Blog in the Manger: History Lesson

Hello again, dear readers! Literary Director/Dramaturge/Blog Slave Keith Hock here. I am delighted to tell you we began our rehearsals for Dog in the Manger on Monday! I got to attend rehearsals for the last two nights to do some table work and exchange my Writing Chains for the Dramaturgy Hat for a little while. This is going to be a hell of a show that the rest of the team and I are very excited to share it with you. We are especially excited to bring it to you because it is comparatively little-known and so we have an opportunity (rare in a classical theatre company) to likely be your first experience with this play! Because we don’t want you to go in COMPLETELY blind, though, I wanted to take this opportunity to give you a little bit of context on Spanish theatre, our author Lope de Vega, and why I believe you don’t recognize his name or his plays despite him being utterly fascinating.

First some baseline information. Our play, Dog in the Manger, comes out of the Golden Age of Spanish Theatre, approximately 1580s-1670s. You may recognize this as contemporaneous with Shakespeare and his fellows, and shortly after the rise of the commedia dell’arte in Italy, the two styles to which it hews most closely artistically. You may also notice that you are familiar with Elizabethan theatre, and commedia, but have never seen anything purporting to have come out of the siglo de oro, much less seen theatre companies that are dedicated to exploring the style and aesthetic, like countless Shakespeare companies and our colleagues over at Faction of Fools. Until the past 40 or so years there has been little market penetration by Golden Age Spanish theatre in non-Spanish-speaking environments, I believe in large part due to the Black Legend.

The what? What is the Black Legend? I’m glad you asked, rhetorical framing device. The Black Legend was a historiographical tool that viewed Renaissance Spain through the lens of atrocities such as the Reconquista, Inquisition, subjugation of the Low Countries, and colonization of the Americas and concluded that Spain was a nation of cruel and intolerant monsters whose culture, beliefs, and ideologies have been rightfully forgotten by history. A culture such as this, which expelled or forced conversion on Muslims and Jews after confiscating their wealth, which profited off the exploitation and slaughter of native peoples in Mexico and the Caribbean, which fought an 80 Years’ War rather than tolerate Protestant faith in a portion of its holdings, could not understand or create any art that was subtle, sophisticated, or worth consuming. Surely no society run by those inbred bigots the Habsburgs could produce anything beautiful. Or so the argument went.

Charles II, Last of the Spanish Habsburgs. Please note the profound busted-ness of his grill, otherwise known as the Habsburg Jaw

I will not deny that all of these horrific things, and many more, happened in Renaissance Spain. But I (and other, much better, theatre and regular historians) do not believe that these atrocities disqualify the art and culture created there, nor do we believe that Spain was somehow unique in its commitment of atrocities in the time period. Modern historians now regard the Black Legend as propaganda, more of a slam piece by contemporary-through-Enlightenment European rivals such as England and what is now the Netherlands to discredit and damage Spanish and Catholic prestige on the global stage. While the Black Legend itself has been discredited, it did its job pretty good for a while there, and the international community has largely ignored or at the least undervalued Spain’s greatest theatrical achievements for close to 400 years.

That is the only reason I can think of that we wouldn’t all learn about this era, and especially its greatest playwright, Lope de Vega, in the same high school literature class where we learned about Shakespeare and Cervantes. Which is too bad, because de Vega is well worth learning about. He claimed to have written over 2000 plays, which you might recognize as an utterly ludicrous number. He is known for certain to have written between 600 and 800, a somehow equally insane number, which would amount to writing more than one play a month, every month, for 50 years. If that were his sole claim to fame he would still be worth discussing just for that. But he was also a genius, a generational talent. His best plays, Dog in the Manger included, rank with the plays of Shakespeare, Racine, and Aeschylus.

Felix Lope de Vega y Carpio, 1562-1635.

Even setting aside his prodigious output and preternatural talents, however, his life was NUTS. Born to a middle-class family, he was educated to be a priest but elected instead to marry twice, have several additional love affairs, and father at least 16 children, both legitimate and bastards. After the first of those affairs (with a prominent actress named Elena) went south he…didn’t take it well, and wrote a series of libelous poems about the woman and her family. The authorities quickly deduced it was him and he was exiled from Castile for two years, and the city of Madrid for eight. When he went into exile, he took his 16-year-old lover Isabel with him. They married in 1588, the same year that he sailed with the Armada. Fortunately for the art of theatre he escaped that fiasco with his life and settled in Valencia to live out the duration of his exile. For the next several years he served in the household of the Duke of Alba, until his wife Isabel died in childbirth in 1594. This coincided with the end of his exile and he returned to Madrid, where he lived and worked as an author until his death. He remarried to a woman named Juana in in 1598 (while continuing his numerous affairs) and supplemented his writing income by becoming secretary to the Duke of Sessa in 1607. Juana also died in childbirth in 1612 and in 1614 de Vega did at long last enter the priesthood, though without curtailing or even attempting to limit his affairs. In this time he was also a theatrical censor and informant for the Inquisition, and more than once attempted to ascend to the role of Royal Chronicler, though his ambitions were foiled by his common heritage. In 1616 he met his final love Marta, who would stay with him through the loss of her sight and reason until her death in 1632. De Vega himself would die in 1635 after the death of his favored son and the abduction of his youngest daughter, and his funeral allegedly took a full nine days and featured 150 speakers.

Hopefully this has given you a vague sense of the cultural geopolitics of 17th century Europe and how they could impact the popularity of plays in the modern day, as well as a small taste of the eccentricities of our playwright. I look forward to sharing much more with you as the creative team and I explore this play and see what beauty from the Golden Age of Spanish Theatre we’ve been missing all our lives. Won’t you come join us?

 

But wait! Don’t go yet! Unfortunately these Dog in the Manger rehearsals have kept me from writing about our other currently running performance, Dracula! [A situation I hope to rectify next week, so keep your eyes peeled -KH] Our space-specific four-person adaptation of Dracula is returning this weekend, to the Otis Street Arts Project! Follow THIS LINK for details, and join us there on October 14th!

Oi! For a Muse of Fire

 

Wyckham Avery as Pistol. From WHF’s 2017 Henry V. Photo by Tori Boutin

Hey folks! Keith Hock here, back again for the final week of our critically acclaimed Henry V! Last week I promised I would talk about our quick-changes and their function in our concept. I’m a man of my word, so I’ll get into them here, but since a) I don’t think even I could spend a thousand words talking solely about the concept of quick-changes and b) there has been an elephant in the room for this whole production that I have mentioned in passing but never addressed in the blog, I want to talk about it in light of another context; Punk Rock. In fact, I’ll do you one better, and I’ll bring EVERYTHING back together under this punk umbrella. Sound good?

Much to 14-year-old me’s disappointment I am perhaps the least punk person I know. I love rules, my concealed-by-work-attire tattoos are about being a contributing member of society, and I got my ear pierced at the mall. My whole lifestyle and aesthetic falls somewhere between “nice young man” and “lovable oaf”. But I’m not exactly a Chinese or Balkans scholar, either, and that didn’t stop me from dramaturging CHALK. So I bit the bullet and set out to learn all that I could about punk. Which I did in, without a doubt, the squarest and LEAST punk of all possible ways: I read about it. I went to my job at the library and I went to our catalog and I typed the words “Punk” and “Class Conflict” in the search engine and I read all the books and articles that popped up. Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye would not approve.

“Shame on you, nerd.” Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins

Nevertheless, my nerd research pinged onto a key aspect of the punk philosophy, one that spoke deeply to We Happy Few’s collective heart; an aggressively democratic, improvisational, anti-authority, do-it-yourself attitude towards creating art and just generally living life. There are no barriers to creating punk art. All that is important is the desire to do it, and the wherewithal to follow through on that desire. Failure doesn’t exist. If you do a bad job all that happens is you made some bad art, and you learn from the experience and get better. [Or you don’t, as cast member and punk survivor Wyckham Avery pointed out to me in a rehearsal. Maybe you don’t get better. It doesn’t matter. Between quality and authenticity in punk culture, quality is the less important attribute by a wide margin. -KH] The point is no one can stop you from doing something you want to do, no authority can tell you that what you made was right or wrong, good or bad.

There is a lot of good stuff to unpack from this philosophy but the one that I really want to focus on is the egalitarian aspect. Why do you think we did away with the Chorus? The expository scenes at the beginning of each act and end of the play are all supposed to be delivered by a (confusingly-named) single Chorus character. But that’s boring, and who is this guy who gets to tell us all what’s going on? HE isn’t the one telling the story, HE wasn’t there. You know who WAS there? Pistol, and Nym, and Alice, and Quickly, and Gower, and the Dauphin, and Exeter; the ensemble. Likewise with “Once more unto the breach”, traditionally a Henry monologue that we broke up across the whole army. Henry isn’t a god, he’s just one man. He is no more important in this battle than any of his soldiers, so his second-most-famous battle cry gets spread around to everyone doing their own bit of fighting. [Henry gets to keep St Crispin’s Day because he is openly trading on his royal status in that one -KH] Long-time fans may recall this trick from our Tempest days, when we cast everyone who wasn’t Prospero as Ariel. The thematic thrust was different (creating a community versus demonstrating the ubiquity of magic on the island) but the tool was the same.

L-R: Josh Adams, Andrew Keller, Scott Gaines, Britt Duff. From We Happy Few’s 2013 The Tempest. Photo by Jon Harvey

You might, by now, see the skeleton of how this is connected to quick changes and multiple characters. You may even see how it is tied to the illusory nature of theatre and why this play, in particular, rewards acknowledging the deception that I talked about on opening night. These conceits—democratizing the stage, drawing attention to class divides through intentional multi-casting, and openly acknowledging the artifice of the play exposed by Shakespeare’s own language—allow us to have our characters change appearances on the fly, sometimes even mid-scene. This was not exactly new territory for us, having cut our teeth on this very conceit in Hamlet, but it had been a while since we were able to do it with such clarity and intent.

Here as elsewhere we found ourselves a mighty ally in the Prologue’s metatheatrical reminder that the audience is watching a play. Thanks to the Prologue, we had fourth-wall-breaking playwright permission to appear as Actors on a Stage from time to time. We didn’t need Hamlet’s insanity nor the dream logic of The Tempest and Winter’s Tale to explain the rapid changes. This time they were actual costume changes in the context of a play. They just happened in broad view of the audience, rejecting the audience’s assumptions about how a play is supposed to be staged. This gave us some leeway in facilitating some quick scene changes; for example, we could have Kiernan traipsing around the French camp as noted coward Le Fer while carrying his Henry robe, because he won’t have time to get back where he stowed it before his entrance for St. Crispin’s Day. It also gave us more opportunities to play with our doubling, letting us do fun things like turn the Boy (on lookout duty during some nefarious dealings) into Exeter, the exact sort of Authority Figure she is supposed to be looking out for.

L-R: Natasha Gallop as the Boy, Niusha Nawab as Bardolph, Robert Pike as French Corpse. From We Happy Few’s 2017 Henry V. Photo by Tori Boutin

This is what I was talking about when I said it was so difficult to examine one aspect of this play without bringing up two others. The punk framework of …rejecting traditional frameworks dovetails perfectly into the Prologue’s acknowledgement of artifice and our own exploration of the clear but underrepresented class divide in the show. Our own propensity for multicasting and on-stage character changes lends itself equally well to examining class divisions and reminding the audience where they are and what they’re doing.

If you would like to see this seamless combination of form and function on stage, time is running out! We are running for the rest of this week and then MUST CLOSE on Saturday the 29th of April. Don’t miss your chance! Tickets are available HERE!

Henry V: Into a Thousand Parts Divide Eight Actors

Hello again, Constant Readers! We Happy Few’s resident Blogslave Keith Hock here, freed from my Blogcage for our second weekend of performances! I have been ungagged and a keyboard placed in front of my fingers and now I can share with you some of those neato secrets that I couldn’t talk about until after the show opened. The fun concept I wanted to look at in this blog is something that is, by now, somewhat of a calling card of a We Happy Few show; our approach to multi-casting. We are no strangers to playing around with our actor tracks to unearth interesting nuance between different characters or highlight a particular aspect of a production, whether that’s the pervasive magic of Prospero’s island in The Tempest or Juliet’s relationship with her nurse and her cousin Tybalt. This play is no different, and I wanted to walk you through some of the thought process behind it.

**400-YEAR OLD SPOILERS BELOW**

There are three major communities in this play that we had to account for: the French court, the English court, and Cheapside. For this play, because we were paying such close attention to class dynamics, we thought it would be informative to make the doubling happen along a haves/have-nots axis wherever possible. [We also did this out of necessity; scenes generally take place between members of the same class and when you only have 8 actors and you take your Henry out of contention by having him observe just about every scene in-character you will run out of actors before you run out of roles. But I’m getting ahead of myself. -KH] Take, for instance, doubling Montjoy with Quickly.  First and most importantly, these characters would never, ever, appear in the same scene, so we knew that Riley Bartlebaugh would be free to do both. Second, Montjoy’s role is that of messenger for the French and since the French “desire nothing but odds with England”, her job is principally to carry insults from the Dauphin and Constable to Henry, engendering and encouraging the conflict. By contrast, Mistress Quickly’s (dramatically expanded) role in the English camp is that of peacemaker, keeping the Cheapside boys’ spirits up and their knives away from each other’s throats. Through her doubled eyes we see both a war begun out of pique and boredom and the ravages that same war wreaks on a family that found themselves dragged into it.

Riley Bartlebaugh as Quickly, from We Happy Few’s Henry V, 2017. Photo by Tori Boutin

Sometimes, as above, we double to examine the differences between two characters. Other times we seek to explore unexpected similarities and create vicious ironies, as by doubling Exeter with the Boy. As before, their paths do not cross in the story so we knew we were free to send Tasha Gallop to do both. In addition, this doubling forces the audience to consider the similarities between Exeter, Henry’s uncle and most trusted advisor, and the Boy, Hal’s onetime Cheapside companion and an unwilling apprentice in blackguardy. Exeter has enough of Henry’s faith to speak for him in both parley and at the negotiation table and it is, if anything, an understatement to describe the Boy as the wisest, maturest, and most competent of the Pranksters. Considering her monologue about the worthlessness of her associates and her desire to extricate herself from their villainy, the Boy seems on the path to straighten up and make something of herself. Until she is killed in a war that Exeter helped to start.

Natasha Gallop as The Boy, from We Happy Few’s 2017 Henry V. Photo by Tori Boutin

Doubling also allow us to tell the story without dumping our actors into minimal roles, and keeps everyone’s business about equal. For example, our concept largely neuters the English nobility with the exception of Exeter, but there still needs to be a court around when Henry wants to say badass things like the St. Crispin’s Day speech. And for as fun and important as Nym and Bardolph are to our play, they just don’t have a ton to do, especially after they get themselves killed. So we doubled Westmoreland and Gloucester with Nym and Bardolph, to give us a chance to see how Hal’s old drinking buddies match up to Henry’s new royal associates. Then, when we saw how much fun Josh Adams and Niusha Nawab were having together, we tacked on the Constable and Dauphin to those tracks as well. For comparison, because Pistol actually makes it through the entire play and gets a nice juicy scene right at the end, there was no need for us to find another supernumerary English lord to give to Wyckham Avery to fill out her business. Pistol and Alice combined to keep her busy enough.

L-R: Josh Adams as Nym, Niusha Nawab as Bardolph, Wyckham Avery as Pistol, Kiernan McGowan as Henry, Natasha Gallop as Boy, Riley Bartlebaugh as Quickly. From We Happy Few’s 2017 Henry V. Photo by Tori Boutin

Speaking of Alice, the last pieces of the cast puzzle are the French royalty Katherine and the King, and the middle class Captains Fluellen and Gower. Raven Bonniwell as Katherine finds herself doubled with Captain Fluellen, for several reasons. One, as always, Katherine does not encounter Fluellen in the play. Two, both characters serve predominantly as comic relief, and both do it through their preposterous and overblown voices. Shakespeare wrote Katherine’s scenes in bad French to be funnier, and replaced every ‘b’ that Fluellen would say with a ‘p’ to replicate the silly-sounding Welsh accent. And three, the most serious reason: Fluellen and Katherine have the two closest relationships with Henry. He has cut his ties to Cheapside, callously sending Nym and Bardolph to their deaths, and his court is filled with allies and advisors, not friends. But Fluellen and Henry share an easy camaraderie, bound by their joint Welsh heritage. Katherine, meanwhile, is Henry’s “capital demand” in conquering France and based on his mumble-mouthed wooing seems to have quite enchanted the otherwise eloquent Henry. These two characters do more to humanize Henry than the whole of his “Upon the King” soliloquy.

This leaves Bob Pike having drawn the unenviable task of being the two straight men in the play. France is sober and conscientious. He bases his measured actions on advice from his court and his own wisdom while corralling his hot-blooded son the Dauphin. Gower in turn is a no-nonsense professional soldier who, in our story, largely exists to keep the Cheapside boys under control and listen to Fluellen yammer endlessly about whatever she feels like talking about that day. They represent gruff, unyielding, and unsmiling authority, of the sort that Hal used to rebel against in Cheapside and is still fighting in France.

L-R: Raven Bonniwell as Fluellen, Robert Pike as Gower. From We Happy Few’s 2017 Henry V. Photo by Tori Boutin

This ended up being a lot longer than I thought I would be able to squeeze out of this topic. I was going to get into how this multiple casting called for us to occasionally play with our quick changes but I suppose that topic will have to wait for another day. If you want to see what I’m talking about, or you want to fact-check what I said here (smart money says I got something wrong), come see the show!

Theatre is a Team Sport

 

Hey everybody! How’s it going? Good to see you again!

If I seem uncharacteristically cheery and upbeat today, that is only because I am. Some wonderful, glorious, beautiful things are happening right now, and they have put a bounce in my step and a sparkle in my eye. For one thing it is cherry blossom season, the prettiest and best season in DC, because it means our city is finally warming up and it will be tolerable to be outside for like 2 months until DC’s miserable sticky bastard of a summer ruins everything. Second, we are three weeks deep into rehearsals for our wonderful, smart, fun, deep, complex production of Henry V that has got me almost giddy with anticipation. And finally, we are in the final week of the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament! March Madness! Basketball Christmas! My favorite three weeks of the year!

“Hey, wait a minute,” I hear you mutter. “Keith, you’re a nerd. You talk about nerd stuff all the time. You lectured us for like 3000 words about where a Chinese story came from and you use pictures of Magic cards and CHUDs in your blog posts. You aren’t supposed to like basketball.” My initial response to that is GO! GONZAGA! G-O-N-Z-A-G-A! Moreover, I don’t appreciate your disappointed judgmental tone, nor the implication that because I like a given thing I am automatically pigeonholed and my interests and personality predetermined.

GO ZAGS!

But hear me out, oddly confrontational figments of my imagination used to construct this blog, because I have here some reasons that I (and you) can enjoy both, besides us being adults and being in charge of our own interests. Perhaps sports and theatre have something in common. David Mamet himself used the arc of a satisfying game to illustrate the nature of a well-crafted narrative, in his book Three Uses of the Knife, so there must be something there. Let’s see if I can convince you that theatre, especially We Happy Few-style theatre, is more like basketball than you might expect.

First of all, they are both spectator activities, performances meant to be watched, appreciated, and analyzed by an audience. We do them to entertain and inspire our fans, and fans come to be entertained and inspired. They are also both physical activities, harnessing the human body and spirit and putting it on display. They both take a lot, lot, lot of practice, drilling scenes and lines and plays and basic fundamental actions until they no longer take thought but are automatic muscle memory reactions. And you need to get to that level of automatic repetition, because once you run into an adversary or ESPECIALLY an audience, all your careful plans will go flying out the window. Your opponent is going to do their level best (and they have been practicing at least as hard as you) to prevent you from doing whatever you’re trying to do, but a crowd will throw you off your game just by not liking you. You will feel the weight of their displeasure bearing down on you, whether you’re trying to hit a key free throw or land “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”. Even if they don’t hate you, just the pressure of thousands of eyes on you, watching and judging and analyzing your every move, can easily rattle even a veteran. A crowd has real energy and can absolutely sway a performance. Just ask Chris Webber:

 

But perhaps the biggest similarity between the two, as you may have guessed from the title of this blog, is teamwork. Theatre is obviously a collaborative endeavor, just like basketball or lacrosse or any other team sport. The only difference is that in sports, you are cooperating with one set of people and competing with another set, while in theatre you are ALL cooperating to put on a performance [if you feel you are competing while you are on stage I urge you to find a less toxic company to work with -KH]. I am in my heart of hearts a collaborator and only get competitive when it comes to trivia, which is why I chose theatre over lacrosse after a year and a half in college and I now spend my spare time as the Literary Director of a theatre company and not playing in rec leagues down at the Y, but I spent enough time being truly awful at lacrosse on a team of the most supportive people in the entire world to know that you need and will find at least as much camaraderie as killer instinct on the court.

Basketball isn’t the MOST collaborative of team sports (for my money that title goes to the hyper-specialized football) but it is the one I love the most, and it is the one that is happening right now, so it’s what I’m gonna talk about. It is also the one that expects the most out of each individual player. Football and to a somewhat lesser extent baseball are dominated by players who excel at a single position and do little or nothing else; football has a number of single-use positions, including two different kinds of kickers (2!), and in baseball it is understood that your pitchers will be an automatic out when they are at bat. Hockey, soccer, and lacrosse divide the field into sections and have players that generally only play in one. Defenders and attackmen/strikers/forwards rarely cross into or involve themselves in the opposite section, and while goalies CAN leave their goals it is ill-advised for them to do so. In all of these sports there are long stretches of time where many of the players will be standing around, watching their teammates play and waiting for their opportunity to do something.

But in basketball, both because of the size of the team and the quickness with which the game is played, everyone plays both sides of the court on every possession. A player who is visionary on offense but a liability on defense is an incomplete player, and a lockdown defender who can’t shoot lets the other team ignore him on offense and basically play five-on-four. This is not to say that a player must be perfect at everything, nor that there are players who are better at one than the other, but unlike in many other sports you really gotta know what you’re doing all over the court. And while basketball has perhaps the most room for heroics by a single player, due to the small team size, playing hero ball is seldom the recipe for success. Look at Markelle Fultz, the number-1 recruit out of high school this year, who led the Washington Huskies to an ASTOUNDING 9-22 season. Or, if you think that was a fluke, ask Ben Simmons, the number-1 college recruit the year before, who led his Louisiana State Tigers to a 10-21 season. Both of these teams had the best player in the country, both will probably be the #1 picks in the draft (Simmons already was last year and Fultz is likely to be this year) but neither of them could lead their teams to win even a third of the time, and both got their head coaches fired at the end of the season. If the cogs don’t fit together, it doesn’t matter that one of them is made of gold.

Go Go Power Rangers!

As you should expect from me by this point, what I am talking about is both true in general and specifically relevant for what we are working on. Not to tell tales out of school, but our conception of Henry V (and the whole We Happy Few ethos) takes very seriously the idea of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. For all my emphasis on ‘Great Man’ history in my History Lesson post, we will be spending a lot less time with Henry, and a lot more time with his army, when we bring the show to the stage next month. Exactly how we manage that…you’ll have to come see the show to find out. Tickets are available now!

Until next time,

Go Zags

PS The next blog post I write will actually be about the play, I swear.

History Lesson: The Hundred Years’ War (And Another 200 Years Before it)

Good evening, Dear Readers! We started rehearsals for our upcoming performance of Henry V today, and oh man am I excited about it. Henry V, as I intimated in my last blog post, is one of Shakespeare’s Histories, which means there is more context to the story than usual. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream or King Lear or any other non-history play you care to mention all that you need to know is whatever exposition some ancillary character or Chorus analogue ham-fistedly delivers in the first few scenes. These stories are self-contained, just as Aristotle would like. But the Histories are real events, hence the name, so it is helpful to have additional background on what was happening around the events of the play. Since my job around here these days is basically Head Stuff Knower (a title I have wanted all my life) I have spent the last few weeks teaching myself all about what was happening around the reign of Henry V, and it turns out that was the Hundred Years’ War. So I hope you guys want to read about a centuries-long dynastic conflict as much as I want to write about it!

It all started, as English histories are wont to, in 1066 with William the Conqueror (nee Bastard) crossing the Channel, defeating Harold Godwinson, subjugating the Anglo-Saxons, and establishing the Norman dynasty in England. This conquest established William as the King of England, though he remained the Duke of Normandy. The Duchy of Normandy was technically a fief of the King of France, which means that the King of England was, in his office as the Duke of Normandy, a subject of the French Crown. This is obviously a less than ideal circumstance for a king to be in, but it was tolerable for a time while the king of France was not powerful enough to exert control over the nobles over whom he was suzerain.

This circumstance was complicated by Eleanor of Aquitaine. In 1137 she married the soon-to-be King Louis VII of France but bore him only daughters. In 1152 he sought and received an annulment technically on the grounds that they were like 4th cousins but really because she kept having daughters. Then, in 1154, she married King Henry II of England and shortly thereafter bore him five sons, among them King Richard I Lionheart [there is no evidence to support this, and frankly biology is against me here, but I assume she did so out of spite -KH]. In addition to securing Henry II’s bloodline and beginning the Plantagenet dynasty, this highly advantageous marriage wed her substantial holdings in south and central France to his in Normandy and England, creating the Angevin empire which for a time controlled more French land than the king of France.

This empire was not to last, however. One of England’s greatest and most heroic kings, Richard I, was followed by one of her weakest, King John. You may know him as John Lackland, for losing Normandy and other continental holdings. You may know him as John Softsword, for a lack of martial virtue and…alleged marital issues. You may even know him as the king who was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 and usher in the era of constitutionality.

But probably you know him as this guy. From Disney’s Robin Hood, 1973.

In any case, John lost England all of her continental holdings, save Aquitaine and Gascony, in the early 13th century. Smash cut to ~100 years in the future, to the reign of Edward II (he was the fey, foppish prince in Braveheart whose lover is defenestrated by Edward I Longshanks). He married Isabella, princess of France, in an ill-conceived effort to unify their feuding nations. Edward II is otherwise unremarkable for our purposes, though I would be remiss if I did not mention that he was apocryphally killed by a red-hot poker being inserted into his anus, presumably in reference to his alleged homosexuality.

Meanwhile, in France King Charles IV has died without male issue, ending the 400-year-old house of Capet as the rulers of France. The throne was claimed by Philip VI, Charles’ first cousin and count of Valois. But Edward III contested the throne, asserting that his claim (through his mother Isabella, Charles IV’s older sister) is more valid than Philip’s, which is through his grandfather. Philip’s claim, however, is entirely through the male line, while Edward’s passes through a woman, which the “Law Salique” forbids. Edward did not choose to accept this interpretation, as you might imagine, and declared war to take what is rightfully his. Finally, some 800 words into this blog post, the Hundred Years’ War has begun.

I should clear up a couple things about the war before we get into it. First, it is longer than 100 years; the opening action takes place in 1337 and its final action is in 1453, so in reality it lasted almost 120 years. Second, as you will soon see, it was not the beginning of Anglo-French discord, nor was it the end. France and England hated each other, UNC/Duke-like, from the time of William the Conqueror to shortly before the First World War. Third, it was not, as it might sound, a straight century-plus of nonstop warfare across the green fields of France. It was raids, proxy wars, border conflicts, a handful of campaigns of conquest, and long periods of peace. I do not have the time to go as deep as it demands (people can, and have, written entire books about what I just summarized in 5 paragraphs), so I will try to hit highlights and important facts for our purposes.

Go Tar Heels.

The war opened with great success for the English. At the Battle of Sluys in 1340 the English navy utilized inventive tactics and advanced technology to crush a numerically superior French force (this will be a theme). The French navy was obliterated and the English ruled the waves for the next 30 or so years. In 1346, Edward and his son the Black Prince launched a chevauchee across northern France to destroy the French’s capacity to make war and demoralize the French populace. They were caught near Crécy by an army led by Philip and King John the Blind of Bohemia, who outnumbered them approximately 3:1. The English army was made up predominantly of longbowmen and they shattered the French; around 2,000 knights are killed, including King John of Bohemia, and who-knows how many French commoners, while the English lost around 300 men. Eight years later the Black Prince is leading another chevauchee when he is caught near the city of Poitiers by a French army led by the new French King, Jean II. Again the French outnumbered them at least 2:1, and again the result was a crushing defeat for the French, including the capture of their king, whose ransom was set at the preposterous sum of 3 million crowns, twice France’s annual income. The dauphin [the French name for their heir apparent, for reasons passing understanding -KH] arranged the Treaty of Bretigny, which in 1360 granted the English suzerainty of much of Southern and Western France in exchange for the English renunciation of their claim to the French throne. So, war solved, I suppose.

Guess again. Pictured: President Harry S. Truman.

Oh, if only it were so simple. After some proxy wars fought in Brittany and Spain, in 1369 new French king Charles V declared war after the Black Prince (ruling in Aquitaine) refused to answer summons by Charles to Paris. England was stymied by an aging Edward III and an ill Black Prince, while France had recruited somewhat of a genius in Bertrand du Guesclin (this, too, is a theme). Guesclin had noted that when the French and the English met on the field, the French were destroyed, so he avoided pitched battles wherever possible and outmaneuvered the English army, seizing lightly-held cities where possible and gradually retaking French territory but never engaging. In addition, the French with Castilian aid had rebuilt their fleet and defeated an English squadron at the Battle of La Rochelle in 1372, lessening England’s control of the seas. By 1380 Edward III, his son the Black Prince, and Charles V were all dead and the underage Richard II and Charles VI were the rulers of England and France, respectively, but this period of the war technically continued until 1389.

This is where Shakespeare comes in. Richard II starts after Richard has ruled for some time, and it traces the exile of Henry Bolingbroke, the death of John of Gaunt (Henry’s father and Richard’s uncle), and Bolingbroke’s deposition of Richard and accession to the throne as Henry IV. Henry IV fights the Percy rebellion and fathers a dissolute son named Hal, who discovers his true knightly purpose after fighting in Wales, where he gets hit by an arrow right square in the face. He takes the throne as Henry V in 1413, though not without a checkered past and a big gnarly arrow scar. Meanwhile some other stuff that is thoroughly confusing and not pertinent to Shakespeare happens in France; suffice it to say that France is as divided as it has ever been. Henry V reopens hostilities in 1415, resurrecting Edward’s claim to the throne and sailing to Harfleur.

Henry V of England, by unknown painter, 1520.    Our Henry will be much handsomer.

Henry V has a different plan in mind than his predecessors. Unlike Edward III and the Black Prince, Henry’s goal was to conquer and rule all of France, not simply win concessions or “some petty and unprofitable dukedoms” from its nobility. He set out not simply to raid but to conquer and hold. To that end he besieged Harfleur and after a lengthy siege took it. Returning overland to the English-held port of Calais he was caught near Agincourt by a numerically superior French army, who you would think would know better by now. Henry was outnumbered 5:1 at least but clever application of longbows allowed him to slaughter by the thousands, for the third time in a century, the flower of French chivalry.

Henry V was seemingly unstoppable on the field, and he also secured a powerful ally in the Duke of Burgundy. After another couple successful campaigns they forced the signing in 1419 of the Treaty of Troyes, under which Henry is wed to Charles VI’s daughter Katherine, the dauphin is declared illegitimate, and Henry’s children are understood to be the rulers of both England and France. But then Henry died in 1422 at the age of 36, leaving an infant son in the hands of a regency council, and shortly thereafter the wheels began to come off the English wagon.

The dauphin and his followers understandably did not accept the conditions of the Treaty of Troyes. In 1428 he gained some unlooked-for help when a maid named Joan of Arc appeared, claiming to be sent by God, and assisted him in breaking the Siege of Orleans. She attended the coronation of the dauphin and accompanied the French army until her capture and execution for heresy in 1431. Shakespeare elected to portray her as a literal witch, consorting with literal devils, for her appearance in Henry VI, in case you were wondering the English opinion of her [though she did count the world’s first serial killer as part of her retinue, so maybe Billy Shakes wasn’t as off-base as I thought -KH]. Charles’ cause was further aided by the professionalization of artillery under Jean and Gaspard Bureau starting in 1434, the defection and separate peace forged with the Burgundians in 1435, and the absence of a strong English leader. Charles continued to retake ground throughout the mid 1400s and in 1453, with the help of the Bureau Brothers’ cannons, he defeated John Talbot at the Battle of Castillon, the final battle of the 100 Years’ War. The French Crown had regained every piece of French land with the exception of Calais, which would remain in English hands until the middle of the 16th century.

V-J Day in Times Square. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Unknown man and (probably) Greta Friedman

::deep breath:: And there you have it. A hilariously brief 2000 words on the history of one of the longest conflicts in human history. 300 years of historical context for a 90-minute play that takes place over about three months but is only about one night and the following day. 10 books and 15 articles of history, sociology, literary criticism, and punk rock ideology crammed into my head to turn into some 10-page pamphlets and however many blog posts my contract says I am obligated to write. 1500 combined hours of rehearsal to turn into 16 performances. Let’s get to work.

CHALK: The Judge on stage

Hello again, everyone! I’m glad I caught you today! This is Keith Hock, Production Manager, Technical Director, occasional Dramaturge, and Blogslave for We Happy Few, your favorite DC indie theatre company and your biggest tax write-off. My boss Raven Bonniwell pulled me aside after one of our run-throughs a few days ago and rather forcibly reminded me that writing blog posts is like the only reason they keep me around asked if it wouldn’t be too much trouble for me to throw something together for you folks to read, and seeing as we open THIS VERY EVENING I figured it was probably about time to get something up here.

This is a play about a trial, as you should remember from the small book I wrote about the play’s history a month or so ago (I promise this one will be shorter). Oh, sure, other stuff happens it in, things which I am told by the actors and director are important, and which I will probably talk to you all about once you’ve had a chance to see the play. But the trial is the climactic scene, the core of the Ur-Myth that I just can’t seem to stop talking about, and I wanted to look into what makes the trial so pivotal and interesting. To that end, I gathered as many trial plays as I could get my grubby mitts on and I read them, back-to-back-to-back, while tech rehearsals happened around me, to see what I could learn and turn into a blog post so I could keep my job.

Research

Trials are already very dramatic by their own nature, and playwrights were quick to pick up on that. Playwrights from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Miller have explored the topic. The stories regularly explore bigotry and injustice within the legal system (Gross Injustice, 12 Angry Men, Trial of the Catonsville Nine), but also examine how trials serve the cause of justice, and why we use them (The Eumenides, A Few Good Men, God’s Country, 12 Angry Men again). Frequently playwrights write about famous or significant cases like the Salem Witch Trials and the Scopes Monkey Trial, and famous lawyers, by which I mean Clarence Darrow, because Clarence Darrow is the only famous lawyer in American history and has had at least 3 plays written about his trials. These accounts of real trials and of Clarence Darrow vary between using the actual words used in the trial (Gross Indecency, God’s Country) to varying levels of fictionalization, from assumptions about what Leopold and Loeb may have said to each other interspersed with real trial language in Never the Sinner to making up a whole new town, trial name, and Clarence Darrow analogue in Inherit the Wind. They confusingly tell us it is both right AND wrong to persecute Jews (Merchant of Venice, God’s Country). Occasionally the playwrights write about themselves, as Daniel Berrigan did about his own trial in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine or, more broadly their art, when Moises Kaufman wrote about the Trials of Oscar Wilde in Gross Indecency.  Sometimes the stories are invented from whole cloth, as in A Few Good Men or The Merchant of Venice, or to explore what a trial could uncover in a different story, such as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot or that time in middle school when your English teacher made you put Goldilocks on trial for breaking and entering. It is a form ripe for storytelling, and it can be used to tell all manner of stories.

But in the reading of all these plays I noticed a peculiar thing. The character of the Judge, a key figure in a trial, is tremendously and unaccountably underrepresented, at least in the selection of plays that I read. It is truly astounding how few of the Judges even get names. Lawyers, plaintiffs, witnesses, and defendants have traits and agency and all those things that a character calls for in order to be interesting to the audience. Even juries get to have personality! 12 Angry Men is literally all about jurors butting heads, and both Inherit the Wind and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine include portions of the juror selection process. But the Judges seldom get these, serving instead as the implement of the court; a tool, not a person. The whims, idiosyncrasies, and beliefs of the Judge in a courtroom have a tremendous impact on the course of a trial, but in many of these plays the Judge may as well be a mildly biased robot. The Judge exists in these dramas to dispense courtroom jargon, threaten to “clear the court”, and frequently to overrule the objections of whichever lawyer the audience is supposed to like more.

Judge 723, Futurama.

When the Judge DOES get a sketch of characterization, as I alluded to at the end of that previous paragraph, it is to be either a vocal representative of the status quo or openly antagonistic to the case of the protagonist, or both. The most well-defined Judge in the dozen or so plays that I read for this project would probably be Judge Littlefield in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, whose only traits are that he hanged himself on a Civil War battlefield, that he absolutely hates the attorney who is bringing the suit on behalf of Judas, and that he ran a chain of successful “Kosher Pizza Parlors in East Purgatory” with Caiaphas the Elder and must therefore recuse himself when Caiaphas takes the stand (it’s a weird play). The Judge in Inherit the Wind doesn’t have a name, but he is more than happy to make pro-religion announcements from the bench in a religiously charged case and to dismiss out of hand every single witness presented by the defense. Likewise the Judge in Gross Indecency, who has the temerity to assert that “There is no worse crime than that with which the prisoner has been charged”, but does not deign to give us his name as the lawyers and witnesses do, even though, since this was a real trial, he actually has one: Alfred Wills. Judge Hawthorne in The Crucible actively wants blood and the Judge in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine cowers behind technicalities and his pretended impartiality to heap scorn on the defendants and influence the court. The venal cowardice and bigotry of these judges is a scathing indictment of the abuse of authority and the perils of an unjust court.

The Hon. Judge Whitey. Also Futurama.

The only Judges who are even remotely sympathetic to the heroes are Captain Julius Randolph in A Few Good Men, more out of irritation with Lieutenant Colonel Jessep (the Jack Nicholson character) than anything else, and Athena in The Eumenides, who is a literal god. And, I suppose, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, although I would assert that the protagonists of that particular piece are, in fact, the villains of the story. (It is telling that of the sympathetic Judges, one was written by Shakespeare and another by Aeschylus, in a time and place where plays were not used as weapons of the counterculture). I won’t pretend this doesn’t make sense from a storytelling perspective; most modern theatre by its very nature tends to run in a countercultural direction, and there is little more countercultural than fighting an unjust court, the literal embodiment of Authority. If you want your villain to be Corrupt Society, it is easy and effective to corrupt your Judge as well, and it is therefore unsurprising that so many writers would use this tool.

Not so for us! CHALK (and its predecessors) continues to invert the status quo, making the Judge in our play matter and moving him to the opposite corner of the alignment chart [LE to CG, for my fellow nerds out there. ed.], giving him free rein to both have unpopular but just opinions and to act upon them. To be fair, our play’s origins also fall in a time and place where theatre was not a tool of the oppressed, and its original moral could easily be rendered as “Confucianism is correct.” Since we are not Song-Dynasty Chinese, however, our moral is somewhat more complex, and our Judge gets to be an active countercultural warrior.

He is also more than a voice delivering instructions to a jury off-stage or a machine programmed to clear courtrooms and overrule objections. We see him not being a Judge, having his own opinions, and in general doing more than simply dispensing justice from the bench. The Judge is a character of crucial importance in the play, second perhaps only to Alma, the ‘mother’ of the child. (Maybe third, if you count a bag of flour wrapped in cloth with no lines. Really more of a MacGuffin than a character, all things considered. But that’s a matter for another blog post.) Far from disappearing behind a one-word combination job title, description, and character name, our Judge (who has a real name, Zeke) creates and defines his own world in his own image. No passive arbiter he, Zeke brings his own beliefs and personalities to the table and forces the people around him to deal with it. He represents passion and energy, excitement and empathy, a significant tonal shift from the traditional interpretation of the Judge on stage.

L-R foreground: Raven Bonniwell (Dave), Ann Fraistat (Mary). background: Josh Adams (Zeke), Louis Davis (Jeren). Photo by Tori Boutin.

And we can’t wait to share it with you! This unorthodox take on the Judge is but one of the many exciting elements of this play that we have been sitting on here for the last few months waiting to share with you, and I am beyond thrilled that you all finally get to see it! Tickets are on sale now, and we run from tonight until July 9th at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in Eastern Market. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Iphigenia: Director Chat!

Hello again, readers.  It’s me, blog slave Keith Hock, here with some more ranting and raving on the subject of our upcoming reading of Iphigenia.  We’re gonna mix it up today, however, and the majority of the ranting will come not from myself, but from the director of the reading and my maybe-boss, Bridget Grace Sheaff (the managerial hierarchy of We Happy Few is Byzantine, to say the least, and the only thing I can say with any degree of confidence is that I am NOT in charge).  Readers from the last time I had Bridget drop by will recall that she is much better at saying nice things than I am, so those of you still with functioning hearts should be very excited to have her back.  She has graciously consented to an interview which we certainly conducted face-to-face over tea, and not in any way over the internet and hours apart while we were both snowed into our respective apartments this previous weekend.

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Keith: Tell us about yourself.  How did you come to be entangled in the WHF network?  Are you secretly gunning for my job?

Bridget: Wow. So suspicious. Why would I be after your job? Seriously. Drink your tea.
No, go ahead, drink it. It’s perfectly safe…

The short answer: I fell in love. It’s as easy as that.

The long answer: I think one of the answers I hear the most from theatre artists when they are asked how they get jobs is “It’s who you know.” Which, after you hear it over and over again, becomes quite annoying. But it’s truth doesn’t disappear. (These are my exact feelings about Taylor Swift songs- always annoying, always true to life.)  So, yes, I got involved with We Happy Few because I went to school with Bob Pike (the sound designer of Duchess of Malfi, CUA Class of 2014) who got involved because he talked to Kiernan McGowan (trusted Brain Trust member who also graduated from CUA (represent, amiright)) who is now engaged to Raven Bonniwell (co-founding Artistic Director).

Right? It’s who you know. But it’s also about finding your tribe, about finding people whose work speaks to you. So when I was looking for projects to get involved in, I took a look at the work WHF had done in the past, of which I heard nothing but high praise. And, I’ll tell you what, I don’t believe in fate. But I got pretty close to believing when it hit me that the goals of WHF and my goals were synchronous if not identical.

And so it’s less about me than it is about mission and goals and finding people who want to change the world in the same way you do. (Look at me, I’m gettin’ all misty over here. “I am a fool/ To weep at what I am glad of.”) That should tell you everything you need to know about me. And I really mean that.

K: Drop some knowledge about the difference between directing a staged reading and directing a performance.  What about it is easier?  What is harder?

B: Directing a staged reading is actually quite difficult. You would think it would be easy. “Oh hey, all your actors will have scripts and they are just expected to stand and talk and sound pretty and make the right faces at the right time and you don’t have to worry that they don’t have it memorized or that they forget a costume piece or whatever, you’re going to be fine.”

That’s a surface level analysis of a staged reading.

In a staged reading, the text is the star. The play is the only ego in the room you need to be concerned about. It rules. It dominates. It stares you in the face and does that annoying nose-flick thing every nine seconds. It demands that you pay attention to it and acknowledge the wound that it opens. It says, “I am flawed and complicated and leagues deep with knowledge. I am older than you and I have something to teach you. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO SAY.”

Of course you have to do this with a full production. But in a full production, you get to use the text to do things on stage. In a staged reading, the text uses you to do things to an audience.

It’s vulnerable important work. It’s no less valuable than work on a full production. It just involves less props.

K: Why?  Why Iphigenia?  Why, specifically, THIS Iphigenia?

B: If I’m being totally honest (which I wish was a bigger failing of mine), I knew NOTHING about this play or even it’s original legend four months ago. As most things go in the Brain Trust [Editor: point of clarification; the Brain Trust is how we refer to the organizational core of We Happy Few.  My pitches to call it the War Council, the Synod, and the High Circle were rejected], one person suggests one thing, which leads to one person suggesting another things, which leads to Bridget volunteering to help in whatever way possible. In this case, it happened in such a way where Bridget volunteered to help cut and organize the script in a some sort of WHF fashion of changing the play and ended with a stellar cast of actors that make Bridget’s heart flutter. I didn’t choose Iphigenia as much as I stumbled over it one day, turned around to see what had made me lose my footing, and found this beautiful story that I can’t stop thinking about. This particular Iphigenia happened because of my absolute devotion to Racine and all things French. (I’ll get into that later). I will tell you that if I had to answer “Why this play, why now?” I would give you some long flowery answer that essentially boils down to this: what does it mean to sacrifice? When all instincts to love and protect and serve the ones we love fall short of what is asked, what is the precipitate of the reaction?

K: There’s a pretty enormous parallel between the Iphigenia story and the Abraham/Isaac story in Genesis, which I unaccountably managed to completely ignore in my previous blog post.  Do you have any thoughts on that?

B: I’m very Catholic, I have thoughts on everything. It actually is one of the things I continually come back to when I think about this piece. Of course, in the Abraham story, God was testing him to see if his faith was strong enough to trust something as precious as his son to the Lord (and, you know, is foreshadowing for the whole Jesus thing, but let’s not get into that because we could be here all day). In this story, it’s pretty clear that Iphigenia is going to die. She has to die. These gods work in a different way than the Judeo-Christian God, even the one in the Old Testament. I could get pretty theologically philosophical with you, but I only have minors in Theology and Philosophy. However, I have a major in Drama, so I instead am going to talk about how this is MAJOR DRAMA.  It’s a classic story, sacrificing your children. And both Abraham and Agamemnon are reasons that it is classic. It’s something we all identify with, even those of us without children. It’s access to our empathetic pathways is immediate. It sits on our skin and instantaneously seeps into our bloodstream. It hearkens back to landmarks in our mythic and spiritual culture that we all identify. And that’s why we can keep telling it today.

K: As a dame [Editor: I narrowly dodged a slap here], how do you feel about my assertion that the primary drama in this story is about how Agamemnon is forced into an unwinnable situation?  Do you think that is true, or am I blinded by my own undeniable masculinity about the true nature of the piece?  Does it change from version to version?

B: Yes. Thank you for asking this question. Let’s talk about this: Yes. I am a female director. Yes. There is some inherent male/female dichotomy in this play. Yes. I think that it is a really interesting aspect to talk about.

HOWEVER. For me, this is a play primarily about human beings, not just men and women. This is a play about family. This is a play about duty and sacrifice and loyalty and war and love and heartbreak and ruin and triumph and fate and God and country and children and, ultimately, fault. That’s the primary drama of the story. What goes wrong.

I think that you are structurally correct that Agamemnon’s struggle is the catalyst of the piece. That is what the through line of the story is saying to us. If we are going to look further at the piece, I think we need to talk about what changes from beginning to end. Elinor Fuchs tells us that we can find the heart of the story by setting the play in the middle distance and looking at the play through squinted eyes all the way through. And when we look at Iphigenia this way, we have at both ends parent’s fretting about the fate of their child. Even though Clytemnestra only comes in (like a wrecking ball) halfway through, she is the parent remaining onstage at the end while Ulysses describes the scene at the temple. This directly bookends Agamemnon talking to Ulysses at the initial incident of the play. And so my argument is that the true nature of the piece is not about men or women, but about how our labels and roles define how we react under pressure.

K: Who do you think is the most interesting/exciting character in this show?

B: I love Racine’s added character of Eriphile. There is something so April Ludgate about her. She speaks to a part of us that we all like to deny. We would all love to be the tragic hero. We would love to be the victim. We would love to be the martyr. Because those people are revered and respected and sacrificed for. And what’s great about Eriphile is that she LOUDLY wants all of those things. She is frustrated and annoyed that Iphigenia gets that kind of attention. What an amazing and very human desire to explore in this age of digitalization, of internet stardom and reality TV fame. And what a fascinating take on self-centered sacrifice. Where is the virtue in that thought process? I mean that question very seriously. I’m really excited to look at this character further.

K: Is there anybody you’re especially excited to work with on your cast for the reading?  Anyone you’re dreading?

B: I couldn’t be more thrilled with the cast! I’m excited to work with everyone. One of the big highlights of this for me is that I get to watch Melissa Flaim act. I have deeply and fervently admired Melissa since my time at CUA. The first time I ever saw her, I got to watch her fearlessly and with amazing grace tell a boy in my Drama 101 class that if he was going to be proud of doing half-hearted work then there was no reason for her to be in the room because he could do that without her. She taught me so much about how to be in command and watching her as Clytemnestra may be the highlight of my 2016.

I’m dreading working with Tori Boutin because she is my best friend and really talented and funny and clearly I hate her with my whole soul. (Is she reading this? I hope so. She’s gonna be so mad.)

K: This translation is, in the nature of French plays, structured as rhyming couplets.  How long does it take you reading it to not hear it all sing-songy and actually take it serious?

B: I think that verse text is my soulmate. It understands me in a way I don’t understand myself. I come back to it at the end of the day, safe and secure in the truth it provides me. I don’t know what it is, but I love French plays. Cyrano de Bergerac is my favorite piece of theatre of all time, Racine’s Phedre is my current dream project, and who doesn’t love Moliere? The rhyming couplets doesn’t bother me at all. I gave up the idea that something that rhymes sounds like songs a long time ago. (I mean, look at Sondheim. Rhyming or not, there is nothing “sing-songy” about that man’s work.)

To me, something is too “sing-songy” when it is just rhyming for the sake of rhyming. If it has purpose and drive, then rhyme merely helps bounce the actor from line to line. Really, if the text is about human beings, real and full-blooded people with real and earnest problems, then it’s not “too” anything for me.

The translation makes all the difference in my mind. My friend Bob once compared translating to carving wood. Pieces of the original block have to go, but if you are careful, you are going to get something equally as beautiful as the end result as you did with the original. When translating from French, especially translating Racine, you have to balance keeping the verse intact, the rhyme intact, the meaning intact, and the story intact. It takes a lot of skill and what is great about using the Cairncross translation is that so much of the original beauty of the text is preserved with great care and tact. It’s really exciting.

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And there you have it, folks.  Hopefully this will have piqued your curiosity to see what exactly we’ve been talking about these last two blog posts.  Perhaps you are curious how Racine (and then Cairncross, and then Ms. Sheaff) were able to take this ancient story and update it, drag it from the Festivals of Dionysus in Attica some three thousand years in the past, through the court of the Sun King, and share it and make it relevant to you today.  It could be you want to know how exactly Bridget exists with all this passion clearly boiling out of her at all times, and you want to see how that manifests in her directing.  Maybe you’re mad at me for some reason and you want to attend this solely to yell at me for some error or slight I have made (It’s probably that last one, isn’t it.)  Whatever the reason, you should be able to satisfy your burning desires at our fundraising event, tonight at 7:30PM at CHAW in Eastern Market.  Free Reading!  Fabulous Prizes!  Cash Bar!  Cool People!  Donation Opportunities!  Truly the social event of the season.  I look forward to seeing you all there.

Iphigenia(s): History Lesson

Happy New Year, Loyal Readers, and welcome to an exciting new chapter for your favorite independent theatre company, We Happy Few! This will be a year of many firsts for us as we throw caution to the winds and, in brazen defiance of Friar Lawrence, Polonius, Gonzago, Nestor, and all those other stick-in-the-mud father figures our protagonists never listen to, we wildly experiment, take risks, and push our boundaries.  Experiments, risks, and boundaries like exploring non-Elizabethan theatre, as you may have guessed from my name-drop of Nestor in my list of father figures (as well, I suppose, from the title of this blog post, which is almost universally a giveaway of the topic of the accompanying blog).  First of all, well-spotted on Nestor, a fairly deep cut.  But I’m prepared to cut you one deeper; the story of Iphigenia.  Not old-school Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis OR Tauris, nor the avant-garde Charles Mee Iphigenia 2.0.  Not even Aeschylus’ lost Iphigenia (but man, wouldn’t THAT be a coup!)  But 17th-century Neoclassical Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Racine’s Iphigénie, which we are proud to bring to you at the end of this month in a totally free staged reading (follow THIS link for details). Later on, in a future blog post, we can delve into what exactly is so compelling about Racine’s interpretation of the story and why we chose to tackle it, but before we get to that I wanted to look at all these different versions of the story and address, specifically, what the deal with that was.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR A  FEW 3000 YEAR OLD STORIES FOLLOWING.  ALSO TEDIOUS NAVEL-GAZING REGARDING STORY ORIGINS,  LONG-WINDED DISCUSSION OF GREEK LEGENDS, AND A SENSE OF PROFOUND DISMAY ON THE PART OF THE AUTHOR THAT SO MUCH GREEK LITERATURE IS LOST.

The original story of Iphigenia, or at least the time it was probably first written down, would probably have been in the Cypria, the first ‘book’, as it were, of the Epic Cycle (a series of poems depicting the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath; the only extant portions are The Iliad and The Odyssey; we know OF the others through summaries and references in other works).  The Cypria depicted the beginning of the story; as my readers will certainly remember, the Iliad is set a full 9 years into the war, while the Odyssey takes place after the war is won. Seeing as Iphigenia deals directly with how the Greeks got to Troy, the episode that tells that story would fall there.  However, as with the majority of the Epic Cycle, the VAST majority of Greek Theatre (including Aeschylus’ telling of the story in his Iphigenia), and Billy Shakes’ Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won, the Cypria is lost to the sands of time, and we must, unfortunately, swallow our tears and learn to accept that.

The Course of Empire – Destruction.  Thomas Cole, 1836.

For that reason and for the purposes of this blog post I am willing to accept Euripides’ telling of the story of Iphigenia at Aulis as the ‘canonical’, if such a thing existed, true (or at least original) story.  It is also the simplest version of the story, and the version from which the other interpretations would most reasonably be retconned adapted; also, elements of other stories, most notably the Oresteia, only work if the story plays out as Euripides has it.  But I am getting ahead of myself. Before I can talk about how the story changed from version to version we have to discuss what the original story was.  What, exactly, happened on Aulis at the beginning of the Trojan War?

Briefly, Agamemnon had gathered the combined forces of Greece to Aulis to stage their invasion of Troy.  While there, he did something to offend Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt; to wit, killing a stag in a sacred grove, and then (exceedingly foolishly) claiming to be a better hunter than Artemis, the aforementioned Goddess of the Hunt.  So she stopped the winds and stranded the army on Aulis, and sent word through the seer Calchas that she would only allow the winds to return if Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to her.  Agamemnon sends for Iphigenia to be brought to Aulis, and then vacillates in fine Danish fashion for a while, sending another messenger to send her home, which is intercepted by his brother Menelaus.  He lets the cat out of the bag RE: sacrifice to Menelaus and continues to be wracked with indecision.  Iphigenia arrives with her mother Clytemnestra and baby brother Orestes; to cover for her being there Agamemnon pretends to betroth her to Achilles.  The subterfuge is shortly revealed and Agamemnon makes up his mind to sacrifice her.  Her husband-to-be is understandably distraught and vows to prevent it, but discovers that literally the entire Greek army, including his own men, would rather kill Iphigenia than give up and go home.  Iphigenia assents to the sacrifice, and the play ends with her marching to her death and Clytemnestra weeping.

This is what I would assert to be the original story.  However, even before we branch into differing titles and interpretations, there is debate on whether or not this is the ‘true’, for lack of a better word, story.  The extant manuscripts include a brief scene after the chorus, where a messenger rushes on stage to inform Clytemnestra that Artemis descended from the heavens, snatched up Iphigenia before the knife could strike home, and replaced her with a stag.  This… lacks somewhat the ring of truth, even in a world where gods turn women into trees and themselves into swans.  It emotionally neuters the play and is not, in my mind, in keeping with the tone of Greek Tragedy as a whole, especially considering the generally lax attitude the Atreides have toward kin-slaughter. Speaking of the Atreides, it also explicitly negates the story of The Oresteia, the conclusion of their generational curse; if Agamemnon doesn’t kill Iphigenia on Aulis, Clytemnestra has no valid reason to kill Agamemnon at the end of the Trojan War, and if Clytemnestra doesn’t kill Agamemnon, Orestes has no reason to kill Clytemnestra, and if Orestes doesn’t kill Clytemnestra, Athena and Apollo have no reason intercede on his behalf and allow trial by jury to supplant the Law of Vengeance and, at long last, expiate the sins of his house (spoilers).  My research is of two minds about this discussion; the editors and translators of my copy of the play assert that scholars are more or less universal in accepting the final scene as a later addition, but they asserted that in 1958, and almost 60 years of critical analysis have passed since then.  Alternatively, the fine folks over at Wikipedia are more or less convinced that the canonical answer is that she is rescued at the last second, but they are anonymous Wikipedia editors and may well be C.H.U.D.s for all I know.

A Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller, C.H.U.D., 1984

In spite of my disapproval of the theory, the deus ex ending does have a disheartening number of adherents, including Euripides himself, who wrote another Iphigenia play entitled Iphigenia at Tauris.  In it Iphigenia has been whisked away from Aulis, deposited in the Crimea and made the High Priestess of Artemis for the Scythians.  Her brother Orestes bumbles his way there via shipwreck, seeking expiation for killing Clytemnestra, and is almost sacrificed in his turn before the siblings share a revelatory conversation about their homes which almost certainly served as an inspiration for the pay-out scenes in Shakespeare’s comedies and romances (see HERE for more information about the Romances, written by Your Humble Narrator).  It also shares a good deal in common with another Euripides play, Helen, in which another important piece of Trojan history is rewritten; we discover that Helen was not in Troy at all, but secreted away to Egypt, awaiting rescue by her True Love, Menelaus!

These alternate endings read like fan fiction, as though someone read these stories and said “no, its too sad if she dies. What if INSTEAD, God saves her, and they become BEST BUDS” (Seriously, one of the other stories floating around is that Iphigenia becomes Hecate, goddess of witchcraft and hangs out with Artemis on Mt Olympus).  I know the Greeks literally invented the “deus ex machina” ending, but in general the Greek gods were not in the habit of SAVING human lives with them so much as ruining them, and it hardly seems likely that Artemis would want to let Agamemnon off the hook for his familial curse just because Iphigenia never did anything to anybody (this play was written 2500 years ago, OF COURSE the real tragedy is her father having to make a no-win choice). Having alternate endings and stories like these would seem like Bowdlerization if that weren’t such an anachronism, or if we had even the slightest indication the Greeks were concerned about the sensibilities of their kids.

Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons.

The version that we’re doing also deviates from what I will increasingly desperately and inaccurately call the canonical story, but it does so in a less “Mom stops the movie right before Old Yeller gets shot” and more of a “Frenchman updates the story to account for some 2000 years of advancement in storytelling” way.  A new character, Eriphyle, Iphigenia’s jealous handmaiden of uncertain parentage, is added and ends up narcing to the Greek Army about the nature of the prophecy.  Achilles and Iphigenia have been betrothed for some time, in order to inject some much-needed romance into the plot. Odysseus (or “Ulysses”, as Racine wrongly calls him) is given a handful of lines and allowed to serve as the mouthpiece and ringleader of the bloodthirsty, populist army. Also, in a Shymalan-style twist ending, it turns out that Eriphyle is Helen’s secret daughter by Theseus, that her birthname is also Iphigenia, and that SHE was the necessary sacrifice all along.  Eriphyle herself her quietus makes with a bare bodkin, Iphigenia is spared, and the brutal 10-year siege and subsequent sack of Troy can go on as scheduled! Everybody wins!  Except for Eriphyle.  And Troy.

You may notice I am cutting this new version an awful lot of slack, which should strike you as a very un-me thing to do, especially considering the scorn with which I addressed the other revisionist pieces in this blog post.  To which I say, first of all, I write what I am ordered to what I choose, I don’t have to answer to you!  On a less confrontational note, the Greek plays and stories exist as part of a much larger and interconnected narrative; even what little remains extant to us displays a remarkably complex relationship between an astounding number of characters, and our modern storytelling sensibilities tell us that there must be a single correct canonical through-line (get me drunk and ask me about the difference between the Lord of the Rings books and movies sometime for a belligerent example of what I mean).

Haldir (Craig Parker) and Lorien Elves at Helm’s Deep, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2002.  They shouldn’t be here.

But there is little evidence to suggest that the Greeks themselves thought of them that way.  In fact, given that at least two surviving plays we have represent direct contradictions of the ‘traditional’ story, it could easily be argued that the opposite was true! These are the stories that the actual Greeks actually told, and seeing as there are fewer than three dozen Tragedies still in existence (7 from Aeschylus, 7 from Sophocles, and 19 from Euripides), it would be foolish to discount them from the discussion simply because I disapproved of them.  If the Greeks were opposed to deviation in their storytelling, what would be the purpose of different versions?  Yet we have records of multiple tellings of the same story; Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy versus Euripides’ play Orestes, or Sophocles’ lost Clytemnestra. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or At Colonus versus Euripides’ lost Oedipus. A Bacchae by both Euripides and Aeschylus.  A lost Ixion, whatever that is, by all three. We know so little of the stories the Greeks told that we treat everything we can find as precious, but they don’t seem to have felt the same.  These were not the sacred relics of a dead civilization to them, they were everyday stories, the casual backdrop to their lives. Earlier I described the revisionist stories as fan fiction; that description may be decidedly apt.

And if Greek storytellers didn’t consider themselves bound into that all-encompassing narrative, French NeoClassicists were certainly under no such compulsion.  Racine wasn’t creating a grand narrative with a pantheon of interconnected characters; he was updating a single story from that narrative to suit Renaissance French sensibilities. French audiences would have expected a romantic angle; he found one for them.  They would expect Odysseus to matter in a story that includes him; Racine conjured him some lines. The original Greek story is largely concerned with the inevitability of the will of the gods, as Greek Tragedies tend to be.  Renaissance France is not concerned with the desires of Artemis, however, so Racine created a new moral by punishing Eriphyle for her jealousy and betrayal of Iphigenia.  He was making the story accessible to his audience, and if there’s one thing We Happy Few is concerned with doing, it is making classical stories accessible.

So there you have it!  A laughably short crash course in Greek theatre and legend (I didn’t even TOUCH the Theban cycle, and then there’s the Titanomachia, and Herakles, and the Argo…), a meditation on the way cultures interact with their stories, and a sneak peek at our upcoming reading.  Join me next time when we go much more in-depth into the whys and wherefores of Racine’s Iphigenia with my younger, smarter, and prettier colleague Bridget Grace Sheaff,who drew the short straw and was roped into positively leapt at the opportunity to direct the reading.