Iphigenia: The Fall of House Atreides

I’ve hinted at this topic a couple times already in the leadup to this show, so now that we are up and running I think it is probably time to address the elephant in the room: the Curse of the Atreides. This curse, the REAL, if hidden, reason that Iphigenia is doomed, is one of two significant bloodline curses in Greek mythology and particularly in Greek tragedy. Maybe someday in another eight years I’ll win another pitch meeting and we will stage Seven Against Thebes or Oedipus Tyrannos and I’ll tell you all about the Curse of Labdacus, remarkably an even more troubling curse than this one. But until then, I have some theories about Greek bloodlines that I am eager to share with you.

Agamemnon comes by the blood on his hands honestly. He is following in a rich familial tradition of kinslaughter dating back to his great-grandfather Tantalus, a king on the West coast of what is now Turkey. Tantalus, for reasons passing understanding, took it into his head to test the gods’ infallibility. When the Olympians attended a banquet hosted by Tantalus, he butchered his own son Pelops, cooked him, and fed him to the gods to see if they would notice. What he would get out of this, other than a dead son and, I suppose, the satisfaction of being right, is unclear. In any case, he was wrong. The gods DID notice that the kid they were eating was human and not goat as they were promised (with the exception of Demeter, who was still in mourning for her daughter Persephone and inadvertently ate some of Pelops’ shoulder) The gods were understandably aggrieved at Tantalus, both for attempting to force them into anthropophagy and for thinking he could trick them. He was sent to Tartarus, where he stands in a pool of water up to his neck with a bunch of grapes above his head. If he bends his neck down to take a drink the water recedes, and if he cranes his neck up to eat a grape the branch lifts out of his reach. His eternal torment is where the word “tantalizing” comes from.

The Torment of Tantalus, by Bernard Picart, 1731.

Pelops, in the meantime, was restored by the gods and fostered for a time on Mount Olympus, where Hephaestus even built him a new shoulder out of ivory to replace the portion that Demeter ate. He sought the hand of Hippodamia in marriage, but her father King Oenomaus of Elis, fearful of a prophecy that he would be killed by his son-in-law, challenged him to a chariot race for consent to wed her, with his life as the hazard. Oenomaus had been running this con for a while, having claimed nearly 20 past suitors’ heads after defeating them in chariot races. But the other suitors weren’t the favorites of Poseidon, god of the sea and of horses. Nor were they trapped in a polluted bloodline whose every generation would pass more atrocities on to their offspring, turning them more vile and depraved and pathetic with each passing year. Pelops was both. He conspired with Oenomaus’ chariot driver Myrtilus, offering him half of the kingdom and the first night in bed with Hippodamia, if he would betray his master. Myrtilus leapt at the opportunity and sabotaged the chariot before the race, killing Oenomaus (and fulfilling his prophecy). When he approached Pelops to demand his cut, Pelops accused him of trying to rape Hippodamia and threw him off a cliff. His, shall we say, eventful life gave us the name for the Peloponnesian Peninsula, the large southern landmass of Greece separated from the rest of Europe by the Isthmus of Corinth.

The regions of the Peloponnesian Peninsula

Pelops’ sons Atreus and Thyestes are where it starts to get really complicated. First of all, the two of them conspired to kill their half-brother and Pelops’ favored son Chrysippus [for reasons I don’t want to get into now but I swear I can talk about if we ever do that Oedipus stuff and the Curse of Labdacus like I threatened earlier -KH] and they were exiled. While in exile they were jointly named as the stewards of Mycenae (or Argos, depending on who you ask) while its king Eurystheus warred with the sons of Heracles; when he was killed in battle Atreus and Thyestes ascended to the throne. But two men may not sit on one throne, and soon Atreus and Thyestes were at one another’s throats. Atreus found a golden lamb in his flock while looking for a sacrifice for Artemis, and gave it to his wife Aerope to hide it from the goddess [insulting Artemis is a family failing, it would seem -KH]. Aerope promptly turned it over to her lover Thyestes, who proposed to Atreus that the crown of Mycenae should go to whoever had a golden lamb. His brother somehow didn’t sense the obvious trick here and agreed, at which point Thyestes produced the lamb and won their contest. Atreus got him back by wagering that the crown should go to whoever could make the sun rise in the West and set in the East, after Zeus told him that Helios had been offended by Thyestes’ duplicity and would drive the chariot of the sun across the sky backwards to help him win back the throne.

After this their prank war took a turn. Atreus found out about the affair between his wife and Thyestes, and to get revenge he took a page from his grandfather’s cookbook, killing his nephews Aglaus, Orchomenus, and Calaeus and cooking them into a pie, Titus Andronicus-style, that he fed to their father. Thyestes’ inadvertent cannibalism left him polluted, unfit for human company, and he was exiled. While in exile an oracle informed him that, if he had a son by his daughter, that son/grandson would kill Atreus. Seeming to believe that if he was polluted anyway there was no harm in incurring more, he did so, raping his daughter Pelopia and fathering Aegisthus. When Aegisthus came of age he, true to prophecy, seized the throne, killed his uncle Atreus, and banished Atreus’ two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, who found refuge in the court of King Tyndareus of Sparta.

L-R: Matthew Rhys as Demetrius, Laura Fraser as Lavinia, Anthony Hopkins as Titus Andronicus, Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chiron. From Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus, produced by Fox Searchlight.

While in Sparta Agamemnon and Menelaus married Tyndareus’ daughters, the clever Clytemnestra and the beautiful Helen, and with the support of the Spartans Agamemnon took his throne back from Aegisthus. When Tyndareus abdicated Menelaus became king of Sparta, and the scene was set for the beginning of the Trojan War, which I do not have time to explain here. While awaiting the muster of Greece to sail for Troy, Agamemnon continued the cycle of violence by killing his daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis as repayment for his boast of being a better hunter. Clytemnestra took her revenge during his long absence fighting the Trojan War by taking his father’s killer, the exiled Aegisthus, as her lover. When Agamemnon returned to Mycenae with his captive seer Cassandra in tow, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus caught them both in a net while they bathed and killed them, and Aegisthus, like Grover Cleveland, took power once again. Agamemnon’s son Orestes, having been away in Athens, returned some years later in secret on orders from Apollo and met his long-lost sister Electra. The two of them killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, as well as their son and Electra and Orestes’ half-brother/uncle/cousin Aletes. For the crime of matricide Orestes was tormented by the Furies and fled back to Athens, where Athena and Apollo interceded and the citizens gave him a trial. They found in his favor and the curse of House Atreus is finally broken.

What I find particularly interesting in the Atreides bloodline curse is the cannibalism. The kinslaughter is bad, certainly, but it is relatively common in these sorts of stories. But cannibalism is an entirely different kettle of…fish. Very uncommon in Greek mythology otherwise, it makes a surprising TWO appearances in the five generations of this curse. Even more interesting is that, in both cases, the victims of the cannibalism are the offspring of the perpetrator. I am aware of only a handful of other examples of fathers eating their sons in the canon of Greek myth: Tereus tricked into eating his son Itys by his wife Procne after he raped her sister Philomela and pulled her tongue out and the whole sorry trio being turned into birds by Apollo out of pity, Lycaon eating his son Nyctimus at another banquet for the gods and being turned into a wolf by Zeus out of disgust, giving us the name Lycanthrope for werewolves and apocryphally originating a werewolf cult on Mount Lykaion, and Kronos King of the Titans eating each of his children as they were born, out of fear of the one who would eventually usurp him. Cannibalism, as I have addressed before, is heavily associated with abandoning your humanity and identifying with another class of being, so I am not surprised to see animal transformations featured in these other stories. But why does it not feature in the Atreides myth?

Greater Werewolf, 5th Edition, Magic: The Gathering. Art by Dennis Detwiller. Never thought I’d get to use this picture again.

I believe the answer lies on Mount Lykaion and Mount Olympus. King Pelasgus, the father of Lycaon, was the namer and progenitor of the Pelasgians, the legendary inhabitants of prehistoric Greece from whom the “modern” Athenians and Thebans and Telamonians and Argives, etc. of Agamemnon’s time were descended. Agamemnon’s own ancestor Pelops, a victim of cannibalism, was similarly revered as the father of the Peloponnese, the people of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, in the times of Homer and Euripides. Kronos ate all of his children but for Zeus, who overthrew Kronos and became King of the Gods. And Zeus himself was always on guard for the next hero to usurp and replace HIM; Achilles, notably, was sometimes considered a threat to the throne of the Great Thunderer. It is my contention that cannibalism, particularly when you keep it in the family, was strongly associated in Ancient Greece with founding new tribes and dynasties. I think that Orestes had the opportunity to be either the progenitor of a new tribe, perhaps unifying all of Greece as his father did, but permanently, or the king of a new generation of gods, overthrowing the capricious Olympians and ushering in a wave of justice and rationality, as befits the first man ever acquitted by a jury. What happened in my little pet theory to turn him off the Golden Path is unclear, but from where I’m sitting he had as good a shot at the throne as anybody.

This theory has major implications for Frank and Brian Herbert’s Dune series as well.
Timothee Chalamet as Duke Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides, in Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 DUNE, produced by Legendary Entertainment.

Iphigenia is, unfortunately, little more than a footnote in this broader view of her family tree. For the Ancient Greeks her main job was to die, first to loose the winds for Troy and second to seal Agamemnon’s doom as a filicide. That may have been fine for them, but here at We Happy Few we like our female characters with a little more to do. Come see what agency we found for her! Tickets are still available here!

Iphigenia: Are the Greek Tragedies Taught at Starfleet Academy?

The lesson of the impossible choices offered up by the gods in Greek tragedies is not how to find a clever solution. It is not how to weasel your way out of a contract. You can’t outsmart the gods. Thinking you can will truly only make it worse for you, and that you would even consider that in the first place is probably why you are in this unenviable position at all. You cannot alter your fate. But you CAN dictate the manner in which you meet it. In Seven Against Thebes, Eteocles knows that his brother Polyneices is going to lead the assault on one of the seven gates of Thebes, and he knows that he and his brother are fated to die at each other’s hands, so he deliberately takes over the defense of the gate his brother is attacking. Instead of trying to escape his destiny he sets the terms under which it will be fulfilled.

In the basis for our story, Agamemnon’s impossible choice on Aulis at the onset of the Trojan War is: Kill his daughter, fulfilling his familial curse, incurring the pollution of kin-slaughter, and infuriating his wife, but sail to Troy at the head of the greatest army in history. Or spare her, and by so doing, betray his brother Menelaus and break his oath to Tyndareus and all of Helen’s suitors, earn a reputation for faithlessness, and then be forced to watch Odysseus assume command of the expedition and sacrifice his daughter anyway. And possibly be killed himself for violating a sacred pact. Similarly, Iphigenia’s choices, such as they are, are: beg and plead and resist the sacrificial knife, forcing her father to drag her to the altar, or accept her fate and try to find meaning or significance in it. There are no ‘good’ options in this position. There isn’t even a ‘less bad’ option. All that can be done is find a way to come to terms with the inevitable.

The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, a fresco found in Pompeii

I was pondering this fatalistic worldview while I was at the gym the other day, watching my Stories. I watch Star Trek while I get my #steps in on the elliptical, it is the carrot I use to force myself to go to the gym. It works…sometimes. The point is, I was watching Star Trek and Data was singing Gilbert and Sullivan and it occurred to me that, while Star Trek is both highly literate and famously concerned with no-win scenarios, I could not recall any mention of the Greek tragedians or the canon of Greek tragedy.* As a man who is obsessed a little too concerned with demonstrating how well-read I am, this struck me as a real missed opportunity for the writers to score some deep cuts. My only conclusion is that Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus must not appear on the curriculum at Starfleet Academy.

There is, unfortunately, what I believe to be strong evidence to support my pet theory that the Commandant of the Academy has struck the Tragedians from the reading list. In the episode “Peak Performance”, Data is soundly beaten at some sort of milking udder-based strategy game by a Third-level Grandmaster and descends into a deep funk, only able to be roused by Captain Picard telling him that to do everything right and still lose is not failure, but the human condition life. Data, a voracious student of human culture with perfect recall, would certainly have recognized this lesson from the humbling of Heracles, were he familiar with it. In Euripides’ Heracles the title character, in his moment of greatest triumph after completing his final Labor, is driven mad by Hera and kills his own family. As he sits in despair amidst the wreckage he is comforted by his friend Theseus, who tells him that the gods are not wiser or better than humanity, merely stronger. Data should also have learned this lesson from Marvel Studios’ The Avengers: Infinity War, in which Thanos the Mad Titan, having experienced this sort of dismaying defeat in the past, comprehensively but empathetically metes it out to the defenders of the Infinity Stones.** I suppose the Infinity Saga has been struck from the curriculum as well.  What’s more troubling is that Data didn’t even recall this lesson from the time he sat for the Kobayashi Maru, a test that is supposed to explicitly teach how to cope with failure and defeat. [It is possible that by the 24th century, the Kobayashi Maru test has also been removed from the curriculum. Like all tests, it only works if the contents are a surprise, and it having become a well-known shorthand for a no-win scenario negates its effectiveness. Its function may now be served by the Psych Test portion of the Academy Entrance Exam, which is instead personalized to the applicant but similarly has no right answer and gauges the testee’s response to a dangerous scenario -KH]

Foreground L-R: Brent Spiner as Commander Data, Glenn Morshower as Ensign Burke, Roy Brocksmith as Kolrami. Background center: Diana Muldaur as Doctor Pulaski, Marina Sirtis as Counselor Troi. From Paramount Pictures’ Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 2 Episode 21, “Peak Performance”, 1989.

Star Trek is not shy about wearing its references on its sleeves. A dozen or more episodes have Shakespeare quotes as their title. More importantly, it is abundantly clear that it is the characters themselves, not merely the writers, who are so aggressively erudite. One presumably quite well-worn Complete Annotated Shakespeare serves as set-dressing in Picard’s ready room, Data’s quarters, and Khan’s shelter on Ceti Alpha V. There are multiple episodes in which characters are rehearsing or directly quoting Shakespeare to each other, because if you have access to Sir Patrick Stewart for your science fiction television program you should cram as much Shakespeare into his mouth as you can. The Enterprise, flagship of the Federation, hosts art classes, chamber concerts, and poetry readings, the Cerritos entertains salons and transcendental meditation, and the Discovery and NX-01 screen classic films. In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk, Spock, and Khan bandy back and forth quotes from A Tale of Two Cities and Moby-Dick, while in Deep Space Nine Sisko and Eddington trade barbs from Les Miserables. Captain Picard uses the epic of Gilgamesh to find common ground with the Children of Tama in one of the best episodes in the series’ history. Data and Geordi’s preferred holodeck recreation activity is Sherlock Holmes detective stories, while Picard unaccountably favors a deeply lame generic hardboiled detective series called Dixon Hill [presumably because Dashiell Hammett’s far superior Continental Op stories were still under copyright -KH] Riker is an amateur trombonist and jazz aficionado, a genre that his successor Captain Shaw scorns as overly loose and improvisational, favoring the structure and fidelity to form and meter of the Romantics. In one of my company-mates Jon Reynolds’ favorite episodes, noted schlemiel Lieutenant Junior Grade Reginald Endicott Barclay III has been cast as the title role in a production of Cyrano de Bergerac, a spectacularly incisive bit of casting by the Enterprise’s Chief Medical Officer and Performing Arts Chair Dr. Beverly Crusher. The nerds who comprise the officer corps of Starfleet are open about their interests and are not shy about indulging them. If they had been exposed to the Greeks, I strongly believe they would have mentioned it.

L-R: Tracee Cocco as Ensign Jae, Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, Michael Dorn as Worf, Jonathan Frakes as William Riker, Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi, Brent Spiner as Data. From Paramount Pictures’ Star Trek Generations, 1994.

Starfleet talks a big game about coping with failure and rising to meet it, but in reality their philosophy doesn’t mesh with Greek fatalism. You can’t change the conditions of the test in a Greek tragedy. Don’t get me wrong, Starfleet officers have grit in spades. They don’t back down and they honor their promises or die in the attempt. But the Greeks are too dour for the bright and optimistic fully automated luxury Communist future that Star Trek envisions for the Federation. To open another whole entire kettle of worms so close to the end of this blog post, Starfleet are more like hobbits; cheerful peaceful lovers of luxury, but doughty at bay, to quote the Professor. They love their comfort so well because they can go without it, and can bear terrible privations, secure in the knowledge that their warm cozy home is waiting for them if they can just get through it.

Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee. From New Line Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003.

The Klingons, on the other hand, live their lives in exactly the sort of loud, bold, expressive, emotionally charged manner that Euripides and his fellows describe. Shakespeare has fared very well in translation to the Klingon (so well that some overly-enthusiastic Klingon patriots even claim The Bard as one of their own!) and I imagine that the theatregoers of Qo’noS would find even more to appreciate from The Oresteia or Ajax. Or, just maybe, from OUR upcoming performance of Iphigenia, an adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Jean Racine’s Iphigenie, that we are excited to open next week! Tickets are available HERE.

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*I was eventually able to find a single mention of Euripides in Star Trek, a throwaway line in the episode “Pen Pals”. Data posits that Commander Riker, after making an unusual ‘grand design of the Cosmos’ suggestion in support of the Prime Directive, could perhaps quote from the Greek tragedian in support of his argument, before dismissing the entire discussion as rhetorical and irrelevant to the life-and-death stakes of the situation. This suggests that Data’s [shallow -KH] interpretation of the Greek tragedies dismisses them as little more than parables about predestination and the will of the divine, lacking deeper emotional substance or thematic resonance. If this is the sad state of dramaturgical rigor in the Classics Department of Starfleet Academy I am not surprised they no longer teach the Tragedians.

**I owe a credit to John Hodgman for this point about the theme of failure in Infinity War, in a guest spot on this episode of Blank Check.

Peerless: I’m Just A Teenage Shakespeare, Baby

Hi there, everybody! It’s been a long time, I know, I’ve been busy with some of my myriad other responsibilities around the We Happy Compound. But the clarion call of our upcoming Shakespeare-adjacent reading caught my eye, and I followed the scent like a cartoon hobo being inexorably drawn to a pie cooling on a windowsill right here to another blog post [for those keeping track at home, the only reason I didn’t fully mix that synesthetic metaphor with all five senses was a failure on my part to think of appropriate touch or taste idioms -KH]. So here I am to write for you about the setting of the play Peerless by Jiehae Park, why it works, and how it fits into the larger canon of Shakespeare adaptations.

That setting, of course, is a high school. This setting is uncommonly popular with film adaptations of Shakespeare, in my experience. Particularly in the late 90s and early 00s. Before we go too much further I should pick a nit: I am referring to adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, by which I mean retellings in modern language of stories made famous by the Bard. Adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story, She’s The Man, O, and Get Over It [I am cheating a little with West Side Story, in which the characters never attend any classes, but since they are so clearly teenagers I have decided to give myself a pass. You are powerless to stop me. I am the author, I decide what is and isn’t fair. You’re just a hypothetical audience member, and based on my readership metrics you barely exist at all -KH] I am decidedly NOT talking about films set in the modern day using Shakespeare’s text, an entirely different kettle of fish that I would love to one day write a blog post about. But today is not that day. Today is the day I write about high school adaptations of Shakespeare and why they work so well.

She’s The Man, Dreamworks Pictures 2006.
L-R: Robert Hoffman, Laura Ramsey, Amanda Bynes, Channing Tatum, Alexandra Breckenridge

There are a couple reasons, by my count. First of all: high school is an emotionally fraught place, filled with emotionally fraught people. The sort of people whose feelings are right on the surface, who experience in their minds if not in actuality the strange highs and strange lows of the characters in a play. People, moreover, who are actively being taught Shakespeare. The temptation to have the actors discussing the very stories they are living through is very tempting, and as a fan of maximalism and an enemy of subtlety I see no reason for directors to not indulge that temptation.

10 Things I Hate About You, Touchstone Pictures 1999. L-R: Gabby Union, Andrew Keegan, Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Larisa Oleynik, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Another telling feature is what stories are being adapted. In my brief survey of these adaptations I found 12th Night, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Romeo & Juliet. Comedies about jilted lovers, longing, and competition, a tragedy about love and infidelity [and racism -ed.], and a tragedy about love and hate whose main characters are all teenagers themselves. Add in Macbeth, the source material for Peerless, and we find a tragedy about ambition, competition, and entitlement. These themes are all right on the money for high schoolers, a tightly wound group of people if ever there was one. No one has ever “loved not wisely, but too well” more than high schoolers, who have all these emotions coursing very strongly through their minds without a good idea of what they mean or how to appropriately act upon them. The stakes for everything feel so very high in high school, a time when competition is encouraged in the classroom and on the sports field and where relative worth can be objectively measured by scores and grades, and it feels natural to carry that competition onward to romantic pursuits. With this in mind it is a little surprising there aren’t more of these adaptations; surely there is space in the cinematic world for a high school Hamlet, riddled with parent issues and indecision about what the future holds, or a Much Ado About Nothing centered around the Homecoming dance. Our own colleagues at Woolly Mammoth put on Teenage Dick, Mike Lew’s high school Richard III play, just two years ago. The ground is fertile. Get on it, filmmakers of 1995-2007!

“O”, Lions Gate Entertainment 2001. L-R Julia Stiles, Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett

Consider also what stories AREN’T being adapted. Shakespeare was a man for all seasons, he had somber reflections about aging and legacy and statesmanship, about responsibility and fatherhood, that have little to no bearing on the lives of high schoolers. It would be difficult at best and offensive at worst to attempt to place King Lear’s struggle with parenthood and his own deteriorating mind in a sophomore biology class, or to have Shylock’s complicated battle with the legal system, anti-Semitism, and his daughter’s betrayal play out under the bleachers. The Romances are, ironically, completely inconsistent with a teenage setting, riddled as they are with tremendous leaps in time, overt mysticism and magic, and lessons about loving your children, living a good life, and being comfortable with your legacy and the approaching spectre of your death. Not a lesson that would resonate with, or make sense coming from, the captain of your all-state lacrosse team or the student body vice president.

From 10 Things I Hate About You, Touchstone Pictures 1999. L-R foreground: Susan May Pratt, David Krumholtz

And there is, of course, also the reason that WE and so many other theatre companies enjoy telling Shakespeare stories so much, regardless of their setting: they’re good stories. Immediately recognizable, drowning in thematic resonance and depth, populated by some of the most fleshed out and human characters in the history of literature, infinitely retellable, flexible to multiple interpretations and open for discussion and debate until the cows come home. And they’re also free, a not-to-be-sneezed-at advantage for the producer on a budget.

But Peerless wasn’t free, to gracelessly pivot back to the matter at hand in order to wrap up this blog post. We paid Concord Theatricals for the privilege of producing this reading for you all, and we were happy to do it. We are extremely excited for the chance to share this play with you, and I, personally, look forward to seeing you all there at the show tonight. Tickets are still available HERE or at the door. Prepare to relive your glory days or the living nightmare of high school, depending on your level of popularity between the ages of 15 and 18, and here’s hoping it was a little less…intense than our play tonight.

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.

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.

Living Room Reads, a new series brought to you exclusively by WHF!

[Editor’s Note: Regular readers may notice some differences in the writing of this post.  It may seem less arch, less mean, more endearing and warm and positive. That is because a lot of it, and just about 100% of the good parts, were not written by me, Production Manager Keith Hock, but by Assistant Producer Bridget Grace Sheaff, whose spirit we have not crushed yet and who still has some joy in her soul. She has made a terrible, TERRIBLE error by allowing me to discover how good of a writer she is, and I would not be surprised if you saw more of her voice on this blog as I increasingly attempt to shirk my responsibilities and saddle her with writing duties.]

Hello again, fanatical followers of our tremendously popular blog.  I promised I would bring you another post soon, last time, and here one is, right on (intentionally nebulous) schedule.  “What could you have done so soon after your last impeccably-written blog post that would warrant another entry so soon?” you clamor. “You only write about things that you are doing and you haven’t staged anything else or done anything of public note this whole month!” you cry, a trifle judgmentally. “What could the subject of this blog post possibly be?” you shriek to the heavens in terrified confusion.

What we did, long-suffering readers and my only greatest friends in the whole wide world, was gather together a bunch of people, drink some wine, and read a play to each other, because when you work in theatre you have a different definition of the word “fun” than normals have. You see, it may come as a surprise to you, coming from your favorite producers of confusing classical theatre, but We Happy Few is staffed entirely by nerds. You heard me. We embrace it. We welcome it into our lives with a warm smile and a glass of red wine (though we wouldn’t say no to something stronger!) So, when we tell you that we spent our Saturday night sitting around a living room reading Caryl Churchill’s Dream Play out loud, we won’t be offended when you call us nerds, slap the books out of our hands, or push us into some lockers.

From “Revenge of the Nerds”, 1984.  Pictured: Ted McGinley and Donald Gibb.

 

If you’ve paid attention to the way we frame this blog in the past, Constant Readers, you should expect that next I would put some words in your mouth purporting to be some questions you have about something I just said, to spare me from having to learn to write actual segues and give me an easy opportunity to introduce our topics.  And who am I to argue with success.  Your questions about what I just said are as follows:

1. We Happy Few doing Churchill? Don’t they do Shakespeare?
2. Churchill’s Dream Play? Why not the original Strindberg?
3. Couldn’t you all just read it in your free time? Why the public gathering?
4. What does this mean about your next project?
5. How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?

I am confident we can conjure up an answer for about 80% of these questions.  That last one, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

This first question was a little bit of a straw man on your part, seeing as we did an adaptation of a Poe story last month, and a Webster play in 2014, but we can dig into it anyway! Let’s start by defining and operationalizing a few things here. We Happy Few works with classic texts in a stripped down, straightforward, no-nonsense/all-nonsense sort of way. We all know this. What is a little more fluid is the definition of what we consider “Classic.” There is a lot to unpack in that word. We by no means are the experts on what constitutes a “Classic”; after all, this is a vague enough term that any story might fit inside this definition with some fairly flimsy justification. When we start identifying works outside their structural genre, the world gets a little trickier. What’s the difference between an adaptation and a new work? Where is the line between translator and playwright? Defining plays under these umbrellas helps us pinpoint a means to our end, but doesn’t always help us with semantics. When We Happy Few thinks of “Classics,” our eyes are drawn to stories that are told and retold in new ways by many different artists.

 

Enter Dream Play.

From CUA’s 2013 production of Dream Play.  L-R: Natasha Gallop, Kiernan McGowan, Kimberlee Wolfson, Samantha Smedley, Claire Aniela, Joseph Weber, Seth Rosenke

Strindberg wrote Dream Play just after the turn of the twentieth century. (For those of you that like math, that’s 114 years ago. For those of you who don’t like math, it was way before you were born.) Churchill’s adaptation was brought to the London stage in 2005. And betwixt and between those two dates, a number of very famous adaptations popped up and gained widespread popularity.

Why do we keep coming back to Dream Play? Could it be (perish the thought!) a Classic?

 

We Happy Few thinks so.

 

Familiar enough with the basic premise of the play, and leaning somewhat on the experience of former WHF sound designer Bob Pike and …this memo says I have to say Senior Executive Producer, Actor Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary, The Right Honorable Kiernan McGowan when they staged it at Catholic in 2013, we turned to Caryl Churchill’s version as a study of adaptation and revitalizing a standard for a modern audience. We got to ask the play some questions and it asked some back. (Yeah, the play talks to us… why, is that weird?) Reading it as a group allowed us to experience the play in the same time and space. Plays aren’t meant to sit on the page, we all know that. But we take for granted that very obvious essence of a play sometimes and forget that the play moves with us, lives with us, confronts us, pushes us away, and pulls us back in. It’s a verb. Theatre is just verbs. “Play.” “Act.” “Watch.” “Perform.” “Design.” “Write.” “Fall down in exhaustion after a 12 hour technical rehearsal.” You get the picture.

And so with several bottles of red wine, pizza, a few good friends, a few great friends (which is which? Fight amongst yourselves) and the words of Caryl Churchill, We Happy Few got to throw all of our ingredients into a pot and see what kind of stone soup we came up with. Reading the play led us to talking about our mission, long term goals, the heart of the play, the nature of devising, and even the lighter, humorous side of this dense, cerebral play.

Living Room Read of Dream Play at We Happy House, 2015. L-R Tori Boutin, Bob Pike, Raven Bonniwell, Kerry McGee, Keith Hock, Adaire Brooks, Kiernan McGowan. Not pictured: Nathan Bennett, Che Wernsman, Bridget Grace Sheaff

 

What comes next?

 

That’s a really great question, blog.

For that, you’re just going to have to keep your eyes out, aren’t you? Big stuff is coming your way, world. Our little band of brothers has not yet begun to fight.

Needless to say, We Happy Few is going to keep digging into the beauty of plays like Dream Play to find what our audience needs to hear in this increasingly confusing time. As we move forward, we keep one foot firmly planted in our past, strengthening ourselves from those who came before us. And if Churchill’s fragmented, non-linear, metaphoric play can provide us with any answers, then bring on the dream dictionaries.

“What’s poetry? It’s not real but maybe it’s more than real. It’s dreaming while you’re awake.”

CARYL CHURCHILL, A Dream Play

Capulets vs. Montagues

We Happy Few’s ROMEO AND JULIET opened last night! With the momentum gained from completing the first show, we’ll keep giving great performances so be sure to get a ticket! There are 8 shows remaining in our 2nd annual appearance at the Capital Fringe Festival.

In celebration of starting performances, we present to you another glimpse at the inner workings of the show. This time, the cast talks about the feud between the Capulet and Montague families, including some characters’ views on the feud and even our guess at how the feud began in the first place. Enjoy!

Meet & Greet

Get to know the cast of ROMEO AND JULIET. Watch this video and find out who will be on stage at this year’s Capital Fringe Festival. Get your tickets now!

We’re Up to Something(s)

Hello from We Happy Few land. The past month has been a crazy whirlwind of meetings, decision-making, and overall planning. We have a few very special announcements to make!

1. Kickstarter helped us to kick ass. Fact: we made our goal and then some (special thanks go out to our 54 backers)! Because we didn’t ask for the entire budget for THE TEMPEST on Kickstarter, we are still accepting donations via the yellow “donate” button on the top right of our webpage. We are in the home stretch in terms of being prepared to stage this show, but fundraising the last little bit means that we’ll be able to have great costumes, a safe environment for actors on stage, and quality set pieces. If you’re interested in donating, see item #2!
2. We’re super cool. That’s the truth. But you know what we’re not? We Happy Few is not a 501(c)3 non-profit as identified by the government. In order to offer benefits like tax-deductible receipts to donors, as of the middle of March we are part of the Fractured Atlas community! They’re super cool too, which makes a great partnership. This allows us more time to focus on making great theatre, which is the coolest.
3. We have a lot of things in the works. In fact, because you are wonderful and want to read about us, we’ll reveal to you now that we’ll be performing ROMEO AND JULIET at the Capital Fringe Festival this year. But more on that later…

Last year, the inaugural WHF year, was a great success but we’re not resting on our laurels. Oh boy, do we ever have plans. What does that mean for you, dear audience? Plan to attend our upcoming show, follow us on social media (which I’m sure you’re already doing), and watch for announcements about all things WHF.