A Bold Stroke for a Wife

I've previously blogged about Susanna Centlivre's play The Busie Body, which was one of the most produced English comedies of the 18th century.

Today, however, many critics prefer her play A Bold Stroke for a Wife, which pushes back against certain constraints on women while at the same time providing an amazing role for a (male) actor.

The play premiered at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1718, featuring Christopher Bullock as Colonel Fainwell. The colonel falls in love with Anne Lovely, originally played by Jane Rogers, who had actually married Bullock the previous year.

Obviously, the hero wants to marry Lovely. (Come on. Even her name is beautiful!) But in order to do so, he has to win the consent of four different guardians, each one of whom is opposed to what the other three want for the unfortunate woman.

In order to win her, our hero makes a bold stroke for a wife, hence the title. Fainwell decides he must fain well various different personalities, winning over each guardian in turn. This means the actor playing Fainwell portrays a character who constantly disguises himself and plays other characters. He easily wins over the first guardian, the fop Sir Philip Modelove, simply by dressing well and adopting French manners. Convincing the other guardians is not so easy.

To persuade the antiquarian Mr. Periwinkle to allow him to marry Lovely, Fainwell puts on "Egyptian dress" and pretends to be a traveler from far-off lands. He convinces Periwinkle he can do a number of fantastical things, including make himself invisible, which he does by means of a trap door. The plan is ruined, though, when a drawer in an inn recognizes Fainwell and calls him colonel. He then has to pivot and instead pretend that Periwinkle's uncle has died so that he can trick him into signing something without noticing what it is.

A third guardian, Tradelove, is a "City" type who loves nothing but... well... trade. Act IV opens in Jonathan's coffee house, which was a center for stock trading in the early eighteenth century, and was a forerunner of the London Stock Exchange. In fact, the first line of the act is "South Sea at seven-eighths! Who buys?" Not long later, Jonathan's would be at the heart of the South Sea Bubble, in which shares of the South Sea Company rose spectacularly high and then collapsed in 1720, only two years after the play premiered.

Fainwell pretends to be a Dutch merchant (because Dutch accents were hysterical in 18th-century Britain) and wins a bunch of money from Tradelove, then agrees to forgive the debt if he grants permission to marry his ward. Tradelove actually thinks he's the one doing the swindling, since three other guardians have to give their permission before anyone can marry Lovely. Little does he know, Fainwell has already concocted plans to get permission from two of them, leaving only the hypocritical Quaker, Obadiah Prim.

Act V takes place in Prim's house, where Fainwell pretends to be a Quaker to win Lovely's hand, taking on the name and identity of another man, Simon Pure. The plan works, and Anne Lovely gets to marry the man she wants. The play ends with Fainwell reciting a poem in praise of choice, concluding with the couplet:

               'Tis Liberty of Choice that sweetens Life,

               Makes the glad Husband and the happy Wife.

Centlivre is not nearly as famous now as she was in the eighteenth century, but her plays can still bring a smile to one's lips.

Stoppard's Legacy

Yesterday, the world learned of the death of Tom Stoppard, who was probably the world's greatest living playwright. As it so happens, I had a ticket that night to see Archduke by Rajiv Joseph, who like all dramatists today could not help but be influenced by Stoppard.

I think it's fair to say that Archduke couldn't have been written without Stoppard's plays, which brought high comedy to intellectual niche issues. Stoppard burst onto the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which brought the sensibility of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot together with William Shakespeare's best-known tragedy, telling the whole story through the eyes of seemingly insignificant characters.

Stoppard followed up that success with The Real Inspector Hound, which skewered the mysteries of Agatha Christie with the same intellectual vigor he had used with Shakespeare. It also happens to be one of the funniest one-act plays you'll ever encounter. His 1972 play Jumpers satirized passing fads in British politics, but also probed the deepest recesses of human emotion. One of my favorites of his plays, Travesties, imagines unlikely meetings involving author James Joyce, revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara.

Critics who had accused Stoppard of lacking emotion had to eat their words when he premiered Arcadia in 1993. He followed that up with other successes, including the three-part epic The Coast of Utopia, the deeply personal Rock 'n' Roll, and most recently the sprawling Leopoldstadt. All of those plays re-imagine historical events in intensely theatrical ways, something Joseph tries to do in Archduke.

While I didn't find Archduke up to the standards of some of Joseph's other plays like Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, it clearly has ambition, and I have to applaud it for that. The play portrays Gavrillo Princip, the assassin whose bullets ultimately started the First World War. Rather than directly portray the farcical manner in which that assassination unfolded, Joseph shows what happened before the fateful day.

Newcomer Jake Berne plays Princip, but the real star of the play is Patrick Page, who plays Dragutin Dimitrijevic, leader of the Black Hand Society. Page's fast past, sharp wit, and impeccable timing would make him perfect for a role in a Stoppard play. How sad we'll never get another one again.

After an Earlier Incident

This summer, I had a workshop of the first scene of my play After an Earlier Incident at Theatre of Western Springs. Next, month, the full play will be having two readings with Caryn Osofsky and Nick Walther, with whom I've been developing the piece at American Renaissance Theater Company. 

After an Earlier Incident tells the story of recently widowed Jen who meets the perpetually awkward Elliot at a restaurant for their first date. Things do not go well. The play asks how two people can relate to one another when the technology we use to communicate keeps getting in the way. It's a comedy about trying to live and love when tragedy lies just below the surface.

Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research will be hosting the first reading on Saturday, December 13th at 2:30pm. They're located on the second floor of 251 Huron Street in Brooklyn near the Greenpoint Avenue stop on the G train. Proceeds from tickets and the bar (yes, there will be a bar) will all go to support Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research.

Then on Monday, December 15th, we'll be reading the play at Theater for the New City at 7:00pm. Readings there are free, but there's a $5 suggested donation, again going to support the theatre, which is located at 155 1st Avenue, between between 9th and 10th Street in Manhattan.

Samara Graham will be reading stage directions for both readings. I hope you can join us!

Henry Arthur Jones

The British dramatist Henry Arthur Jones has fallen out of fashion now, but he was once extraordinarily popular.

I've previously written about The Silver King, a melodrama Jones co-wrote with Henry Herman that opened at the Princess's Theatre in 1882, starring Wilson Barrett as a reformed drunkard who makes his fortune in a Nevada silver mine.

Two years later, Jones collaborated again with Herman in a bizarre reworking of Henrk Ibsen's A Doll House called Breaking the Butterfly. The play sought to give the drama a happy ending, in which the husband offers to ruin himself for his wife before the difficulties are resolved without sacrifice.

That's not what happens in Jones's 1894 play The Masqueraders, though. The play famously staged a card game in which one man won the wife and child of another. He then whisks his new "wife" off to the Alps, thinking to raise a family abroad with the woman he loves. Ultimately, though, the woman's sister convinces him that this plan would render her impure in the eyes of her child. Instead he undertakes a journey to Africa in which he will most likely perish.

Africa seems to have been a convenient place for Jones to send men off to once their romantic lives grew too complicated. He did the same thing at the end of his 1897 play The Liars. In that play, Edward Falkner is in love with a married woman, Lady Jessica Nepean. Her domineering husband Gilbert nearly drives her into Falkner's arms, but in the final act, the comical Sir Christopher Deering whisks Falkner off to Africa to mediate with some warring chieftains, leaving Lady Jessica to return to her husband.

However, The Liars should not be confused with Jones's later play The Lie, which was made into a (now lost) silent film. Perhaps when you write as many plays as he did, you have to start cycling back through title ideas.

Gods-Given Comedy

Last night I finally caught up with Gingold Theatrical Group's production of Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This new staging by director David Staller imagines a pantheon of gods looking down on Henry Higgins as they bring his "creation" to life.

Mark Evans plays Higgins, the socially awkward expert in phonetics who finds a flower girl and bets he can pass her off as a duchess. That flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, is performed by television star Synnøve Karlsen, who shows Liza's evolution from calling out "Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo!" to articulating some of the finest language Shaw ever wrote.

The rest of the cast play white-clad gods who relate the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, as told by Ovid, and then perform all of the other roles. Just as the mythical Pygmalion carved a statue and prayed to the gods to bring her to life, Higgins teaches Eliza correct speech but worries that there's something missing. He takes her to an "at home" day of his mother (played brilliantly by Lizan Mitchell) in hopes that he can find that intangible quality she's missing.

This scene was the highlight of the show for me. Karlsen manages to get so many of the manners of respectable society right while at the same time getting everything horribly wrong. The always game Carson Elrod plays Colonel Pickering, Higgins's partner in phonetical crime, while Matt Wolpe plays the visiting twit Freddy Eynsford Hill and Teresa Avia Lim takes on the role of his obnoxious sister Clara. After Eliza makes a less-than-stellar impression, uttering the dreaded "b-word" on her way out, we believe Mrs. Higgins when she says, "if you suppose for a moment that she doesnt give herself away in every sentence she utters, you must be perfectly cracked about her."

Higgins, it turns out, is perfectly cracked about her, but not in the way everybody thinks. Shaw rewrote the ending to Pygmalion multiple times, and Staller gives us yet another ending, in which the cold, remote Higgins just begins to crawl out of his shell at the end. It's a refreshing change from both overly romanticized and overly cynical versions of the story in recent years.

Pygmalion is playing at Theatre Row until November 22nd, so get your tickets now! There's also a companion event at the American Irish Historical Society tomorrow at 6pm. I'll definitely be there.

Frankenstein in Jersey

There have been numerous stage adaptations of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, going back to Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption in 1823.

The gothic tale has also provided plenty of material for film, beginning with a 1910 short made by the Edison studio, and continuing through to the Guillermo del Toro epic recently released by Netflix.

I was particularly keen to see the stage adaptation being performed now at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. It uses a script penned by David Catlin for the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago and is directed by STNJ's artistic director, Brian B. Crowe.

This adaptation uses as a framing device the famous story-writing contest at Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816. Mary Shelley (played by Amber Friendly) becomes Elizabeth, her common-law husband Percy (Sean-Michael Wilkinson) becomes Victor Frankenstein, and their friend George Gordon Byron (Jay Wade) appropriately emerges as the monster.

Also present during that fateful summer by Lake Geneva was Byron's personal physician John Polidori (Neil Redfield) who semi-plagiarized Byron's tale and published the first famous vampire story in English. Polidori goes on to enact a number of roles in this production, including Victor's friend Henry and the ship captain who encounters first Victor and then the mysterious creature.

We wouldn't know as much as we do about that summer at Villa Diodati were it not for Claire Clairmont (Brooke Turner), Mary Shelley's stepsister who kept a detailed journal that year while waiting for the birth of the child she had with Byron. Claire plays Victor's mother in this adaptation, among a number of other roles, and sometimes nearly steals the show.

The play is showing until November 16th at the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre in Madison, New Jersey. It's just a short distance from the train station in Madison, on the beautiful campus of Drew University, and it's well worth a trip!

A Punch in Nottingham

James Graham's new play Punch, which closes this weekend at Manhattan Theatre Club, takes place in the English midland city of Nottingham, and Nottingham itself could almost be a character in the piece.

I visited Nottingham in 2019 when I attended a conference by the British Association for Romantic Studies at the University of Nottingham. The famous Nottingham Castle was closed, but I walked around it, and I attended services at the Victorian Roman Catholic cathedral in the heart of the city.

Nottingham is known as a working-class city, with a long history of rebelliousness, particularly during the Industrial Revolution, when it was helping to remake the world into what we know it today. With the de-industrialization of Britain that occurred after World War II, the progress of the city's working class was stymied, as Graham's play makes clear.

Much of the action takes place in a housing project built in the 1970s that is described as inside out: all the residences face one another with their backs to the street. It was the type of utopian planning that flourished in the '60s and '70s and usually went horribly wrong. In this case, what was meant to be a bastion of community ended up making residents feel cut off from the rest of society.

As crime in the project increased, more and more security cameras were added, but this just led to young people figuring out how to take circuitous paths that avoided all of the cameras. The main character in the play, Jacob (performed by Will Harrison in his Broadway debut), likens taking the dodging path to being in a real-life video game. Everything, in fact, seems like a bit of a game to him, from picking fights at cricket matches to making pocket money by selling drugs.

All of this turns sour when he steps in to help out a friend in an argument with a stranger. He throws one punch--that's it--and the stranger falls back, hits his head, and subsequently dies. That stranger, as always is the case, had his own life. He was a paramedic. He had two loving parents. He had a bright future ahead of him. All of that was brought to an end by a single punch. (Though it didn't help that the doctors at the hospital dismissed him as a drunk and sent him home with a brain hemorrhage rather than giving him immediate care.)

Punch is based on a true story, and comes with all of the conventional tropes one would expect from a "real life" drama. Jacob puts on a tough facade, does a laughably short amount of time in prison after a murder charge is reduced to manslaughter, and then struggles to get his life back after incarceration. He gets a job packing boxes (since logistics has replaced making things in the post-industrial era), goes back to school, and renews a courtship with a young lady named "Clare without an 'i'" (Camila Canó-Flaviá).

More surprisingly, he agrees to meet with the parents of James, the young man he killed. All three of them are looking for answers, and they form an unlikely bond as they attempt to move on from a tragic and unnecessary death. The parents, Joan and David (played by Victoria Clark and Sam Robards), naturally attract our sympathy, but so does Jacob as he struggles to make some sort of atonement for what he's done.

One interesting plot thread involves Raf (played by Cody Kostro), who also bears responsibility for the tragic events but escapes legal if not moral consequences. The entire ensemble is deftly directed by Adam Penford. If you want to see the show, you'll have to catch it soon, though, as its final performance is on Sunday.