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.

The Theater is a Temple...

This spring Paper Mill Playhouse is performing my favorite Stephen Sondheim show, the musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  Forum is an absolute delight of a show, about a Roman slave who's trying to win his freedom by securing a beautiful virgin for his young master.  Having performed the show twice (a courtesan in high school, Philia in another production), the setting indicated in the libretto made me giggle when I first read it:  200 years before the birth of Christ, a day in spring.  So this would be right after the Second Punic War, when Rome was really the only player left in the Western Mediterranean after having crushed their primary rival, Carthage. 

I studied Roman History last spring and was fascinated by the Second Punic War—this was the one with Hannibal and the elephants.  To sum up (briefly—there were three Punic wars altogether), Carthage was a seafaring city on the northern coast of Africa (in today’s Tunisia) and Rome’s main rival in the western Mediterranean.  Carthage had had its Phoenician ass handed to it by Rome in the First Punic War, 264-241 BC, and was jonesin’ for revenge.  The First War was essentially expansionist and basically unremarkable except for the fact that Rome developed a navy from scratch—yes, notwithstanding Italy’s manymany miles of coastline, Rome (which pretty much controlled the entire peninsula by then) did not have a navy until 261 BC!    Along comes Hannibal, one of the greatest generals in history—he invades Rome via an overland through through the Alps with elephants.

And then proceeds to inflict many, many terrible defeats on the Romans—the site of one especially bitter loss, Lake Trasimene, wallows in the gore with place names like Ossaia (Place of Bones) and Caporosso (Cape Red--as in blood).  

O hai there! One of Hannibal's Gallic allies beheading the Roman general Flaminius.
The Celts were the *scourge* of ancient Rome until Julius Caesar came along--they were the only people who managed to sack Rome until the very end, when the Vandals came in.

Eventually of course the Romans manage to turn the tables and ultimately eliminate their rival--and now that Rome is so dominant, it can relax a little and start to think about non-military concerns.  A Roman cultural and artistic voice begins to emerge—which leads us to Forum.

Forum is based on the plays of Plautus, a Roman playwright who lived roughly 254 BC – 184 BC—so, right around the time the musical is set.  In addition to being the first extant Latin playwright, Plautus was known for his use of stock characters—the scheming servant, the military braggart, the overbearing lady of the house—and these characters populate Forum as well, helpfully cueing the audience with their names:

• Philia = young female love interest
• Pseudolus = con artist
• Hero = …well, the hero!

Of course these archetypes continued on through the middle ages and beyond—commedia dell'arte, Restoration comedies and 20th century musical theater all make use of these same types. In fact farce depends on these kinds of shortcuts--the quicker it can establish the relationship, the quicker the payoff.


Forum's libretto is sprinkled with references to the city's geography and the cultures and civilizations that surround it.  One song, "Pretty Little Picture," begins 


♫ In the Tiber there sits a boat... ♫

The old, old Tiber, seen from the Ponte* Principe Amedeo Savoia-Aosta.
Philia would've sailed up this river when arriving from her home in Crete.

The Funeral sequence is filled with geographical references--in fact a dedicated musical scholar could virtually map out the Mediterranean world through this song alone!


♫ All Crete was at her feet
All Thrace was in her thrall
All Sparta loved her sweetness
And Gall
And Spain ♫


Musical theater--bridging the ancient and the modern worlds!  Plautus would have been so proud...

*Fun Fact--Ponte (bridge) and pontiff share the same root word for a reason--the term predates Christianity and derives from the Collegium Pontificum, the body of Roman priests whose duties included placating the river gods.

Macbeth and Battle Tactics in the Hebrew Bible

I'm pursuing two main projects for the next couple of months:

•       studying Laws of War in the Middle Ages at Columbia, and
•       dramaturging Macbeth for the White Rabbit Theatre Company here in Manhattan.

Both of these ventures are taking up an enormous amount of time, not helped in the slightest by my need to over-prepare, over-write, over-ruminate.  But then anything worth doing is worth doing thoroughly, and it's fascinating how these two projects are informing each other.  Of course the real Macbeth, the actual Scottish King who reigned during the 11th century, has popped up already in one of my texts for class.  I say this carefully, since Macbeth is a personal favorite of mine--but the poor guy got a bit of a hatchet job.  The real king reigned for quite some time, 17 years, and his predecessor Duncan was a young man killed in battle, not murdered in his bed.  But Shakespeare was not an historian; he was a dramatist and a courtier, and used this rather obscure king to explore the concept of violence as a political tool, the idea of human nature and the impact of personal choice and to ingratiate himself further with the Scottish king of England, James I.

*I like to wonder what her first name is--something beautifully Scottish perhaps, like Elspeth or Margaret or Catriona.  And I always wondered--is Scottish noble/royal nomenclature different from that of the English?  In Richard III, Richard is referred to as Gloucester, his title, until he assumes the throne.  Why is Macbeth not noted in the script as Glamis first?

At any rate, another Macbeth catch was a bit more obscure.  Last Wednesday the subject of the lecture was classical sources (such as Biblical) that may have influenced medieval military theorists.  Specifically we were looking at codes of war in the Hebrew Bible, and examined a passage in Deuteronomy--the injunction against laying waste to trees during a siege.  We examined several different possible interpretations of this passage (the first was from the King James Version):

• Thou shalt not cut them down for the tree of the field is man's life/food to employ them in the siege.

• For is the tree of the field a man, that they should be besieged by you?

• Is the tree in the field a man, to enter before thee into the work of the siege?

Then this one jumped out at me:

• ...instead you shall make use of the trees to go before you in the siege.

In Macbeth Malcolm is the one who has the idea of cutting down the trees of Birnam Wood and carrying them in front to hide their forces.  Of course it's a fairly common tactic in guerrilla warfare as well, and although I love the idea of Malcolm getting the idea from Deuteronomy it's perhaps a stretch to think that he was poring over the KJV (how meta would that be in 1611!) or the Douay-Rheims for inspiration while in exile in England.  Still it's a neat little reminder of why I find military strategy so interesting--it never changes.  What worked for the Hebrews, worked for Malcolm's rebel army.  Just like what worked for the Roman army when confronted with Pyrrhus's elephants, worked for the fighters of the Rebel Alliance when confronted with the A.T.A.T.'s in the Battle of Hoth.