Workshopping Baillie

I've frequently written about the Scottish dramatist Joanna Baillie and her play The Family Legend, which was a sensation when it premiered in Edinburgh in 1815.

Now, a group of scholars is getting together to put on a virtual reading of the play in November. Today, we met for a workshop on Baillie, trying to iron out some of the details of the reading, which will be held over Zoom.

Baillie laid out some of her theories on drama in the preface to her first volume of the Plays on the Passions. In it, she postulated that the chief object of tragedy is "to delineate the progress of the higher passions in the human breast."

Two additional volumes of The Plays on the Passions followed. The third volume contains a lengthy complaint about the expansion of the theatres in Britain at the time, which enlarged houses to such an extent that subtle acting became nearly impossible.

"The diminutive appearance of individual figures, and the straggling poverty of grouping, which unavoidably takes place when a very wide and lofty stage is not filled by a great number of people, is very injurious to general effect," Baillie wrote. She feared that actors would soon "only attempt such strong expression as can be perceived and have effect at a distance."

Over Zoom, we'll have a chance to perhaps do some more subtle acting than was generally on display in the mammoth theatres of the 19th century. Tune in on Saturday, November 21st to see the end result. You might even see some familiar faces up on the screen...

Small Can Be Good

Not every play has to be an elaborate singing-vampire musical. Some of the theater I've seen most recently has been on a noticeably smaller scale.

Last weekend, I attended Officer at Poor Mouth Theatre Company in the Bronx. Billed as a one-man show featuring Al Gonzales, it actually contained a surprise special guest about half-way through, but the tiny stage made it impossible to fit many more people up there than that.

There was a slightly larger cast in Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library by Jenny Lyn Bader. The play, which stars Ella Kaille as a young Hannah Arndt, is mostly a two-hander where the philosopher faces off against a German police officer played by Brett Temple. However, Daniel Cantor showed up in the middle as a lawyer, adding a bit of variety to a play that is intentionally claustrophobic.

Of course, when your play is about what it's like to be detained in a jail cell by a Nazi government beginning to flex its muscle, claustrophobic is precisely what you want, so the small stage downstairs at 59E59 Theaters worked. A limited cast and stage are necessary when exploring enclosure, and how much more enclosed can you get then a jail cell, and one in Nazi Germany at that? Perhaps showing someone buried alive?

Well, in a manner of speaking, that is what's on stage in Grace McLean's musical In the Green. Last night, I saw a student production of the play at City College. It tells the story of how Hildegard of Bingen was mentored by the 12th-century anchorite Jutta von Sponheim, who had sealed herself up in a one-room shelter much like a tomb. The musical, which has songs titled "Death Ceremony" and "Burial" explores how the limits we place on ourselves can sometimes be freeing (though they can be dangerous, too, as the the play admits).

There is much to be said for small-cast plays, small performance spaces, and dramas that force the audience to confront uncomfortable truths with no place to run. This shouldn't be an excuse for not producing larger shows, but Officer, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, and In the Green all showcase the power there can be in being small.

Don Juan in the Park

Central Park has its fair share of free outdoor theatre, but so does Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which is now offering an exciting production of Molière's Don Juan.

The heart of the play is not so much the great lover Don Juan himself, but his servant Sganarelle, a part Molière himself originally performed, and in this production is portrayed by Kaliswa Brewster.

Most scholars think La Grange, one of the main actors in Molière's company, probably played Don Juan, a libertine who mocks religion and has no fear of hell. The Brooklyn production has the charismatic Keeshav Moodliar in this role.

Wanting revenge on Don Juan is his spurned ex-lover Elvire, likely played by Mademoiselle Du Parc in the comedy's 1665 premiere. Du Parc was mostly known for playing tragic roles, but Elvire is a tragic figure, particularly as portrayed in Prospect Park by Michelle Veintimilla, who made her Broadway debut playing the younger version of Chita Rivera's character in The Visit.

This is a Molière play, however, so there's still plenty of comedy, such as when Don Juan goes back and forth between two lovely peasant girls named Charlotte and Mathurine (one of whom might originally have been played by Molière's own wife). Also enamored of Charlotte is Pierrot, a character right out of commedia dell'arte, and played wonderfully in the park by theatrical veteran Daniel Pearce. Pearce not only shared the stage with Glenn Close in Mother of the Maid, but has also done numerous Shakespearean roles for The Public Theater.

Naomi Lorrain succeeds performing a variety of parts in the show, but one of the most exciting performers is offstage most of the time. That is cellist Johnathan Moore, who also composed music that keeps the production rolling along. Lucie Tiberghien directs the production, which uses Stephen Wadsworth's translation.

If you're in the neighborhood, Don Juan is running until September 27th. Check it out, just don't accept any dinner invitations from strange statues.

Vampire Family Values

Last night I saw The Lost Boys, the new Broadway musical based on the 1987 Joel Schumacher film about California vampires.

The show opens with a television clip of Ronald Reagan discussing family values, setting up this adaptation as all about family. The central family of the story consists of newly single mom Lucy (Shoshana Bean) and her two sons Michael (LJ Benet) and Sam (Benjamin Pajak).

Old-fashioned family values are represented not just by Reagan, but by Michael and Sam's abusive father, who appears ghost-like in scenes, reminding us of the trauma our families can sometimes inflict. Also championing traditional values is Max (Paul Alexander Nolan), the Goldwater-loving video store owner who hires and then romances Lucy.

Opposing the idea of a traditional family is the non-traditional family formed by the vampires, who call each other brother and live together in harmony when they aren't out slaughtering the locals. Ali Louis Bourzgui plays David, the charismatic frontman for an all-vampire band that plays driving rock music and tries to tempt Michael away from his human family.

After he drinks vampire blood but has not yet made his first kill, Michael is trapped in between, as a half-vampire not fully belonging to either world. In this respect, he is like Star, played by Maria Wirries, who is alienated from the traditional world and has lost her family, but has her eyes wide open to the harm being inflicted by the outsider vampires.

The band The Rescues provided a rocking score for this musical, which has a book written by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, two former college roommates from Carnegie Mellon University. Michael Arden (who previously directed Maybe Happy Ending) directed the piece.

The Lost Boys is more polished (and more mainstream) than Blood/Love, the other big vampire musical to open in New York this year. It's also less earnest and leans more into a camp sensibility.  However, I thoroughly enjoyed both shows.

Year's Work in Shaw

The Year's Work in English Studies is not a publication I generally review. By the time it comes out, the "year" is two years ago, but it can help in keeping up with recent trends.

Recently, a colleague in the International Shaw Society alerted me to a chapter in it written by Claudio Francesco Favazza, published this month, called "Modern Literature: George Bernard Shaw."

Much of the chapter is taken up by a review of a special issue of Shaw edited by Mary Christian on "Victorian Shaw." I wrote a piece for the issue on The Devil's Disciple, which Favazza astutely summarized:

A comparable concern with formal innovation and transformation underlies James Armstrong’s ‘Subverting the Melodramatic in The Devil’s Disciple’ (ShawR 44:i[2024] 48–61). Armstrong argues that in The Devil’s Disciple [1897] Shaw both adopts and overturns the conventions of Victorian melodrama, using them not for sensation but to expose the illusions of respectability, marriage and social order. He notes that the familiar opposition between a woman’s legal marriage and a ‘true’ marriage with another man—a theme common in melodrama—is here recast to question the legitimacy of marriage itself.

My interest in melodrama should be well known to anyone who reads this blog regularly. (I recently wrote a post about Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight.) Though Victorian melodramas are rarely read or performed today, they can tell us a lot about the development of theatrical techniques. Favazza notes this, continuing:

Comparing the play with Sydney Grundy’s Slaves of the Ring [1894], the first melodrama Shaw reviewed, Armstrong shows how Shaw moves beyond conventional moral contrasts. Unlike Grundy’s heroine, who acts under illusion, Judith acts consciously, making her near-adultery all the more destabilizing. Armstrong also points out that the play resists the redemptive closure typical of the genre: Dick Dudgeon’s willingness to die is not an act of romantic sacrifice but a deliberate rejection of social norms. As he observes, Shaw even opposed stage interpretations that sentimentalized the relationship between Judith and Dick. In this way, Armstrong concludes, Shaw transforms melodrama’s emotional energy into a medium for cultural and ideological revolt. 

That's a fair assessment of the article. It's nice to know my work is getting read.

The Cenci

The story of the Cenci family is perhaps best known from a verse drama by Percy Shelley. However, Shelley based his play on real-life events at the end of the 16th century.

Shelley wrote in his preface to the play that it was based on a manuscript "copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome" detailing the events of 1599 that "ended in the extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city."

An English translation of an account of the Cenci family from the 18th-century Annali d'Italia by Lodovico-Antonio Muratori exists partially in the hand of Mary Shelley (better known for writing other things). When it gets to the part where poor Beatrice Cenci is violated by her father, the translation glosses over the details, and a note by Mary Shelley states, "The details here are horrible, and unfit for publication."

Those details were not glossed over by Alexandre Dumas, who also wrote a play about the actor Edmund Kean in addition to some books about musketeers. In Les crimes célèbres, Dumas wrote about Count Cenci not only taking his daughter by force, but compelling her to take part in orgies involving men, women, and children. While Shelley shows Beatrice as escaping torture after she was arrested for the murder of her father, Dumas depicts her being interrogated while subjected to the rope and pulley, also known as the strappado.

An image of Beatrice being tortured also appears in the play about her by Antonin Artaud, which is based on Shelley's play but also contains elements from Dumas's version of the story. (It also might have been influenced by a historical novel by Stendhal on the ill-fated family.)

For many years, a portrait of a young woman attributed to the artist Guido Reni was thought to represent Beatrice Cenci. Even if it was not her, it certainly influenced Shelley and the many other artists who have endeavored to tell her story.

If you'd like to hear her story for yourself, Red Bull Theater will be putting on a reading of Shelley's play this November.

Midsummer Rain Site

The Riverdale Shakespeare Players, a new venture bringing together Riverdale Repertory Company and the University of Mount Saint Vincent, tonight had their debut performance, with a spectacular outdoor production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Well, the course of true love never did run smooth, and neither did the course of outdoor theatre. A flash-flood warning forced the Players to preform indoors at the Hayes Theatre at Mount Saint Vincent, rather than outside in Grace Plaza as originally planned.

Co-directors Sarah Stevenson and Esther H. Cohen put a positive spin on the matter, though, noting that if you have to move indoors, you might as well perform in a space with a chandelier (which the Hayes absolutely has). The stage was decorated with flowers and greenery, so the audience at least felt like they were outdoors.

The cast was game. Elana Weinberger was a regal Hippolyta opposite Alan Cutler as Theseus. Deborah Lupkin brought some magic as the Fairy Queen Titania, warring with King Oberon, played by James Duncan. Sam Yaggy brought the Fairy King some (questionable) assistance as Puck, who screwed up the poor lovers, played by Sadie Isseks (Hermia), Michael Kashtelyan (Lysander), Annie Cutler (Helena), and Aaron Levav (Demetrius).

Of course, it would be rude to leave out the Rude Mechanicals, led by Steven Pena as Peter Quince. Matt Gordon appropriately made an ass of himself as Bottom, Andrew Small found his inner falsetto as Flute, Jennifer Firestone built the wall as Snout, and Sarah Greenberg roared mighty roars as Snug.

A Midsummer Night's Dream will be back tomorrow at the Riverdale Y, and then on Sunday at Christ Church Riverdale. Hopefully, those performances will actually be outdoors, but there are rain sites for both, just in case.

For the latest weather-related announcements, you can check out the group's feed on Instagram.