Revolutionary Drama

Tonight, I'm having a private reading of my play Combustion with American Renaissance Theater Company.

The play tells the story of Marie-Anne and Antoine Lavoisier, who revolutionized chemistry around the same time a political revolution was happening in France.

Megan Greener will be reading the part of Marie-Anne, who figured out the mechanics of how to perform experiments that changed the way we think about matter. Frank Hankey will be playing her husband, Antoine, who was more focused on theory than the actual experiments.

A third character in the play, being read by Eric Percival, is the ghost of Jean-Paul Marat, a key figure in the French Revolution who sparred with the Lavoisiers and ended up getting assassinated in his own bathtub. (This later became the subject of a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.)

The French Revolution has always inspired great drama. In fact, re-enactments of the storming of the Bastille were staged soon after that event took place. Throughout the revolution, playwrights like Olympe de Gouges wrote about current events for the stage. The Bastille and the Terror later had important roles in the play The Black Doctor which became a star vehicle for Ira Aldridge.

Perhaps the most memorable depiction of the French Revolution is in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens's novel which was first adapted for the stage in 1860 by Tom Taylor. The events of the revolution keep resurfacing though, such as in the 21st-century playwright David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette, which I recently saw at Marymount Manhattan College.

My own play adds to this tradition, but also brings focus to the unique partnership of two scientists who tried to change the world, but got caught up in the world changing without them. I hope to be able to share this piece with the public soon in a full production.

Romantic Dramas at NASSR

Today, I presented my paper on Olympe de Gouges and Ira Aldridge online as a part of the annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, better known as NASSR.

I was a part of a panel on Theaters of Violence and Justice moderated by Sophie Thomas. The panel was led off by Marjean D. Purinton of Texas Tech University who spoke on "Justice on Trial in Romantic Period Drama and Novels."

Purinton is incredibly knowledgable about British Romantic drama, which is also the subject of a recent book of mine. She began by discussing one of my favorite playwrights of the period, Joanna Baillie, but instead of talking about one of her more well-known dramas, she delved into The Stripling, a prose tragedy based on a real-life case in Scotland.

In most of the plays Purinton discussed, legal trials are suggested but not directly portrayed on stage. In The Iron Chest, for instance, George Colman the Younger's adaptation of the novel Caleb Williams by William Godwin, a trial is central to the plot, but occurs offstage, as the accused title character comes to have less and less faith in a legal system that seems to just protect the rich and powerful.

Next, Purinton discussed The Cenci, a drama by Percy Shelley which I have written about frequently. She argued that the play really criticizes the justice system in Britain during the Regency, not the courts of Renaissance Rome that are nominally depicted in the tragedy. In addition she discussed James Boaden's The Secret Tribunal and a play by Elizabeth Inchbald, though I didn't catch the title of that one.

Young-ok An from the University of St. Thomas rounded out the panel, discussing Percy Shelley's The Cenci and Mary Shelley's novel Valperga. Thanks to everyone who showed up to listen to us!

NASSR Conference This Week!

This week, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism is holding its annual conference in Huntsville, Texas. I'll be attending, but online rather than in person.

Last year, NASSR held a joint conference with the British Association for Romantic Studies, which was also held in a hybrid format. I presented a paper virtually on George Gordon Byron's play Marino Faliero, and even chaired a panel on Byron.

This year, the theme of the NASSR conference is Romanticism and Justice. The conference opens on Thursday, and though I'll have to teach during the morning sessions, I plan on attending a virtual coffee hour with Julia Wright from Dalhousie University. Then, the Keats-Shelley Association of America is sponsoring a virtual seminar called Percy Shelley for Our Times.

My panel will be on Friday morning. I'll be discussing imprisonment in the plays The Convent by Olympe de Gouges and The Black Doctor Ira Aldridge. I'll be joined by Marjean D. Purinton discussing dramas that put justice on trial, Shavera Seneviratne discussing T.W. Moncrieff's The Cataract of the Ganges, and Young-ok An discussing women on trial in the work of Percy and Mary Shelley.

Sophie Thomas of Toronto Metropolitan University is currently scheduled to be chairing my panel. I'm looking forward to it!

Reviewing Eugene O'Neill

I recently joined the Eugene O'Neill Society, and yesterday my first issue of The Eugene O'Neill Review arrived in the mail.

The journal includes my own review of a production Irish Repertory Theatre did last year of O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, starring Robert Cuccioli and Belle Aykroyd.

It's an honor to have my review included. This issue has some fascinating stuff, including an article about an unperformed adaptation of The Hairy Ape by Shirley Graham originally written for the Federal Theatre Project, and another article on the influence Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths had on O'Neill.

Many thanks to the journal's editor, Alexander Pettit, for putting together such a lovely publication, and to Bess Rowen for asking me to review Irish Rep's production for the issue. I hope to have more work published in the journal in the future.

Right now, though, my attention is on earlier dramatists, as I am giving a paper at the end of the month on Olympe de Gouges and Ira Aldridge for a conference by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.

I don't know if O'Neill was familiar with the work of de Gouges and Aldridge, but I imagine he would have liked their plays!

Romanticism and Justice

At the end of March, I'll be attending a conference on "Romanticism and Justice" held by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and delivering a paper on two plays I regularly teach in theatre history courses, The Convent and The Black Doctor.

My paper, which I'll be delivering virtually on March 31st, will be titled "Ancien Régime Imprisonment in the Plays of Olympe de Gouges and Ira Aldridge." I'll be a part of a panel chaired by Sophie Thomas from Toronto Metropolitan University, and including Marjean D. Purinton of Texas Tech, Shavera Seneviratne from the University of Minnesota, and Young-ok An of the University of St. Thomas.

The Convent, or The Forced Vows was one of de Gouges's most popular plays. It premiered in 1790, just as the French Revolution was getting started, and tells the story of a woman imprisoned against her will by an aristocratic relative who tries to force her to take vows as a nun. The play examines the injustices of the old monarchal regime just as it was being transformed. I should note that de Gouges herself wanted to reform the monarchy, not abolish it, and because she wasn't radical enough for some, she was later executed during the Reign of Terror.

Ira Aldridge, by contrast, wasn't even born until after the French Revolution, but he had become fascinated by a French melodrama called Le Docteur Noir that had been circulating in Britain where he was touring as a leading actor. An African-American man from New York, Aldridge was looking for new roles he could play without having to cover himself up in whiteface, which he frequently did when portraying white characters. The Black Doctor fit the bill.

Over the course of the play, the titular doctor runs afoul of powerful aristocrats and gets imprisoned in the Bastille. The play then re-enacts the storming of the Bastille, and shows him being liberated, but only after years of isolation have affected the doctor's sanity, a plot element that would later appear in the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Just as with A Tale of Two Cities, The Black Doctor moves beyond the giddy triumph of the masses overthrowing the Bastille and examines how the Terror attacked even family members of those who were heroes of the Revolution.

The two plays have a lot in common, so I should have more than enough to talk about in March. If you're interested in attending the conference, either in person or virtually like me, check out NASSR's conference website.

The Convent

The French playwright Olympe de Gouges considered her plays to be dramas, though writing around the same time as the French Revolution, she introduced many sensationalistic elements that came to be adopted by the incipient new form known as melodrama.

Her first successful play Black Slavery (originally titled Zamore and Mizra) reflected her strong abolitionist views. Though it was written before the revolution, the Comédie-Française did not stage the work until December of 1789, when the revolution was already in full swing. Pro-slavery partisans heckled the play, and it closed after only three performances, though de Gouges later claimed the hecklers had not prevented the theatre from selling tickets. The piece inspired numerous imitations, leading the author to attack those she felt had plagiarized her.

In 1790, the revolutionary government in France began dissolving convents and monasteries, seizing their property to pay the nation's debts. There had also been allegations of young women being forced to take the veil as nuns, and the government had officially banned the taking of new religious vows even before it started closing convents. It was in this environment that de Gouges wrote The Convent, or The Forced Vows. The three-act play premiered on October 4, 1790, and continued to be performed off and on until 1792, the year she published the piece with an accompanying preface.

The Convent centers around Julie, a novice brought up in a convent and preparing to take her final vows. Julie attracts the romantic attention of a young chevalier who sees her when visiting the monastery with his father, a marquis. The chevalier bribes a gardener named Antoine to help him gain access to Julie so he can determine if she reciprocates his affections. His plan is to dress up as a Capuchin friar, but before he can don his robes, he is forced to flee the stage to avoid being seen by his father, the marquis. It is due to the marquis, we learn, that Julie is being asked to take her vows in spite of moral qualms. Something is afoot...

In the second act, Julie begins to confess to an older nun, Sister Angélique, the reason for her reluctance to take the veil. Just as she is about to reveal her secret, though, the abbess enters to brow beat her into going through with taking her vows. It turns out that the marquis has paid for Julie to be brought up in the convent, and if she refuses to become a nun, that money will disappear. The abbess sends Sister Angélique away, and welcomes a Capuchin friar to convince the girl to take her vows, not realizing that the friar is the chevalier in disguise.

Julie admits to the friar that she has fallen in love with a mysterious man she has seen in the company of the marquis. Elated, the chevalier reveals himself, but he is discovered by the abbess and his father. The marquis threatens to disinherit his son and even have him imprisoned, something powerful aristocrats definitely had the power to do prior to the revolution. Just in the nick of time a Commissary arrives with a contingent of soldiers, determined to get to the bottom of the matter. Saved by the revolution!

Act III begins with two nuns worrying what might happen if their convent is dissolved by the authorities. If that happens, one of them worries: "vows will no longer be pronounced, and each one of us will be what we will, or what we can... it will expose us to unusual temptations." Another nun seems to look forward to those temptations, though, and they exit dreaming about the men they might marry if their vows are dissolved (with the exception of one nun who seems to enjoy the flagellations practiced in the convent). All of this would have seemed very topical in 1790, when many nuns were being cast out into the world, and some did indeed marry.

The resolution comes when Sister Angélique reveals that she is Julie's mother, and sister to the marquis. It seems she married against her brother's wishes, and the marquis killed her husband in a duel. Overcome with guilt, the marquis cries out, "Oh! Lacerating remorse! Barbarous prejudices! To what excesses have you led me...." He begs his family to forgive him, and the lovers (in spite of being first cousins) are able to marry with their parents' consent.

Unfortunately, de Gouges did not experience a similarly happy ending. In 1793, King Louis XVI was executed, just two days before the premiere of de Gouges's play The Entrance of Dumouriez in Brussels at the Théâtre de la République. She considered the performance a disaster. By de Gouges's account, "actors allowed themselves to take only a few scraps of my play, to dilute them into a sort of medley, half farce, half pantomime."

In spite of de Gouges's enthusiasm for the revolution, she was not radical enough for some, and many people suspected she harbored royalist sympathies. In reality, she aligned herself with the moderate Girondins, but after Charlotte Corday assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, even being a moderate was enough to get you killed.

Three days after Corday was guillotined, authorities arrested de Gouges. She managed to smuggle some of her writings out of prison, but couldn't avoid the fate of so many who perished during the Reign of Terror. On November 3, 1793, de Gouges died on the guillotine.