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.

Restoration Theatres

When the British monarchy was restored in 1660, two acting companies received royal patents. The King's Company set up by Thomas Killigrew ultimately settled at a theatre on Drury Lane, while the actors using the rival patent granted to William Davenant eventually found a home at Covent Garden.

The road to Drury Lane and Covent Garden was a long one, though. In Neoclassical France, plays were sometimes performed in converted tennis courts, so perhaps fittingly the King's Company initially set up shop in Gibbons' Tennis Court, which had its main entrance on Vere Street. The Duke of York's Company at first performed at the Salisbury Court Theatre, though they occasionally used the Cockpit Theatre, sometimes called the Phoenix.

Soon, however, the Duke of York's company converted Lisle's Tennis Court in Lincoln's Inn Fields into a state-of-the art performance space. There, Davenant introduced to public stages in England for the first time moveable scenery that had perviously only been used in court masques. He opened the new theatre in 1661 with The Siege of Rhodes, which had previously been performed under the Protectorate period as an opera to get around rules against drama.

Seeing the success of the Duke of York's Company at Lincoln's Inn Fields, Killigrew couldn't afford to be outdone. In 1663 he opened a new theatre on Drury Lane with an entrance on Bridges Street. Visitors admired the theatre's decorations, but complained about the narrowness of the passages to the main seating area, known as the pit. Fashionable ladies avoided the pit and kept to the boxes in the back, but these were too far from the stage to clearly hear the play, so there was much grumbling. A cupola on the roof might have admitted light for daytime performances, but it leaked when there was rain, causing even more discontent.

Dorset Garden Theatre

The Duke of York's company continued to use their playhouse at Lincoln's Inn Fields until 1671, when they moved into a new building at Dorset Garden. We know a good deal about this theatre and even possess an illustration of its proscenium. The inaugural production at Dorset Garden was Sir Martin Marall by John Dryden. The theatre later premiered Aphra Behn's The Rover, among other works. Though the rival company possessed the king's name, the Duke of York's Company enjoyed a reputation for superior quality, largely due to its star actor, Thomas Betterton.

The original Drury Lane Theatre on Bridges Street survived the Great Fire of 1666, but it burned down in 1672. Since the Duke of York's Company had vacated their playhouse at Lincoln's Inn Fields the previous year, the King's Company took it over. Killigrew set about building a new theatre on Drury Lane, which opened in 1674. The following year, the theatre premiered William Wycherley's comedy The Country Wife. Nathaniel Lee's tragedy The Rival Queens appeared at the theatre a couple of years later.

Following a series of bad seasons with poor attendance, both patent companies merged into the United Company in 1682, using the Drury Lane Theatre for most plays and the Dorset Garden Theatre mainly for opera. In 1685, King Charles II died, and all theatres closed for a period of mourning. Few new plays were performed by the United Company, and Betterton chafed under the management of Christopher Rich, who took the company over in 1693. The following year, Betterton left with other senior performers to start their own company.

The breakaway actors set up shop at Lincoln's Inn Fields where they scored a hit with William Congreve's play Love for Love in 1685, shortly after King William III had officially authorized the new company. The departure of experienced actors from Drury Lane provided an opportunity for the young Colley Cibber to excel both as performer and dramatist there. His Love's Last Shift premiered at Drury Lane in 1696, with Cibber himself appearing as the fop Sir Novelty Fashion.

In 1705, a new theatre was built to house the company at Lincoln's Inn Fields. This was known at the Queen's Theatre and was located in the Haymarket. The Queen's Theatre is where George Farquhar's The Beaux Stratagem was first performed in 1707. Shortly thereafter, the two companies were reconfigured, with the best singers sent over to the Haymarket to perform opera while the actors who specialized in spoken drama returned to Drury Lane to form a new United Company.

In the early 18th century, the whole patent situation had become murky. The two rival companies had merged, split apart, then merged back together again. Meanwhile, other groups of actors were setting up their own companies both in London and in the countryside, touring from town to town. All this was put an end to by the Licensing Act of 1737.

First Covent Garden Theatre

Five years prior to the act, the actor John Rich, eldest son of the infamous Christopher Rich who had alienated Betterton, used the patent originally assigned to the Duke of York's Company to establish a new theatre at Covent Garden. (His company had previously been at Lincoln's Inn Fields.) The timing was fortuitous, since the Licensing Act effectively repressed all London theatres performing without a royal patent.

This left two theatres in London performing spoken-word drama: Drury Lane operating under the patent originally granted Killigrew, and Covent Garden operating under Davenant's patent. A third patent was later issued to a theatre in the Haymarket that focused on musical drama, but that patent confined spoken drama there to just the summer months.

That remained the situation of London theatre until the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843, but that's another story.

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.

Jack Cade on the Toy Stage

 In the past, I've written about toy-theatre adaptations of such plays as Black-Eyed Susan, The Castle Spectre, The Miller and His Men, Oliver Twist, and even William Shakespeare's Macbeth.

While all of those were popular on stages during the 19th century, toy theatres also presented less known stories, including that of Jack Cade's rebellion which is featured in the second part of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy.

The Boys of England journal published a script for a toy-theatre version of Jack Cade; Or, The Rebel of London that is loosely based on incidents from The Second Part of Henry VI, sometimes borrowing Shakespeare's language, or at least his jokes.

In the first scene, Cade proclaims: "By my blood and sword, there shall be seven halfpenny loaves sold for one penny, and the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and always be full." This is a paraphrase from Act IV, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play, though it leaves out the quip that follows it: "and I will make it felony to drink small beer."

Perhaps the most famous line in Shakespeare's play is "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers." The script for the toy-theatre version shortens this to "Let us kill all the lawyers." A bigger difference is the portrayal of Alexander Iden, the man who killed Cade. Shakespeare shows him as a simple man content with a small inheritance who captures and kills Cade by chance.

The toy-theatre version of the play remakes Iden into a romantic lead in love with a young woman named Violet who has been accosted by Cade and his men. Shakespeare's Iden doesn't even realize at first that it is Cade he has slain, as he is simply trying to keep the peace. This contrasts greatly with the Iden in the toy-theatre play, who proclaims patriotically, "Thus perish all traitors and foes to old England and its monarch!"

It's not surprising that scripts for toy theatres frequently simplified plots, language, and characters, making them easier for young people to understand. I spoke about this two years ago in Glasgow at a conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies. An expanded version of that talk later appeared in Theatre Notebook, if you're interested.

The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" is an entertaining read, but would it make a good play?

In the hands of adaptor Susane Lee, the answer is decidedly yes. On the surface, it would seem to be the least adaptable tale in the Holmes canon. After all, it's the story of a secret code (similar to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug") with half the fun being the cyphers made up of little stick figures which were originally published with the text of the story.

Those cyphers, and Holmes's brilliant (yet elementary) decoding of them, creatively appear onstage in the version currently being performed by Hudson Classical Theater Company outdoors by the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park. Some of the cyphers are drawn in chalk by the villain, Abe Slaney (played by Max Bank. Others appear on papers the actors show to the audience.

Most brilliantly, though, the actors take on the shape of the cyphers (which look like little dancing men) as Holmes is explaining how he cracked the code. The company's founder, Nicholas Martin-Smith, plays Holmes on stage, ably assisted by Quint Spitzer as Dr. John Watson. Alison Logan also gives a memorable performance both as Holmes's landlady Mrs. Hudson and as Mrs. Saunders, the loquacious housekeeper who turns out to be a rather unreliable witness in the case.

Costume designer Joy Grad provides a delightful steampunk aesthetic for the show, which also includes dancing coordinated by Karen Eterovich. Tony Mita of New York Combat for Stage and Screen ably choreographs the fight sequences. The outdoor stage works for the story, which partially takes place in a garden anyway.

Having recently seen Red Monkey Theater Group perform their adaptation of a different Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet" I was pleased to see again how delightful it can be to watch Holmes and Watson come to life on stage

The Adventure of the Dancing Men is only playing until August 16th. Don't miss your chance to see it!

Supposes

The Italian Renaissance writer Ludovico Ariosto is most famous for his verse epic Orlando Furioso. However, he also wrote plays, including the highly influential comedy I Suppositi, notable for a 1566 English translation by George Gascoygne called Supposes.

Ariosto's first comedy, La Cassaria (The Coffer), premiered in 1508 at the court of Cardinal Ippolito in Ferrara. It was a hit, and the next year Ariosto premiered I Suppositi at the palace of the duke. Both plays were originally in prose, though Ariosto later wrote verse versions of them.

Both plays are also examples of commedia erudita, the learned comedy of scholars, which differed from commedia dell'arte, which was produced by professionals. Commedia erudita looked to classical Roman drama for inspiration. I Suppositi borrows in part from Terence's comedy The Eunuch and even more from Plautus's play The Captives.

In the first act, we learn that the young scholar Erostrata has switched places with his servant Dulippo. (Gascoygne spells the names Erostrato and Dulypo.) This is similar to the way Philocrates switches places with his slave Tyndarus in The Captives, but in Ariosto's play the motive is different. The false Dulippo (really Erostrata) uses his servant disguise to sleep with the beautiful Polinesta (Polynesta in Gascoygne's spelling).

Polinesta's father Damon, who is similar to the parsimonious Pantalone in commedia dell'arte, wants to marry her off without having to pay a dowery. That's why he favors a match with the old doctor of law Cleandro (Cleander as Gascoygne has it). Cleandro is like the Dottore figure in commedia dell'arte, and similarly has some long, rambling monologues. In the first act, he says (in Gascoygne's translation):

It becometh not a man to praise him selfe; but, indeede, I may say, and say truely, that my knowledge hath stoode me in better steade at a pinche than coulde all the goodes in the worlde. I came out of Otranto when the Turkes wonne it, and first I came to Padua, after hither, where by reading, counseling, and pleading, within twentie years I have gathered and gayned as good as ten thousande ducats.

That incident in Otranto, which the Ottoman Turks seized in 1480, putting much of the population to the sword and enslaving the rest, will become important later. First, however, we get a plot where the false Erostrata convinces a gentleman traveling from Sienna to pretend to be his father. Things get complicated when the real Erostrata's father arrives from Sicily. If this sounds a lot like the subplot in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, now you know where the Bard picked up some of his ideas.

Of course, Ariosto was borrowing from others as well. The parasite character in I Suppositi, Pasifilo (or Pasyphilo according to Gascoygne), is based of Ergasilus from The Captives. Like Ergasilus, Pasifilo is always on the lookout for a free meal. When told he should supervise what is prepared for supper, he replies:

By the masse, if you should have studied this sevennight you could not have appointed me an office to please me better! You shall see what dishes I will devise.

Ariosto's borrowings from The Captives goes far beyond just the parasite character.  We learn that Cleandro's son was sold as a slave to Erostrata's father, just as Hegio's son was stolen and sold as a slave in Plautus's play. In the end, Erostrato married Polinesta (without Damon having to pay a dowery) and Cleandro is content having recovered a son and heir. All ends happily.

Ariosto went on to compose other comedies, including Il Negromante (The Necromancer) and La Lena (Lena). He left another play, I Studenti (The Students) unfinished at his death, though it was completed by his brother Gabriele. It is I Suppositi, however, that has had the most influence of his comedies, at least in the English-speaking world.

Constancy Unrewarded

Faithfulness to a job has always been a fool's errand. Constancy is inevitably unrewarded. In fact, "Constancy Unrewarded" is the subtitle of Bernard Shaw's comical blank-verse drama The Admirable Bashville.

Shaw wrote the piece as a mocking adaptation of his most famous novel, Cashel Byron's Profession. Of course, Shaw is known as a dramatist, not a novelist. Being Shaw's most famous novel is like being the most popular kid on the math team. It's hardly something brag-worthy.

After being rejected by nearly every publisher in Britain, Shaw had the piece published in a socialistic periodical. The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson thought the best thing about the book was a footman named Bashville, who falls rather hopelessly in love with his aristocratic employer, Lydia Carew.

The relations between wealthy patrons and a servant class hardly even deemed human is on display on Broadway right now, not in an unlikely revival of The Admirable Bashville, but in the imported Korean musical Maybe Happy Ending, which I finally caught up with last week. Though ostensibly a futuristic piece of science fiction, the play skewers the relationships the wealthy have with the people they employ so long as it's convenient for them.

In Maybe Happy Ending, we are introduced first to Oliver, a Model 3 robot who has been left by his former owner James in what appears to be a studio apartment where he can listen to records and enjoy a lifetime subscription to Jazz Monthly. Oliver's orderly routine is interupted by the robot across the hall, a Model 5 named Claire, who in spite of her more convincing human-like manner has a less robust battery than the Model 3s and requires frequent charging.

Just as Bashville's love for Lydia can never be reciprocated, Oliver will forever pine for James, the former owner he idolizes. In Shaw's story, Lydia feels a tinge of guilt for not being able to reward her servant's constancy. Similarly, James in Maybe Happy Ending feels such remorse for having to retire his outmoded Model 3 that he sets Oliver up in what he hopes will be a humane resting place for retired robots, even though it's essentially just a glorified warehouse for unwanted junk.

Even more poignant in the musical is the story of Claire, the Model 5 who knocks on Oliver's door. Her former owner gifted her designer clothes and even a car. (Model 3s can't drive, but 5s can.) She is aware, however, that the woman she served did this because she is rich, not because she actually cares about her. Shaw's admirable servant eventually professes love for his employer, but robots like Claire are apparently incapable of love. We learn that Claire received a profession of love from her owner's husband, which led to the humans warehousing her so they could deal with their own messed-up relationship.

The thing is, while our society might treat employees like robots, we are in fact capable of love, pain, regret, and all of the other emotions our owners (oh, wait, employers) can experience. In Maybe Happy Ending, Oliver and Claire do eventually fall in love, or at least think they do. Being that both are now obsolete and replacement parts are no longer being manufactured, their time together is limited, though. Eventually, both will run out of battery life.

Today, A.I. thieves and other wealthy exploiters are making workers across the world increasingly obsolete. Offers of early retirement or retraining to older workers betrayed by the system they helped to build and maintain often seem like little more than warehousing for old robots. Perhaps it eases the consciences of those with power, but if we are to discover our own maybe happy endings, it will have to be on our own.

It seems there is no more help for the victims of economic exploitation in real life than there is for the discarded servants of fiction.

A Man of the People

I've written before about the actor Edmund Kean's working-class associations, including his membership in the notorious Wolves Club.

William Hazlitt, a theatre critic who admired Kean, frequently linked him with the common man. "Mr. Kean's acting is not of the patrician order," he wrote in the London Magazine in 1820, "he is one of the people, and what might be termed a radical performer."

Seeing Kean as the title character in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Hazlitt deemed him a failure. Since "the prevailing characteristics of the part are inordinate self-opinion, and haughty elevation of soul," Kean simply lacked the aristocratic grace to play the role, Hazlitt thought. Instead, Kean "descended into the common arena of man," which might have been good for other characters, but not Coriolanus.

Similarly, Hazlitt was disappointed at seeing Kean in the regal title role of Shakespeare's King Lear. Of course, Kean wasn't exactly acting Shakespeare's Lear, as he was performing Nahum Tate's adaptation of the play with a happy ending. Still, Hazlitt found Kean's performance "altogether inferior to his Othello."

The parts of Kean's Lear that Hazlitt found most affecting were the ones where he was least royal and most human. He singled out this speech Lear has when reunited with Cordelia:

Pray, do not mock me;

I am a very foolish, fond old man,

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;

And, to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks, I should know you, and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful; for I'm mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments; nay, I know not

Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,

For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child Cordelia.

Hazlitt wrote that on speaking the last words, the great actor "staggered faintly into Cordelia's arms, and his sobs of tenderness, and his ecstasy of joy commingled, drew streaming tears from the brightest eyes."

That was the Kean that Hazlitt wanted to see, and it appears to have been the Kean most of his other fans wanted as well.