Pasadena Conference

Currently, I'm in Pasadena, California, for a joint conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the North American Victorian Studies Association.

I'm here because of The Cenci, the influential verse drama that received a public reading last week by Red Bull Theater Company. My colleague Omar Miranda, knowing my deep interest in the performance history of this play, invited me to speak on a panel about the reading.

When Percy Shelley wrote The Cenci in 1819, he wanted it to be performed at Covent Garden by the star actress Eliza O'Neill. Alas, by the time he submitted the play to the theatre, she had retired from the stage (not that the censor would have allowed the play to be performed, anyway).

Instead, The Cenci had to wait until 1886 to have its premiere staged by the Shelley Society at the Grand Theatre, Islington. Actress Alma Murray played the role of Beatrice, originally intended for O'Neill. A few years later in 1891, Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art staged the French premiere of the play at the Théâtre Montparnasse with Symbolist superstar Georgette Camée playing Beatrice.

The New Theatre performed an influential production in London in 1922 with Sybil Thorndike as Beatrice. A publicity photo from the production shows Thorndike's long hair falling down over her shoulder, as is fitting for a play for which hair in a central image. Years later, Thorndike appeared in the play again in the 1959 production at the Old Vic. This time, she played Beatrice's stepmother Lucretia while Barbara Jefford went on as Beatrice.

For the conference panel, the issue was not any of those productions, but rather Red Bull's reading, which was analyzed by a number of fine scholars. Julie Carlson talked about how the reading reminded her of how words are used as weapons in the piece. Jeffrey Cox discussed how the binding of human hair at the end of the play emphasizes female bonding as opposed to masculine bondage. Michael Gamer discussed Amir Arison's performance as Orsino. Terry Robinson contrasted the reading with Antonin Artaud's famous adaptation of The Cenci that emphasized gesture over words. Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud discussed the eruption of laughter in performance.

While I've been focused on The Cenci, the conference has had a number of other great panels, too. Yesterday, I attended an Editors' Roundtable with the editors of a number of prestigious journals, including Victorian Studies, Essays in Romanticism, The Journal of Victorian Culture, and European Romantic Review.

Tomorrow, the Nineteenth-Century Theatre Caucus will put on a performance of the 1899 play Becky Sharp, adapted by Minnie Maddern Fiske and Langdon Mitchell from the William Makepeace Thackeray novel Vanity Fair. I'm looking forward to it!

Operation Mincemeat

This afternoon, I finally caught up with Operation Mincemeat, the long-running British import that tells the true story of how a group of British spies fooled the Nazis.

The musical was written David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoe Roberts. Hagan composed much of the score, while the other three contributed to the writing and also appeared in the first production, originating key roles.

Cumming created the role of Charles Cholmondeley, an amateur biologist who came up with the outrageous plan of planting a corpse with fake plans for an Allied invasion of Sardinia in order to distract the Germans from an imminent invasion of Sicily. (The role is currently being played on Broadway by Brandon Contreras.)

Hodgeson originated the role of Ewen Montagu, an entitled male chauvinist who aided Cholmondeley's plan, and yes, it's gratifying to see a woman play the part. I actually saw an understudy in the role, Gerianne Perez, but she was magnificent. I couldn't have hoped for a better portrayal of a self-assured nepo baby who feels like it's his divine right to treat women as disposable tissues.

Roberts was the original Johnny Bevan, who oversaw the British government's deception campaigns during World War II. On Broadway, the role is now being played by Amanda Jill Robinson, who is sensational in the part.

If you haven't seen the show yet, it's quite fun, and currently scheduled to run through April.

Net of Dreams

Tomorrow is All Hallow's Eve, which reminds me of a number of shows I've written, but right now I'm thinking of one near and dear to my heart--Net of Dreams.

I was inspired by reading Beroul's 12th-century poem (though not in the original Breton) The Romance of Tristan in Jim Hala's Arthurian Literature class at Drew University.

When I went to Carnegie Mellon University to pursue my Master's degree in Dramatic Writing, the piece I was working on that reimagined the story became my thesis play, advised by none other than Lanie Robertson, a great writer and an amazing mentor.

The play was performed at CMU under the title Iseult. Yes, the story is the same as that in the folk play by Thomas Hardy, The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. I was not familiar with Hardy's play at the time, but I did know the opera Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner.

Beroul's poem is only fragmentary, so it leaves out the famous game of chess Tristan and Iseult are playing on the ship to Cornwall, where they inadvertently drink a magic potion that makes them fall in love... but only for a few years. By the time the potion wears off, though, a truer, deeper love has already taken root.

One of the things that interested me about the story was that after deciding to part ways (Iseult, after all, is legally married to Tristan's uncle), Tristan married another woman. This is Iseult of the Fair Hands, an incredibly sympathetic character who none-the-less is responsible for the deaths of the two lovers.

Iseult of the Fair Hands lies to Tristan, telling him that the ship sent to return with the woman he loves--the only person in the world who can heal him of his wound--is sailing with a black sail, indicating that she has rejected him. Her bitter speech was one of the most memorable parts of the production as CMU:

Black, Tristan. Look up? Do you not see it in the distance? Black. Black as jet, black as raven, black as night, black as death. Look upon it and despair. Despair and die. Your life, your struggle, your pain, meant nothing. She hates you, Tristan. She loathes you. Everything you believed in is gone. Now come. Lie in my arms. Rest your head upon my bosom and die. Give up the pain. Give up the sorrow. They're of no use to you any more. Let them go, and be at peace. Return to oblivion, Tristan. No more suffering. No more anguish. No more regrets. Just one.... That perhaps it would have been better... to have not been born.

If you're looking for a fanciful but emotional play to produce, you might want to check out Net of Dreams. I'd love to see it staged again. If you're interested in the script, contact me.

Village Wooing Times Four

I just got back from watching Robert Cuccioli and Beth Leavel perform in Bernard Shaw's Village Wooing at the House of the Redeemer.

The venue is one of New York City's great indoor spaces, and has been used recently for other theatrical productions, including Moliere's Tartuffe. While Village Wooing is not nearly as famous as that play, it is a comic gem that provides great roles for two talented actors.

Director David Staller decided that those actors--who play characters Shaw simply labeled as "A" and "Z"--need not be a man and a woman. Generally a male actor plays A while a female is Z, but tomorrow night promises a bit of a role reversal with Karen Ziemba and Tom Hewitt performing as A and Z in the same play at the same venue.

And why must the couple be mixed genders? Saturday, Cuccioli and Hewitt will be performing together, and Sunday will bring a matinee with Leavel and Ziemba. Minimal changes to the text are necessary, since Shaw's comedy is about different classes and different approaches to life, but is not necessarily reliant on gendered types.

Sadly, Gingold Theatrical Group will not be producing a full Shaw production this year, so this weekend's elaborate staged readings (featuring piano accompaniment by Jono Mainelli) will have to tide us over until the company puts on Saint Joan next year.

Poor William Linley

A recent issue of The Coleridge Bulletin contained an article shedding light on William Linley, the brother-in-law of Richard Brinsley Sheridan who ineffectively intervened to try to get S.T. Coleridge's play Osorio staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Paul Cheshire's article "From Donhead to Drury Lane" brings new attention to Linley, who is less famous than his sister Elizabeth Ann, who was the object of not one but two duels fought between Sheridan and the soldier Captain Thomas Matthews, which caused quite an uproar.

According to Cheshire's article, Sheridan was asking for recommendations for "any young man of poetical genius who would furnish a good Tragedy for Drury Lane." The poet William Lisle Bowles claimed he suggested Coleridge, in spite of never having met the author, simply on the strength of his verses, which were not yet well known to the public.

Bowles, Linley, and Coleridge then met at Donhead St. Mary, a "cottage" Bowles owned which was actually a sizable property. The musically gifted Linley sang a song and Coleridge read aloud his draft of the tragedy Osorio. Everything seemed to go well, and Coleridge even wrote a sonnet about hearing Linley sing. This all went down in September of 1797, though it took quite a bit of time after that for Coleridge to get his play staged.

In October, Coleridge forwarded his completed script to Sheridan, who was unimpressed. Linley apparently showed a draft to the actor John Philip Kemble, who as the leading actor at Drury Lane, would have likely appeared in the piece. Linley's efforts to try to drum up interest in the tragedy might have backfired, though. Sheridan didn't always get along with his brother-in-law. He later commissioned Linley to compose music for his play Pizarro, but then had the singer Michael Kelly write the music instead.

Poor Linley didn't seem to be able to catch a break. Cheshire writes about how he composed an opera called The Honey Moon that opened in January of 1797 and closed after one night. Apparently, partisans in the audience had vocally expressed their disapproval of the piece. Eventually, Linley returned to India, where he had previously worked at a colonial post secured for him by Sheridan.

As for Coleridge, he was disappointed by the rejection of Osorio, but as Cheshire points out, it might have been a blessing in disguise. When he later rewrote the play as Remorse, it became the hit of the 1813 season.

Coleridge's birthday is tomorrow. If you've never read Remorse, it might be a good time to do so. You can find the text online here.

Bad Romeo, Good Juliet

Many of the plays of William Shakespeare were printed during his lifetime in cheap editions known as quartos, which were roughly the size of today's paperbacks. The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1597, but it is so lacking in the text we are accustomed to today that it is frequently referred to as the "bad" quarto.

Hamlet similarly had a "bad" quarto published in 1603. In both cases, the early printed text might be a reconstruction based on the memory of a single actor, which would explain its insufficiencies. On the other hand, the "bad" quarto might be an accurate representation of the performance text when the play was first done, prior to subsequent tinkering by the playwright.

In 1599, one Thomas Creede printed a second quarto (or "good" quarto) of Romeo and Juliet noting it was "newly corrected, augmented, and amended" for publication. This implies that earlier errors were corrected, but also that new material was added and certain passages might have been changed from what was previously printed. A third quarto came out in 1609 based on the second quarto, and it was this text that was used by Shakespeare's actors John Heminge and Henry Condell when they brought out the First Folio of his work.

Interestingly enough, when Heminge and Condell published Romeo and Juliet with Shakespeare's other plays, they left out the famous prologue, recited by a Chorus character. The first quarto begins: “Two household Frends alike in dignitie,” which just doesn’t sound right to the modern ear. (Weren’t they foes, not friends?) The second quarto has the more familiar opening line: “Two households both alike in dignitie,” before adding in parentheses “(In faire Verona, where we lay our Scene)” and continuing with the rest of the well-known opening.

Why did Heminge and Condell remove the prologue? It's anybody's guess, but its excision implies that the text for Romeo and Juliet was never fixed in Shakespeare's day. Rather, the company probably modified it over the years, dropping some bits and adding others. Most editors (and most directors) tend to treat the second quarto as authoritative. Some even suspect it might have been based on Shakespeare's own manuscript of the play.

The prologue ends with the promise "What heare shall misse, our toyle shall strive to mend." (Or if you follow the "bad" quarto: "What here we want wee'l studie to amend." In either case, there is a promise by the players to make up for the shortcomings of the stage through their own efforts, achieved by study and toil.

Producing Shakespeare's plays has never been easy, presumably not even during the Bard's own lifetime. Still, with the proper effort, the plays can still shine today.

Reading the Rabbit Goddess

I've been working together with the playwright Mark Levine to develop his new play Evicting the Rabbit Goddess, which is a great deal of fun.

So far, we've had a couple of readings of scenes from the play at the weekly workshop of the American Renaissance Theater Company. Later this month, I will be directing a reading of the play in its entirely.

The piece stars Pëtra Denison as an Irish-Puerto-Rican single mom who is about to be evicted from her apartment by her landlady's son, played by Nick Walther. It takes place in Washington Heights in the 1990s, just as gentrification is starting to uproot many long-term residents of the area.

If you saw the festival in January that included a one-act play I directed, you might have seen Mark's short play Mutual Bond. This full-length work is much more ambitious, though, taking place in multiple realities as we see the fantasies and nightmares of both characters come to life on the stage.

The reading will be held on Tuesday, October 27th at 6:30pm at A.R.T./NY, 520 Eighth Avenue, 3rd Floor, in Studio B. An ID is required to enter the building.

Should you be interested in attending, contact me, and I'll put you on the list.