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.

Of Man and Media

Another day, another powerful man caught with his pants down.  Political sex scandals—such an irresistible cocktail with so many possible variations on Quiller-Couch's seven basic narrative conflicts.  


Man vs. Woman:

President Bill Clinton

Man vs. Man:

Senator Larry "Wide Stance" Craig

Man vs. Machine:

Congressman Mark Foley

 And yet as mesmerizing as I find Congressman Weiner’s slo-mo tumble into political purgatory, I must confess I prefer the sly elegance of a much earlier scandale that was likewise generated in the media currency of its
time—the famous Woodrow Wilson Misprint.


In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson was a widower who took a shine to Edith Galt, and started sparkin' with her within a year of his wife's death--in these post-Victorian times with much more restrictive mourning customs, this might be considered inappropriate and so his advisors tried to keep the relationship under wraps.  All was for naught when word got out that they were seen together and, as the Washington Post framed the story, 


The President spent the evening entering Mrs. Galt.


For want of four little letters...T-A-I-N...a Presidency was nearly lost!  But the Post, in marked contrast to Congressman Weiner, understand how replicable media could be and immediately recalled the edition.  Undoubtedly Weiner wishes he could do the same...

The Sport of War

Even though the semester has ended, I’m still pondering Laws of War—and not just in the Middle Ages.  There’s a Matrix-like quality to this—once you become aware of these patterns, you see them everywhere!  Not surprising, since man has been at war pretty much constantly throughout the course of recorded history. Heck, the very first work of literature is about a war!  

Then Ares roared like a trumpet, as loud as nine thousand men could shout, aye, ten thousand men in the turmoil of battle! Trojans and Achaians alike trembled to hear the roar of the insatiate God of War!

 And of course the Bible is chock-FULL of warfare—David and Goliath, Judah Maccabee the Rock Star...

…even the endgame, Armageddon, is a battle scenario. (Interestingly Armageddon is a placename—Megiddo is the name of an ancient city.)  We tend to see war as this random, chaotic force of obliteration but there are recognizable, distinct patterns which emerge again and again, and not just in history.  

These patterns are perhaps most apparent in our sports culture—most forms of organized sports tend to be team vs. team, facing each other on opposing fields, much like the classic pitched battle.  You can see this in basketball, soccer, even tennis, but the classic sports metaphor for war is football, which shares the:

• terminology (blitzes, bombs)
• strategy           (front lines, flanking maneuvers)
• tactics (artillery vs. infantry) 

as well as protective armor.  What is a running game but an updated version of medieval jousting, with the players functioning as both destrier and knight?  Football fans are even referred to as weekend warriors!  And their latter-day woadwood would do any Celtic warrior proud.  

William Wallace, Woad Warrior…

I’ve found that reading Froissart’s Chronicles has brought a whole new appreciation to the playoffs.

And—cheerleaders, that peculiarly American contribution to team sports.  We love them, we fear them, we live vicariously through grrrlpower Kristen Dunst movies. (Full disclosure—I was never a cheerleader (3-sport varsity athlete here!) but I always thought it would be fun.) But, you ask,  how do cheerleaders fit into the football-as-war scenario?  Well, although women couldn’t actually fight in medieval battles* they did have a military function in chivalry—as an audience for the knight, to spur him to greater deeds, literally to see him off as he marched off to war.  Interestingly the first cheerleaders were actually men, so this possible parallel with medieval women has actually developed over time.  Of course nowadays cheerleaders are not content to merely watch and applaud--they take the field in their own right.

They even have a castle!

*Joan of Arc was clearly the ass-kicking and name-taking exception.