Dramaturg

For this large-cast performance, I curated the evening program, interviewed the director, Sean Boyd, and wrote the following:

Dramaturg’s Note: An Entertaining School for Husbands and Wives

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor likely premiered on St George’s Day, April 23, 1597. Although staged at Westminster in London, in the presence of the Queen and on the occasion of the yearly feast honoring the Order of the Garter – an aristocratic fraternity – the play is the author’s only “citizen comedy,” a genre that hinged on the everyday life of the middle class. In terms of his intended first audience, Shakespeare thus seemed to heed the classical notion – at least as far back as Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BCE) – that, while tragedies depict characters in higher positions such as kings and heroes, comedies should instead provoke laughter by making fun of those “lower” than the spectators.

This comedy – set in the countryside town of Windsor, west of the capital – also adheres to the precept that art should both entertain and teach, suggested by Roman poet Horace’s The Art of Poetry (19 BCE) and revived during the Renaissance. The main embodiments of these conjoined aims are of course the titular wives, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, who orchestrate the juiciest opportunities for both fun and learning. Even though the Windsor society still revolves around marriages arranged around patriarchal considerations of how to accrue wealth, it’s women here who lead the action and have an equal say about dowry money.

As for the teaching, the title itself is a clue that the play is a “school” especially suited for married folks: by losing their competing bets to have their daughter Anne marry the men they chose for her, Master and Mistress Page learn that economic considerations ought not to eclipse the need for true love between husband and wife. In turn, Master Ford realizes that he must trust his wife more and that misplaced jealousy only reduces him to a fool.

The main target of the comedic medicine against interference with healthy marital relationships is of course Sir John Falstaff, the overweight, lying and cheating knight who is so vain and full of himself to believe he’ll seduce two married women at the same time. Instead, he is thrown into the river Thames along with dirty laundry, beaten up in his disguise as an elderly woman, and finally scared to death by town children dressed as elves and goblins. Instead of cuckolding others, he ends up wearing the horns himself.

If characters like Evans, with his Welsh accent, and Caius, with his French one, draw on more superficial national stereotypes to elicit laughter, Falstaff’s genealogy goes much deeper: not only did the same character appear in the historical plays Henry IV Part 1 and 2 – where he keeps company with Prince Hal, the future King Henry V of England – but his role is here firmly rooted in the Italian commedia dell’arte Capitano, an equally boisterous stock character whose primary dramatic function is to disrupt existing couples. Of course, instead of commedia’s naïve lovers, the women here are much more mature, wily, and persistent, unafraid of tempting Falstaff time and again as he never seems to learn the lesson.

And since there’s nothing more satisfying than making fun of an “immoral” scapegoat, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page eventually enlist not only their own husbands but the entire town to make the point that even married folks can be both merry and honorable. Indeed, the play’s only successful seduction of a married woman is executed by “Brook,” i.e., Ford himself in disguise tempting his own wife. In the end, in proper comedic fashion, no one is excluded from the collective joy of learning that the societal network has remained strong against attacks to its most precious connections.

The NCT production of María Irene Fornés’s Mud was an intense play beautifully directed and elevated by Norma Saldivar, with precise movement direction by Sean Boyd, and a cast fully present to their roles.
Read my interview with the director about her approach to the play, here.

For Steven Dietz’s American La Ronde, directed by Michael Lugering, I wrote the following Dramaturg’s Note and edited both American La Ronde Program and American La Ronde Know Before You Go (7) supporting material.

Dramaturg’s Note
American La Ronde: The Pleasures of Adaptation

On the title page of his play, Steven Dietz makes no secret that his American La Ronde (2017) is an adaptation of Reigen (1900) – known in English as La Ronde – by Austrian Jewish writer and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931). Adaptation of existing works has been a pillar of theatre-making at least since ancient Greece. The approach has proved successful because adapting the same stories combines the familiarity of repetition with the novelty of variation while demonstrating the playwright’s individual point of view and artistic prowess.

As French theorist Gérard Genette suggests, “one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together” (Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, 1982). In fact, perceiving an adaptation as adaptation is part of the pleasure of engaging with this type of artistic production, one that can only be enjoyed by “knowing audiences” aware of the link between the earlier and later text (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006). For those unfamiliar with Schnitzler’s work, it is therefore essential to underscore at least two important aspects of his play: its unconventional dramatic structure and its history of censorship due to a titillating subject matter that unmasked the private lives of a cross section of Viennese society.

In contrast with the typical climactic structure that highlights the changed situation between beginning and end, Reigen hinges on a circular structure that concludes just where it started, thus signaling stagnation and disillusion in regard to human relationships. In a series of ten scenes, each time one of two interlocutors continues to the next dialogue with a different partner until the circle is completed.  With a single exception, the action progresses rather swiftly to sexual intercourse, indicated on the page by one or more lines of dashes towards the middle of each scene.

Hesitant about the literary value of his work, the author initially had it printed in just 200 copies at his own expense. However, following sanctions against a Munich student theatre that presented three scenes from the play, book sales were banned in Germany in 1904 and the official premiere in Berlin and Vienna had to wait until 1920 and 1921 respectively. Even so, due to right-wing antisemitic political demonstrations, the play’s cast, director, and theatre administrators in Berlin were charged with creating a public nuisance and taking part in obscene acts, even if the staging had simply lowered the curtains and played waltz music during the incriminated scenes. Even if the artists were eventually exonerated, Schnitzler’s embarrassment led him to wish the play would never again be performed. And yet, its shock value must have contributed to its continued appreciation.

In transferring the action to contemporary America, Dietz adopted the same circular structure but modernized both characters and situations, with the addition of a bracelet that constantly changes hands and becomes a common thread connecting all involved. Emphasizing the continuity of each scene and between them, this adaptation eliminates the need to censor sexual activities by instead staging the difficulties of “getting to the point” in today’s more permissive yet complicated society. But intimacy is nevertheless sought after, especially when, for instance, the author insists: “This is a really good kiss. It is not a ‘stage kiss.’ It is not fake.” And true intimacy is perhaps the most shocking today when our relationships are increasingly filtered and mediated.

SteBos

My interview with Valerie Rachelle, who directed Violet – the musical by Jeanine Tesori (music) and Brian Crawley (libretto) –for the Nevada Conservatory Theatre, has been published on the UNLV website. You can read it here.

Here’s also the evening program I curated.

For Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre, here’s the evening program I curated.
You can also find my interview with the director, May Liang, here.

Once again, for this show at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre I put together the full evening program.
I also interviewed the director, Clinton Turner Davis and you can find our conversation here.

Dramaturg’s Note

Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy premiered Off-Broadway at the Second Stage Theatre in New York City in May of 1995, directed by Joe Morton. Shortly after it was produced by Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, IL in March of 1996, directed by Leslie Holland, and by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA in September, directed by Seret Scott. It was first published in Nottage’s first collection of plays in 2004.

The title is inspired by Langston Hughes’s short poem, Luck:

Sometimes a crumb falls from the table of joy,
Sometimes a bone is flung,
To some people love is given,
To others only heaven.

In the play, which takes place in Brooklyn in 1950, both Ernestine Crump, a young African American aspiring writer, and the other characters she evokes – her father Godfrey, sister Ermina, aunt Lily Ann Green, and stepmother Gerte, who is German – navigate the complexities of a world that does not yield easy answers as to why certain people succeed and others continue to struggle. Religion, politics, interracial relations, all weigh on decisions, hopes, and desires that may or may not be fulfilled and yet constitute a weave that brings people together in their effort to improve their lot.

Since the set itself is such an important character in the play, for this production we include here the notes of our talented graduate and undergraduate designers, who speak of their creative process.

Enjoy the show!

Stebos