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.

Theatre Spaces 1920-2020

I recently finished reading Iain Mackintosh's new book Theatre Spaces 1920-2020: Finding the Fun in Functionalism. It's equal parts personal memoir, history of modern drama, and fascinating screed on why the way we configure the audience in a physical space matters so immensely.

You might not have heard of Mackintosh before, but anyone who can get Sir Richard Eyre to write the forward to his new book is not to be trifled with. After helping to run Britain's touring Prospect Theatre Company in the 1960s and '70s, Mackintosh joined Theatre Projects Consultants, using his experience with which spaces worked and which didn't to advise companies looking to build or remodel theatres.

Though the title claims to only cover one century, Mackintosh begins by going back to 1870 and the planning of Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. Seating for the theatre was to consist of a giant fan shape surrounding a massive proscenium stage and sunken orchestra pit. Originally, there was no elevated mezzanine or balcony, though an upper level was added later. A fan-shaped auditorium works for Wagner's epics, but Mackintosh argues it can be deadly when applied to lighter operas such as those by Mozart.

The book then takes a detour through an even older theatre, the Festival Theatre Cambridge, which was originally designed by William Wilkins in 1814. I had a chance to visit the theatre (now a Buddhist center) back in 2016 at a conference on Regency-era drama held by the Society for Theatre Research. In the 1920s, Terence Gray acquired the theatre and remodeled it, but left intact some of the original stage machinery. Later, he offered Gordon Craig the chance to take over the theatre, have complete artistic control, and do whatever he wanted, but Craig demurred.

Mackintosh treats the older theatre extensively because it illustrates his point that an old-fashioned horseshoe-shaped wraparound suspended over the orchestra seating provides better intimacy than Wagner's giant fan, which has proved so influential. He argues that the thrust stages pioneered by Tyrone Guthrie provide a better alternative to a fan-shaped auditorium, like that of the Olivier at London's National Theatre. When I saw the brilliant musical Hadestown in the Olivier, I was disappointed, especially since the show had been so enjoyable in the much smaller space of New York Theatre Workshop. According to Macintosh, however, almost nothing works in the massive Olivier, which has a stage far too wide and audiences inevitably stretched out far from the action.

Fan-shaped theatres frequently have poor acoustics, in spite of being modeled on ancient Greek stages that can have excellent acoustics when used properly. Mackintosh argues that the massive theatre at Epidaurus is larger than those used by the great classical dramatists of Athens, and was later more than doubled in size by the Romans, who preferred watching spectacle to listening to poetry. Rather than using the fan layout of the Greeks, Mackintosh prefers theatres like London's Barbican, which uses multiple wrap-around levels to fit the whole audience into a smaller area, making sure no one is positioned too far away from the stage.

The book is also kind to historical reconstructions, such as Shakespeare's Globe and the smaller Wanamaker Playhouse attached to it. When the reconstructed Globe was opened, some purists thought it would just be a tourist trap, but in spite of not receiving the large subsidies enjoyed by the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe offers cheaper tickets than the NT, and continues to attract young audiences who prefer its uncomfortable seats (or worse yet--standing room) to the comfortable but pricey seats in the Olivier.

Mackintosh also chronicles efforts to save historic theatres, including the Theatres Royal in Bristol, Bury St. Edmunds, and Richmond Yorkshire. When the theatre in Dunfermline, Scotland couldn't be revitalized, its interior was shipped to Sarasota, Florida, where it graced the home of Asolo Rep. Some other theatre cultures were not so fortunate. In a later chapter, the book discusses the wholesale destruction of traditional theatres in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps a vindication of Macintosh's preference for wrap-around seating is that the Royal Shakespeare Company modified their main theatre in 2010 to provide a thrust stage. I remember seeing a production of As You Like It in the old theatre there in 1996 and being unimpressed. Overall, I think Mackintosh makes a good case.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Poets like Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Butler Yeats all admired the Belgian Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. So did break-through dramatists, including August Strindberg, Anton Chekov, and Alfred Jarry.  It's a pity we don't see more of his plays performed today.

Maeterlinck wrote mostly in obscurity, until 1890, when the critic Octave Mirbeau wrote a review in Le Figaro declaring Maeterlinck's first play, Princess Maleine, one of the greatest masterpieces ever written. In Mirbeau's words: "Maeterlinck has given us the most ingenious and extraordinary work of these times, and also the most naïve, comparable, and dare I say it, superior in beauty to what is most beautiful in Shakespeare."

That type of hyperbole sounds ridiculous today, as it did to many people in 1890. However, in October of that year, Paul Fort (director of the Théâtre Mixte, soon to become the Théâtre d'Art) requested Maeterlinck's permission to stage Princess Maleine. Maeterlink instead granted André Antoine at the Théâtre Libre the rights to the play, but it was not produced during the playwright's lifetime.  In fact, the first performance of Princess Maleine by professional actors was not until 1962.

Paul Fort instead produced two of Maeterlinck's one-act plays, The Intruder in May of 1891, and then The Blind later that year. Greater fame came with Pelléas et Mélisande, published in 1892 and first performed on May, 17 1893, under the direction of Fort's protégé, Aurélien Lugné-Poe. The work is highly literary. Mallarmé said that "Pelléas et Mélisande, on a stage, exhales the delight of the page."

This work came to exemplify the Symbolist movement. According to Yeats, Symbolism "never mentions an external thing except to express the state of the soul."  Like all great Symbolist works, the play is noted not so much for what it shows, but for what it leaves out. The audience becomes a part of the work, having to supply that which is missing in the text.

Maeterlinck's works have inspired numerous composers, including Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Gabriel Fauré, Paul Dukas, Anton Webern, and Sergei Rachmaninov.  Though Debussy's opera is the most famous musical adaptation of Pelléas et Mélisande, Fauré debuted his incidental music for the play years earlier, during the piece's London premiere at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1898. Though the entire score is lovely, the highpoint for me is the "Song of Mélisande" from Act III.

The song takes place during the most famous scene of the play, as Mélisande leans out the window of a tower and Pelléas caresses her hair. The original song Maeterlinck had written for the piece wasn't working in the original Paris production. He instead gave about thirty poems to the actress playing Mélisande, and asked her to pick one.

She ended up choosing "Les trios soeurs aveugles." Maeterlinck asked the young composer Gabriel Fabre to set the piece to music, which he did to great acclaim. When Fauré wrote music for the English production, however, he used the translation done by Jack Mackail. It goes like this:

          The King's three blind daughters
          Sit locked in a hold.
          In the darkness their lamps
          Make a glimmer of gold.
          Up the stair of the turret
          The sisters are gone.
          Seven days they wait there
          And the lamps they burn on.
          What hope? says the first,
          And leans o'er the flame.
          I hear our lamps burning.
          O yet if he came!
          O hope! says the second,
          Was that the lamp's flare,
          Or a sound of low footsteps?
          The Prince on the stair!
          But the holiest sister
          She turns her about:
          O no hope now forever --
          Our lamps are gone out.

Maeterlinck was not without his critics. Camille Mauclair praised Percy Bysshe Shelley, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Richard Wagner for work that is truly dramatic, but he left out Maeterlinck, finding his plays too philosophical.  Such criticism, however, did not stop Maeterlinck from winning the 1911 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Kneehigh's Tristan and Yseult

Last night, I saw the first preview of the British theatre company Kneehigh's production of Tristan and Yseult at St. Ann's Warehouse. This is a story near and dear to my heart, and the production is well worth seeing.

Writers Anna Maria Murphy and Carl Grose stay mostly faithful to the ancient celtic legend, though the dress is modern, as is the music. Wagner, of course, must rear his head, as the obligatory strains of Tristan und Isolde ring through the theatre, but the audience is more likely to hear pop songs played by the band at "The Club of the Unloved."

Band members, who serve as a chorus of sorts, wear knitted hoods, that if looked at sideways, could almost be mistaken for chain mail. They profess to be merely Lovespotters, observers who hold love at arm's length and never engage in strong emotion themselves. Leading these loveless souls, and narrating the play, is Whitehands, the Yseult of the Fair Hands in the legend, played magnificently in this production by Kristy Woodward. Dressed in white and wearing dark sunglasses, Whitehands remains both detached from the action and cynically engaged with everything that happens.

While the Lovespotters hold love at arm's length, we in the audience cannot. Dominic Marsh plays a Frenchified Tristan, while Hannah Vassallo is the chestnut-haired beauty who captures his heart. When they fall in love, they literally fly through the air, leaping and swinging on cables suspended above the stage. Director Emma Rice choreographs the aeronautics brilliantly, and we cannot help but be caught up in the ecstasy of the moment.

Of course, Yseult has a husband, King Mark of Cornwall, sympathetically played by Mike Shepherd. Traditionally, Mark is Sir Tristan's uncle, but in this version, the play implies he is the knight's natural father. In any case, he clearly loves Tristan with a fatherly love, making the betrayal all that more painful.

Tristan and Yseult is playing until December 14th. For more information, go here:

St. Ann's Warehouse