Lovers’ Vows: Biography Lesson

Hello again, devoted fans! We are into tech rehearsals for Lovers’ Vows, and I think it is past time to offer some introductions. Last time we spoke I mentioned our author, the criminally underappreciated Elizabeth Inchbald, and promised that I would at another time give you some greater insight into her super cool life. Well, I am happy to announce that ‘another time’ is Now! Please join me on a whirlwind tour of the life of Elizabeth Inchbald: actress, playwright, novelist, critic, and our current Muse.

Elizabeth Inchbald was born Elizabeth Simpson in 1753, the eighth of nine children, to a Catholic farming family in Suffolk, England. Coming from a large middle-class family she lacked the advantages of a formal education, but was taught at home by her mother and myriad older sisters. She demonstrated an early interest in theatre, in part as a tool to help her combat a speech impediment, but her early attempts to join a local company met with neither family support nor success. Undeterred, she ran away from home at age 18 and joined her brother, working actor George Simpson, in London. In spite of her early failure she was able to make a living on the stage, although her stutter continued to plague her and may have kept her from a breakout success. The following year, at age 19, she entered into a loveless marriage with Joseph Inchbald, an unremarkable actor twice her age with two illegitimate sons who she had met on a previous trip to London [Joseph, not the sons. Well, maybe the sons. But Joseph for sure -KH] and maintained a correspondence and “the strongest friendship” with. This marriage seems pretty obviously to have been one of safety and convenience for her. Certainly a husband in her field would open up new networks and opportunities for her, and having a husband of ANY sort would offer her at least some protection from the unwanted advances of unscrupulous managers and all manner of other creeps. But their significant age difference, the absence of children of their own, and regular arguments about money and Joseph’s drinking and other extracurriculars do not paint a picture of a joyous union. What’s more, every single biography I’ve seen makes a point of how tall, slender, attractive, red-haired, and well-read her and all 5 of her sisters were, and while I’m well aware that love is blind and ‘leagues’ don’t exist, it seems like she could have done better.

These biographies weren’t wrong. Just strangely insistent I know it. Painting by Thomas Lawrence, 1796.

Having hitched her wagon to the plodding mule of Joseph Inchbald’s career, the two of them toiled in obscurity for some time, working for a touring company in Scotland where Elizabeth honed her talents in ingenue roles such as Cordelia, Desdemona, and Juliet. In 1776 they had the spectacularly ill-advised idea to move to France, where Joseph would learn to paint and Elizabeth would break into the French acting scene. This did not pan out and they were forced to return to England, penniless, after a month, and there join a theatre company in Liverpool. While in Liverpool Elizabeth met actress Sarah Siddons and her brother the soon-to-be-famous actor and manager John Philip Kemble, with whom she would remain lifelong friends. After a few more years of yeomanlike work in regional theatres across the country, Joseph Inchbald had the good sense to die suddenly and unexpectedly in 1779.

His death seems for whatever to have been the trigger that Elizabeth needed. Whether through freeing her from the physical and emotional labor of supporting her husband, or simply by impressing upon her the fragility of life, she began to thrive in the years following his death. She would never remarry and rebuffed many proposals, including from the Earl of Carmarthen, but there was little evidence to suggest she stayed single out of obligation to Joseph. Elizabeth continued to act, in 1780 playing Bellario in John Fletcher’s Philaster [which I mention only because source after source keeps telling me how good she looked in the pants she wore for this cross-dressing role -KH]. But, much more importantly for our purposes, she began to write. In 1784, after years of rejections, one of her plays (The Mogul’s Tale; or, the Descent of the Balloon) that she wrote under an assumed name saw production and success at Covent Garden. She promptly owned up to it, presumably causing spit-takes and popped-out monocles across the nation. Once the seal was broken and her bona fides as a writer established, her career rapidly progressed, writing almost twenty plays (among them our own Lovers’ Vows) and two novels in the 1780s and ‘90s. [These novels, A Simple Story and Nature and Art, are apparently what she is best known for, but we here at We Happy Few are hoping to change THAT -ed.] By 1789 she was successful enough to retire from the stage, enter high society, and make her living entirely as a playwright, and by the end of the century she was able to retire from THAT and live solely as a critic and socialite.

Inchbald regarded it as an obligation to turn critic and editor, believing that she owed something to the theatrical community which had given her so much. She seemed to have taken that obligation seriously, writing for the well-respected Edinburgh Review, and in 1806 she was commissioned by the publisher Thomas Longman to write introductions for The British Theatre, a series of 125 plays from the 16th-18th centuries, a substantial honor and vote of confidence for any playwright. Not content to run solely in theatrical circles, she was a well-known feature in London’s social and philosophical scene and counted among her friends author Maria Edgeworth, journalist and notorious Jacobin Thomas Holcroft, the aforementioned John Kemble, and noted philosopher [and the father of We Happy Few’s goth mom Mary Shelley -KH] William Godwin, with whom she had a nasty and confusing falling-out in the late 1790s over his marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft, of whose affair and child with noted American creep Gilbert Imlay Inchbald did not approve.

In her final decade Inchbald turned inward, retreating from high society and rediscovering her long-neglected Catholic faith. She maintained correspondence with her friends, especially Maria Edgeworth, and worked on her memoirs which have unfortunately been lost to the sands of time (or, specifically, the flames of her confessor, who unaccountably advised that she destroy them), but spent much of her time in contemplative seclusion. She died in 1821 at the age of 68.

My main takeaway from Elizabeth Inchbald’s life, aside from that she is incredible and that everyone should know her name and her work, are the virtues of persistence and tenacity. She overcame parental disapproval and a speech impediment to achieve her dream of acting professionally, made the best of a bad marriage to hone her theatrical talents, didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer until she got her plays and prose published, and wedged herself into an artistic and societal niche that she then forced open so wide that fame, fortune, and respect could not help but fall in. That her name is not as well known as Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, the Brontë sisters, Mary Shelley, or her own friend Maria Edgecombe as a formative writer of the late Georgian period is an unaccountable flaw in history, and it is my sincere hope that our production of one of her finest works will do some small part in restoring her name to the theatrical consciousness. If you’d like to assist me and my colleagues in this idiosyncratic venture, please purchase tickets HERE and join us!

CHALK: The Medium IS the Message

Hello again adoring fans! Keith Hock here, and I wanted to tell you some more about our critically acclaimed play CHALK, playing now at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. In earlier posts I had wanted to keep some secrets from you all in order to preserve the element of surprise when you came to see the show, but since the run is now two-thirds over I am assuming that most of you have already come to check it out, and hoping that this introduction serves to shame the rest of you into coming in this final week of shows. To that end, I am going to talk to you more about set design, chalk, and the role that the latter can play in the former than you ever wanted to hear. Please note that if you don’t want to have a SUPER COOL element of the show spoiled for you, it would be advisable for you to stop reading until you have a chance to come see it for yourself.

If you have seen the show, or, like, any of our promotional materials, you will know that chalk drawings feature prominently in the set for CHALK. We Happy Few stakes a portion of its considerable reputation on the minimalist nature of its sets; this show probably has our second-largest set besides Tempest, and this set is a couple of platforms, a diagonal wall with some doors and a tower, and some stools. To supplement this design and to help establish a sense of place we have a bunch of drawings all over the walls, some of them chalk sketches and some white paint cleverly disguised as chalk sketches. These drawings help to clarify where we are and what’s going on on-stage; a town, a pillar, a cart, some doors. In the distance a mountain range. These drawings are not strictly necessary to indicate what’s going on; we can, and have, done shows with less set dressing than this. But it certainly doesn’t hurt the piece any to have them there, and besides prettifying the stage and indicating that sense of space, like I said above, they give us an opportunity to do something super neato with the set that a show can’t ordinarily do, which I will get to after another paragraph of explanation and scene-setting.

CHALK backdrop. Design by Adelaide Waldrop. Picture by Tori Boutin.

It is in the nature of black box shows in general and We Happy Few shows in particular to be tricky to indicate changes of scene, location, and the passage of time. You can use lights, you can shift around what little set elements you may have, and you can have your characters exposit. We are supremely fortunate that we are able to work with one of the best lighting designers in the city, Jason Aufdem-Brinke, so our light game is and always has been on point. Character exposition is both the clunkiest and the most ubiquitous method of indicating those changes; you would be hard-pressed to find a play that doesn’t use dialogue to either imply or flat-out say where and when the action is taking place, because plays are written to be seen, not read, and audiences don’t have those convenient stage directions at the beginning of every scene to contextualize the performance unless your director is REALLY pretentious. So we fall on even footing with context clues as well. But We Happy Few really can’t compete with a full ‘drop curtain, wait 20 seconds, the corn field is now a bustling frontier town’, ‘turntable rotates from Skid Row to the interior of the dentist’s office’, or ‘a whole new backdrop flies in from the ceiling and we are now in the King’s Palace in Siam’ style transition such that a company with a full stage crew or using a fully kitted-out stage would use.

So we did what we always do; we improvised. We knew already that there was going to be a scene where the Judge would draw a circle on the floor, for the climactic moment in the play. We said “why not do, like, a whole bunch more of that?” We already knew drawing, having the characters interact directly with and add to the set, is going to be a part of the world, so we decided to lean into it, and we started drawing all over the stage. Want to set the city on fire? Scribble red and orange chalk all over it and smear it a little. Need a river? Some blue chalk on the floor and hey presto! a river appears. Script says a scene is happening in a bar? Write BAR on the wall after you enter. We’re in the countryside now? Here’s some flowers to prove it. Props budget a little tight and we can’t afford any dummies to drop from the rafters in a grisly facsimile of a public hanging? Draw up a hangman, an image so simple and evocative that we literally use it as a game to teach spelling [which, come to think of it, wow, right? ed.]. This genius decision allowed us to expand on that sense of place that the artwork was creating. It also gave us the opportunity to democratize the space; the actors are not trapped in a static world, they are in control of their own environment, and can affect change on the world around them.

CHALK. Pictured: Raven Bonniwell. Design by Adelaide Waldrop, picture by Tori Boutin.

One of the beauties of chalk as a medium is that it is dry, so it can be applied, seen, and interacted with immediately without making a huge mess or damaging costumes. Another is that is cheap, so we can use it to approximate props or set pieces that would have broken the bank or we just couldn’t have had otherwise; I don’t know HOW we would have done a bridge without the chalk conceit. A third is that it can be cleaned and wiped away with relatively little effort, which is why we as a society use it to teach math and spelling to children and announce the specials at bars restaurants, and why we as a company thought it would be perfect. Draw everywhere for the show, wipe it clean at the end of the night, start with a blank slate the next day!

It turns out it is not quite as simple to clean up as one might believe. The last time the walls of the stage were totally clean was the first time we came into the space after our chalk artist, Adelaide Waldrop, had added her drawings, but before the actors started drawing everywhere. What we had failed to realize was that, if the set drawings are chalk, and OUR drawings are ALSO chalk, when we try to clean it up we will obliterate the nice professional drawings that Adelaide along with our slapdash mid-show sketches. This problem is assuaged somewhat by the fact that Adelaide used some mysterious substance called “chalk markers” which isn’t affected when wiped with a dry rag. It IS, however, just as vulnerable to water as normal sidewalk or school chalk, so we wouldn’t wet-wipe the walls as we wanted [this clause brought to you by the letter W!]. We realized this about halfway through tech, so we had ourselves a desperate little pow-wow about what we should do about this conundrum. Wet-wiping AROUND the permanent art every night would have taken for-damn-ever and ran the risk of accidentally erasing part of the artwork. The designs are too elaborate to erase and re-draw for every performance, even if Adelaide had been willing to do so, which we were reasonably confident she was not. We started to go over the designs with paint to em-permanent them all but realized we wouldn’t have time to go over everything, and thought that it would look bad if part of the set was restored to pristine blackness and part was left dusty. We were at a loss.

CHALK. Pictured: Bridget Grace Sheaff. Design by Adelaide Waldrop. Picture by Kerry McGee.

What we decided to to, as you can see, is nothing. We leaned into it again, a favorite tool of mine, because it lets me be very lazy. It occurred to us that it made a lot of sense to the themes of the show for there to be physical evidence of previous performances on the stage. So much of this play is about cycles of history, about gradual change and the way that the past echoes in the future. The ever-present chalk dust establishes that on both a textual and metatheatrical level. Our city of Tuzla and the surrounding countryside is permeated with the dust of revolutions past; every action anyone takes, every thing they draw, is happening on top of what happened before. Zeke and Natalya both recall the rebellion in Persia, and they trace clear parallels to the current uprising. That rebellion was put down but the memory of it echoes in this one, and the memory of this rebellion will echo in the future. No matter how hard you try, you can’t completely erase the past, you can’t start over with a clean slate. From a metatheatrical level the mess of chalk dust hanging around the space reminds the audience that this is not the first time we’ve done this. The performance you’re watching isn’t the only performance we’ve done, and it didn’t just happen. The dust looks back at the show the night before and the week of tech rehearsals in the middle of June, and reminds us that the show didn’t always look like this, and it might not look like this tomorrow. Theatre doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it would be a mistake to forget that. When rehearsals started in mid-May the play was still being written. The purpose of rehearsal is to learn how to tell a story, so things by necessity will change. Then tech started, and we had to learn how to fit the story into our space and integrate technical aspects. And then we found out what works and what doesn’t with an audience on opening night. The chalk dust reminds us how we got to where we are, and that things are neither as permanent nor as transient as we may believe.

I hope reading this has been as illuminating and enjoyable for you as writing it was for me. If you had no idea what I was talking about, it’s probably because you haven’t seen the performance yet and don’t have any context for what I was saying. But fear not! We still have a week’s worth of performances left in the run, from this coming Wednesday the 6th until Saturday the 9th over at CHAW. There is still time to see it, but that time is running out, so don’t delay! Come on by sometime this week and check us out! Tickets are available HERE. Mention that you heard about it from Keith when you come! It won’t, you know, matter, we won’t do anything special for you, but it’d make me feel good if you told everyone the reason you did something was because of what I said.