Poetry Becomes Theater: “The Last Days of Troy” by Simon Armitage

Britain’s poet laureate Simon Armitage has long been interested in myth and legend. He’s published retellings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur, The Odyssey, and The Iliad, and he’s reached into the mists of medieval England to translate two famous poems, The Owl and the Nightingale and Pearl. What all of these works have in common is that they were originally created in poetry, the common language of myth.  

A few years ago, before he became poet laureate, his work with The Iliad led to the creation of a play, The Last Days of Troy. It was first performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester before moving to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Other productions have followed.

 

It’s a gripping piece of theater. It’s a griping piece of writing in general. Armitage doesn’t “improve upon” Homer; it’s more that he illuminates the great Greek story for a contemporary audience. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Another Day – poem by Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

 

Poetry Prompt: I’m in Charge of Celebrations – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

 

A forgotten writer of Pere Lachaise – Anthony Daniels at New Criterion on Enrique Gomez Carillo. 

 

“March,” poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Hamnet": Visualizing What Inspired Shakespeare's "Hamlet"

William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway had three children – Susannah and the twins Judith and Hamnet. In 1596, when the twins were 11, Hamnet died. A week after his son was buried in their hometown of Stratford, Shakespeare was back in London, working on a new play.  

It seems odd to us today that the man would have hurried back so quickly to London after the funeral of his child. I suspect it might have seemed odd even in 1596. Your wife is grieving, your daughters are grieving, your still-living parents are grieving, and you rush back to work. We don’t know what might have been going on in Shakespeare’s mind, as he left no written record of his thoughts about his son’s death.

 

Or did he?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Murder Case in Arden of Faversham, the Greatest Shakespearean-Era Play You’ve Never Heard Of – Amnon Kabatchnik at CrimeReads. 

 

Wings – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

"Our Town" by Thornton Wilder

When it opened in 1938, the play Our Town by writer and playwright Thornton Wilder received surprisingly mixed reviews. I say “surprisingly” because the play would become a theater success, receive the Pulitzer Prize, and define what was meant by “small-town America” for generations. Yet some critics were concerned, especially with its structure, because Our Town somewhat deconstructed what serious drama had been like. 

The play tells the story of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, just over the state line of Massachusetts and with a population about 2,400. Specifically, it concerns two families who live next door to each other – the Gibbs and the Webbs. Doctor Gibbs is the town’s physician, and Mr. Webb is the newspaper editor. The play’s three acts happen in 1901, 1904, and 1913, three snapshots in time of two families. The story is especially about young George Gibbs and Emily Webb, their initial understanding of “a relationship,” a wedding, and a funeral.

 

What was unusual about Our Town is the character of the Stage Manager, who is the main character in the play. He is the narrator, the minister, the drug store soda fountain operator, and several other roles. He informs, explains, and foreshadows. In Act I, for example, we’re told that Mrs. Gibbs will eventually visit family in another state, catch pneumonia, and die there, her body returned to Grover’s Corners for burial in the Gibbs’ family plot. Yet she’s with us through most of the play. 

 

While some criticized the play’s “sentimentality,” Our Town maintains a strong appeal to the emotions. This is what we often continue to understand as “the real America,” not the artifice and facades of the big cities growing bigger but the farms and small towns, the places where traditional values not only matter but are lived and breathed like oxygen. It’s nostalgic, to be sure, but part of the appeal of nostalgia is the elements of truth and shared experience it contains. 

 

Thornton Wilder

In high school, I saw a production of Our Town at what was then the New Orleans Repertory Theatre. The school’s junior class attended via buses from our suburb to downtown New Orleans; we were reading the play in English classes that year. What I remembered was George and Emily talking to each other at night from their respective bedroom windows, and the actors perched on ladders (the sets in the play are rather simple and stark). Rereading the play 50 years later brings back more memories of that production, especially the graveyard scene.

 

Wilder was a prolific writer. He wrote novels like The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Eighth Day, and Theophilus North; plays and shorts plays, and essays. Two plays remain his best known – Our Town and The Matchmaker, better known under its Broadway and Hollywood musical name of Hello, Dolly!

 

Our Town remains a classic American play, a reminder of who we are as a nation and where we came from.

Top photograph: Frank Craven as the Stage Manager, Martha Scott as Emily Webb, and James Craven as George Gibbs in the original Broadway production.

Poets and Poems: Troy Cady and “Featherdusting the Moon”

Troy Cady is the founder and president of Playfull, a non-profit organization which aims “to help people and organizations play from the inside out.” What does “play” include? Storytelling, writing, leadership development, drama, preaching, personality assessments, conflict transformation, philosophy, spiritual formation, and more. Who knew play could simultaneously be so serious and so, well, playful? 

Cady did. And he will tell you that play also includes poetry. You can find poems on various subjects right on the organization’s web site. Some of those “playful” poems have found their way into his first collection of poetry, Featherdusting the Moon.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Smart People,” a Play by Lydia Diamond

Smart People, a 2016 play by Lydia Diamond, has been staged by several companies around the country. It’s set in 2008, shortly before the presidential election. Four people (and they are the only characters in the play) are connected to Harvard University. One is a surgeon, one is a psychologist, one is an actress, and one is a teaching neuropsychiatrist. All are, to one degree or another, interested in how the brain works. And all four are, to one degree or another, looking for love and affirmation. 

But then there’s politics. And politics saturates the characters’ thinking. Only a small part of that politics concerns the presidential election; it almost serves as an unspoken theme off-stage. But there’s academic politics (and what happens when cancel culture rears its head). And there’s what happen when the politics of relationships inserts itself into what might have been love stories. For all of their understanding of how the brain works, for all of their expertise, and for all of their intelligence, the characters of Smart People seem unable to overcome the politics they supposedly know so much about. 

 

Lydia Diamond

Yet these characters are all recognizable. In their own ways, they are all compelling. That isn’t to say a reader of the play finds them sympathetic. Each is disagreeable, the neuropsychiatrist in particular. He’s an academic close to tenure, something of a rainmaker for bringing all kinds of grants and recognitions to his department. He’s looking for what in the brain makes people racist. He himself is “evolved,” as he describes it, and has transcended his own racist leanings. Except he suddenly faces cancel culture for something he says in the classroom. 

 

One doesn’t today expect such a probing treatment of the academic and cultural left, but that’s exactly what Smart People does.

 

Diamond’s plays include Stick Fly, Harriet Jacobs, Voyeurs de Venus, The Gift Horse, Inside, and The Bluest Eye (a stage adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel). A graduate of Northwestern University, she has taught at DePaul University, Columbia University, and Boston University. She is currently a clinical associate professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois – Chicago. 

"Heroes of the Fourth Turning" by Will Arbery

It’s almost too much to imagine: a play with five characters, four former students returning to their college in Wyoming to celebrate the appointment of their mentor as college president. All five characters are some shade of conservative, as is the college they attended. They come together, and they clash, each articulating a perspective and wanting to convince the others of the rightness of what they believe, or at least be understood.

What’s hard to imagine is that this play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbery, was successfully staged in New York City and received positive reviews by the New Yorker, The New York Times, Catholic Herald, Time Out, and Vulture, among others. And the characters are not treated as caricatures, as conservatives often are in contemporary culture, but as real people with hearts, minds and passions.  

Justin is the older student, in his late 30s, playing a kind of caretaker role and always trying to help. Teresa lives in Brooklyn, surrounded by progressives, and she is on a crusade to save America from progressive destruction. Emily is ailing and physically frail, or thinks she is, and wants everyone to see all sides of everything. Kevin is the almost hostile skeptic, deciding he’s lost his faith, or perhaps not. And Gina, the new college president, is the pragmatic Never Trumper conservative. This five come together, and soon the fireworks begin.

The title of the play is taken from a book published in 1997, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy: What Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Lowe. They hypothesized four recurring cycles in American history: a period of confidence, followed by a period of rebellion, then an unraveling, and finally the crisis of the “fourth turning,” a rebirth of a new order. Teresa argues that the crisis of the fourth turning is upon America, and it’s time to fight for what they believe. No one else agrees, especially Gina, the college president.

What is bared is that the characters are indeed facing a crisis, but it’s more personal than a rebirth of the existing social and political order.

Will Arbery

Arbery received a B.A. degree in English and drama from Kenyon College and an MFA in writing from Northwestern University. A playwright and filmmaker, he’s written five plays: Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Plano, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, Wheelchair, and You Hateful Things. He’s currently under commission from Playwrights Horizons and Shadowcatcher Entertainment.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning is a fascinating play to read. Conservatives might be surprised to see some of themselves in each of the five characters. (I was.) Non-conservatives might be surprised to find conservative characters depicted as living, breathing, intelligent people, instead of the usual cartoons presented by the news media. More important are the ideas and often challenging discussion around empathy, academia, and what many perceive as the collapse of the social order.

(Note: The play is not available at any of the usual outlets, including Amazon, but can be found at Playwrights Horizon.)

Top photograph: A scene from the recent production of Heroes of the Fourth Turning in New York.

“Mayfly” by Joe White

The story begins with a young man, Harry, rescuing an older man, Ben, from drowning in a river. And yet it looks less like an accident and more like an attempted suicide. The young man works at a local pub that’s closing, likely to become an art gallery or antique shop. He meets an older woman named Cat (for Catherine) at the pub, and her flirting has more than edge to it; it seems almost self-destructive. And he meets a young woman, known only as Loops, dressed in camouflage, who tells him she’s a soldier.

The young man will learn that the man, the woman, and the girl are nothing like what they first seem like – a would-be suicide, a woman on the make, and a soldier who talks military but doesn’t seem military. In fact, they are a family, struggling to understand themselves, what their lives have become and to be reborn. 

Only gradually do we see that their struggle has to do with the death of the family’s son, who killed himself. The story of that struggle is Mayfly, a debut play by young British playwright Joe White,which debuted earlier this at the Orange Street Theatre in off-West-End London (analagous to off-Broadway in New York). 

The story is set in Shropshire, in central England. It might be easy to overlook since it doesn’t have an overtly critical role in the story; in a sense, the play could be set anywhere. But White has placed it Shropshire, often considered the heart of England Shropshire is the setting for A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, that long narrative poem that was so popular among soldiers in World War I. It was what the soldiers considered home as they sat in the mud and the lice of the trenches, watching their mates die of disease, mustard gas, and artillery shells. 

Joe White

In Mayfly, Shropshire is England’s heart, but the family in that heart is broken and trying to reconstitute itself. The characters are not trying to tear each other apart so much as tearing themselves apart, desperate to find a meaning from the personal tragedy.

White has been associated with the Orange Tree Writers Collective and a “playwright on attachment” at Pentabus Theatre Company. He’s also been a member of the Old Vic 12, a group of young theater writers and producers selected by the Old Vic Theatre to nurture the next generation of theatre creatives.

Mayfly is unsettling and often disturbing, exactly what you’d expect a family to be when it finds itself unmoored and adrift.

Related: The trailer for Orange Street Theatre production of Mayfly.

Top photograph: A scene from the production of Mayfly in April 2018.

“Queen Anne” by Helen Edmundson

Start with historical fact. Queen Anne of England, who ruled from 1702 to 1707, had a longstanding friendship with John and Sarah Churchill, who would become the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Anne became queen on the death of her brother-in-law, William III (he of William and Mary). Married to Prince George of Denmark, Anne would carry only one child of 18 pregnancies to birth. The boy died at age 11. She would be succeeded by George I who established the House of Hanover.

For several years before and after Anne became queen, the Churchills wielded great influence. John’s fame skyrocketed with the victory at Blenheim; his reward was a dukedom and land near Oxford to build a suitable home – what became Blenheim Palace. And then the Churchills fell from favor, Sarah first, followed by John.

That’s what we know. How it might have happened is the subject of the play Queen Anne written by Helen Edmundson and staged in Stratford-upon-Avon at the Swan Theatre in 2015 and restaged in London at the Royal Haymarket Theatre in 2017. The 2017 performance starred Ramola Garai as Sarah Churchill and Emma Cunniffe as Queen Anne. 

The play is fascinating. Queen Anne begins as an insecure princess, desperate to bear an heir, resisting William III’s attempt to have her meet her possible Hanover successors, and ends as a woman who knows her own mind, one who has understood how those closest to her have used her for their own ends.

Helen Edmundson

The play artfully blends parliamentary and palace politics, the concern over an heir, the War of the Spanish Succession (in which England and its allies fought Louis XIV over who would sit on the Spanish throne), and how politics played out in satire and broadsheets. The authors Daniel Defoe and Johnathan Swift are characters in the play involved in writing short comedies about the Queen and the Churchills for their own private amusements, until Sarah Churchill stumbles into them and decides to use them for her own benefit.

Edmundson is a British screenwriter and playwright. In addition to Queen Anne (2015), Edmundson’s original plays include The Clearing (1993), Mother Teresa is Dead (2002), The Heresy of Love (2012), and Mary Shelley (2012). Her plays adapted from literary works include Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, War and Peace, Orestes, Gone to Earth, Life is a Dream, Swallows and Amazons, Coram Boy, and Therese Raquin. Her film and television scripts include The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (2014), An Inspector Calls (2015), and Mary Magdalene (2018). 

Queen Anne is a fascinating study of power politics, friendship, trust, and betrayal.

Related: Review of the 2017 play by The Guardian.

Top photograph: A scene from the London play, starring Emma Cunniffe and Romola Garai.

“Apologia” by Alexi Kaye Campbell

Last fall, while visiting London, it was a rare day when we weren’t traveling by double-decker bus from Victoria Street, around Parliament Square, and up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square. We’d pass the old Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, the government buildings on Whitehall, the Horse Guards Palace, and a rather small building named Trafalgar Studios Theatre. Playing at the time was Apologia. We considered trying to get tickets, but they were few and far between. Certainly, a draw (for us American tourists, at least) were two of the stars – American actress Stockard Channing and Laura Carmichael, aka Lady Edith of Downtown Abbey fame.

So, I bought a copy of the play script.

Apologia by playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell is actually written in two versions, an English one and an American one. It was the American version playing at the Trafalgar, likely to accommodate Ms. Channing. The plays are essentially the same; the difference is the lead character, Kristin Miller, who can be played as an American or a Brit. I read the American version.

Miller is something of a famous art historian, who started out her professional life as a protester. The cause didn’t particularly matter; if she thought it could enough, she was there. She’s now living not far from London, in a charming cottage-like home. It is her birthday, and her two sons are coming to visit for the party, along with their girlfriends. Neither son is particularly happy with their mother’s newly published memoir, which doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. She tries to explain this by saying it was a professional memoir, but that excuse doesn’t survive for long.

As the characters interact, the sons Peter and Simon, the girlfriends Trudi and Claire, and Kristin’s old friend and fellow protester Hugh, it becomes clear that this family is about both what it says and what it doesn’t say. Kristin discovers that Peter met Trudi (an American) at a prayer meeting, and she nearly freaks out at the idea that her son may have found faith. Simon, largely unsuccessful at about anything he tries, is breaking up with the successful soap-opera-star Claire. It’s clear that Kristin likes neither of the women and almost seems to deliberately provoke them. Claire gets incensed and responds; Trudi rather blissfully ignores the sarcasm.

Alexi Kaye Campbell

This is a family seething with anger and resentment, and it takes some time to see why.

Campbell was an actor for 20 years, working for such companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company and Hampstead Theatre, before turning to playwriting. His plays include Death in Whitbridge (2008), The Pride (2010), The Faith Machine (2012), Bracken Moor (2013), and Sunset at the Villa Thalia (2016). Five of his plays have been collected and published as Plays One (2017). The Pride won several theater awards when It was written and produced. Campbell was also the scriptwriter for the movies Possession (2002) starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Woman in Gold (2015), starring Helen Mirren.

Apologia slowly builds tension; one begins to suspect that Kristin Miller is almost on the verge of cracking and will do (and say) anything to avoid that. She has to believe she’s in control; she doesn’t seem to understand that her family has become the protestors and she the central authority being protested.

Top photograph: an advertisement for the play at Trafalgar Studios.

“Mosquitoes” by Lucy Kirkwood

When we were in London last fall, we tried and failed to get tickets for the play Mosquitoes, produced by the National Theatre. It was the final weeks for the production, and the shows were sold out. It starred Olivia Colman, best known in America as D.S. Ellie Miller in the crime drama Broadchurch and soon to take on the role of Queen Elizabeth in The Crown.

So, I did the next best thing. I bought the book form of the play.

Mosquitoes by Lucy Kirkwood is the story of two sisters, Alice and Jenny. Alice is a physicist working at the CERN Hadron Collider in Geneva, seeking to find the theoretical Higgs boson particle, and her team is on the verge of a breakthrough. The most definitive thing you can say Jenny is that she spends a lot of time on the internet, and especially Google, and she is susceptible to every fad imaginable. One of those fads (or widely believed bit of “fake news”) is that vaccinations cause autism. Jenny believes it, like she believes almost every bit of non-science, and that belief leads to a tragedy.

The sisters couldn’t be more unlike. While they represent two philosophical perspectives of science, they also represent two sisters who love each other but can’t stand each other, or stand each other for very long. Alice’s teenage son Luke and their mother Karen also play significant roles, but this is almost a stereotyped dysfunctional family on several generational levels. And it’s headed for a major conflict.

Lucy Kirkwood

Kirkwood is an actress, television screen writer, and playwright. Her television shows include Skins (2013), The Smoke (2014), and The Briny (2015). Her plays include Tinderbox or, love amid the liver (2008), NSFW (2013), Chimerica (2014), Hedda (2014), and The Children (2017). She received a degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh, where she also performed for an improve comedy troupe and wrote for the Edinburgh University Theatre Company. She is writer in residence at the Clean Break Theatre Company.

Mosquitoes is full of references to physics, the work of the CERN collider, and the raft of pseudo-science that exists on the internet. But science is only the filter through which we watch a family in self-destruction, engaged in unthinking actions with serious consequences.

Top photograph: Joseph Quinn as Luke and Olivia Colman as Jenny in Mosquitoes at the National Theatre, London.