have to wait until December to see the company, though. Much Ado About Nothing continues to play at Bartow-Pell until June 7th, and then will be running at Wildcliff in New Rochelle until June 28th.

Uncle Vanya

This summer, there are two free outdoor productions of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Last night, I saw the first of them to begin performances, Hudson Classical Theater Company's staging by the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park. I can't speak for the other production that hasn't opened yet, but this one is definitely worth seeing.

Hudson Classical has done some great work in recent years, including Henrik Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea, William Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal. This is their 23rd season presenting summer theatre, and Uncle Vanya is the 80th play they've produced. Audience members sit on the stone steps of the Monument, but fortunately there are cushions.

The unique setting adds to this production, since there is a natural backdrop of trees as the characters discuss the disappearing forests of Russia. Dr. Astrov, played by Jeff Dylan Garrett, speaks eloquently of his plans to restore nature to its former grandeur. Unfortunately, the beautiful Yelena, played by Silvia Bond, seems incapable of understanding him. Astrov remains fixed on Yelena, in spite of the attention paid to him by her stepdaughter young Sonya, played by Charlotte Nichols.

At the center of this whirling cast of characters is Sonya's depressed Uncle Vanya, played by Dan McVey. Vanya is also in love with Yelena, though she remains married to Professor Serebryakov, who is played in all his annoying petulance by John L. Payne. The professor, who writes virtually unread books about Realism and Naturalism without understanding a bit about art, remains to this day a biting attack on the inanity of certain academics.

Nicholas Martin-Smith directs the production to run swiftly from scene to scene in an intermission-free performance that gets to the heart of Chekhov's text with such rapidity the audience doesn't mind the cramped legroom on the Monument steps. The show runs through June 21st, so see it before it closes!

New Comedies Festival Semifinalist (Again!)

I just received word that my new play After an Earlier Incident has been named a semifinalist in the B Street Theatre's 2026 New Comedies Festival in Sacramento.

The theatre is scheduled to select four finalists by June 2nd. Chosen plays will receive readings July 12th through 19th, and at least one of those plays will be fully produced for the theatre's upcoming season.

In March, I previously announced that After an Earlier Incident had advanced to Round 2 of B Street Theatre's process. Last year, my play The Love Songs of Brooklynites made it to the semifinals, but unfortunately was not invited out for the New Comedies Festival.

The first scene of After an Earlier Incident had a workshop at Theatre of Western Springs outside of Chicago. I continued to develop the piece with Caryn Osofsky and Nick Walthers, two actors I met through the American Renaissance Theater Company (ARTC), and they performed a public reading of the full play in December at Theater for the New City.

In the play, a recently widowed woman meets a perpetually awkward man for their first date, only to discover that they both have more baggage than they are willing to admit. The play asks how two people can relate to one another when the technology we use to communicate keeps getting in the way, and how we can move forward with life even when a recent death remains ever present. It's a comedy about trying to live and love when tragedy lies just below the surface.

Perhaps this July the people of Sacramento will get a chance to hear this piece, which is very near and dear to my heart.

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.