Plays on History (PART ONE)

A dear friend of mine, knowing of my obsession fascination with the Black Death, offered an intriguing suggestion—she said that I should write a play about it. I’ve been turning this idea over in my head ever since.  There are several possible narrative structures:

•  A straightforward narrative drama, probably the easiest to conceive and execute.

This format was more popular in the post-World War II era (examples include The Lion in Winter, A Man for All Seasons and Anne of the Thousand Days).

 



Genevieve Bujold looking adorbs as Anne Boleyn.
You can tell this is early on in the film, because
of her gabled headdress (indicating Anne is still
lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon).
  



Later on Anne introduced the French hood, which EVERYBODY immediately adopted.  Thin and fashionable, brunette, French-speaking--Anne was kind of the Jackie Kennedy of her day.

• A dualistic structure, where past and present are both presented and held up to each other.
  
  

Examples include perhaps my favorite modern play, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a fantastic tour de force exploring issues of determinism, eschatology, physics, poetry, sex as chaos theory, thermodynamics, and emerging Romanticism.  This all makes it sound deadly but it is actually a lovely poem of a play, a valentine to the  intellectual mind.  Thomasina’s tearful reaction when she contemplates the burning of the Library of Alexandria--all those books, that knowledge lost, perhaps forever—breaks my heart.

THOMASINA: Oh Septimus!--can you bear it?  All the lost plays of the Athenians!  Two hundred at least by Aeschylus--thousands of poems--Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by [Cleopatra's]* ancestors!  How can we sleep for grief?

• A play that explicitly uses the past to make a point about the present.  

Examples include: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible which of course uses the Salem Witch Trials as a metaphor for the anti-Communist hysteria in the early ‘50s. Crucible's plot works on its own terms as well, as a look into a society we can hardly imagine now in this country, a theocracy shaped by terror—terror of Indian attacks, crop failure, public shaming, damnation.  Miller’s somewhat contrived recreation of 17th-century barely-American vernacular is criticized, but the language is actually one of my favorite aspects of the play, by turns sturdily plain-spoken and unexpectedly poetic.

ABIGAIL: As bare as some December tree, I saw them all--walking like saints to church, running to feed the sick, and hypocrites in their hearts! And God gave me strength to call them liars, and God made men to listen to me, and by God I will scrub the world clean for the love of Him! Oh John, I will make you such a wife when the world is white again!**

I guess for me to decide how I want to write the play, I’d need to think about what I want to say about the Black Death, which is certainly a fertile ground for dramatic treatment.  The worst human disaster in recorded history and yet (fascinatingly!) for such a catastrophe, relatively little has been written about it....

*Thomasina dates the Library's burning to Julius Caesar's OH-so-eventful visit in 48 BC, based on Plutarch, but this is somewhat suspect--classical sources mention several other specific incidents when the Library was fired.

**I have no problem with Miller's twisting history to make Abigail older (in real life she was 11, and John Proctor was well into his 60s), or even his invention of their illicit relationship.  What I dislike though is his characterization of (the character) Abigail as The Teenage Temptress.  As the play establishes, she was a servant in Proctor's home, within a highly misogynistic society--she really had no meaningful agency.  Proctor held all the cards.  Miller even tries to cover his ass later on by claiming "The legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in Boston"--uh, no.  There is no such legend except in Miller's fevered imagination.  Down, boy.