In 2019, myself and a friend congratulated ourselves on being able to score tickets to the last show of Dead Centre’s Hamnet run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (there was a reason for our good luck, as it turns out: it was Marathon Sunday and the theatre was less than a block from the path of the runners). It was worth the inconvenience to watch this extraordinary, devised work that embodied the feeling of being inside an imaginative space, caught in a moment of emotion, while life runs forward just on the other side of the wall. Hamnet was a nonlinear, emotional experience of grief in which the eleven year old Hamnet existed in a netherworld between our contemporary space and his past, negotiating his feelings of abandonment with the ghost of his father. Unlike the 2026 movie based on Maggie O’Farrell’s exquisite book, Hamnet did not propose that great art necessarily comes from great pain. Sometimes, Dead Centre’s piece suggested, the rest is simply silence.

The fascination with Shakespeare’s life is one that has continued apace with his cultural impact, from the very moment Ben Jonson’s 1623 panegyric labeled him the “sweet swan of Avon” in juxtaposition to Robert Greene’s slightly less generous “upstart crow” in 1592, inviting us to ponder what we actually know about the playwright. Questions about Shakespeare abound. What little we know about his life - he was the father to three children, most notably a son who died young, he lived quietly, returning to Stratford-upon-Avon at the close of his career, and left his “second-best bed” to his wife Anne - does not tell us how he felt, or what inspired him, or what mattered to him. In the empty space that William Shakespeare leaves us, all we have is some deeply unstable texts that invite speculation about why he might have written them.

That he was, above and beyond, a journeyman who wrote his plays as craft and did not appear to have retained any sense of ownership over them, does not gel with modern notions of authorship. The post-Romantic ideal of a writer putting the emotions that his heart cannot contain into his language is seductive, particularly in the shadows of a mountain of iambic pentameter, so our culture continues to imagine answers to these questions we have about his life. The loss of a child, unimaginable and profoundly altering as it doubtless must be, combined with the near-overlap of the names from Hamnet to Hamlet, is almost irresistible in its promise to unlock the secrets of his most iconic play. It offers the opportunity to humanize the man behind the bland, impassive face and the unimpressive hairline in the Droeshout engraving and turn him into the man of feeling that the plays suggest he was. The conflation of Hamnet and Hamlet threatens to unlock an ocean of passion behind those disinterested eyes, and perhaps even an affirmation that he cared as much about the young Danish prince as we do.

Although the blurb of the play (both on its website and in its printed script) declares that “grief fills the room up of my absent child” (King John, 3.4.95), William Shakespeare’s experience was less important to the play’s dramaturgy and, because Dead Centre cast the extraordinary young actor Aran Murphy (actor Cillian’s son) as Hamnet, less compelling as its emotional core. Although he was genuine in his feeling, it wass harder to sympathize with a grieving father when his son was standing in front of the audience, the spectacle of which invited us to “Look at that child up there. So young. So vulnerable.” Dead Center’s Hamnet, like O’Farrell’s book, declined to value Shakespeare’s suffering the most, and instead focused on those he left behind - in this case, a small boy, dressed “in a t shirt, hoody, trainers, wearing a backpack”. Dead Centre’s Hamnet carved a path that O’Farrell would follow by telling the story of those who lived with the writer - or simply “his father” as the play’s cast list recognized him - and wonders who the human was to them.

The setting of the play was “a hellmouth,” that was, in reality, a benign white theatre box, in which “the audience enter and see themselves - a live feed projected onto a back wall” (9). It was a place where ghosts, death, life, and art are interchangeable. A place where Hamlet was the son of Shakespeare, and Hamnet was the forgotten shadow that lurks behind the literature, unable to meaningfully connect with his father or lay a claim to his greatest construction as a means of ensuring that his own memory will endure. Throughout the piece, Hamnet continually plays Hamlet, with a ruff and a skull, to try and secure his father’s interest - these tactics always failed. In Hamnet, Hamlet was not a play that justifies or explains the suffering of the man Shakespeare, but instead was a tool for condemnation, an indictment of how little Hamnet knew about his father. He chased the knowledge of his famous parent in the same way that modern Bardophiles might, scouring the text for clues of the man’s humanity and priorities. His father was a ghost, making demands on him and offering little to no clarity on why they are both caught in limbo at the hellmouth, evoking Hamlet in the same breath as refuting it At one point, when the boy appeared in front of his father in a ruff, holding a skull, the father irritably retorted, “I told you no one is Hamlet” (38) dismissing any easy correlation between the lost son and the suffering prince that would have made the father real in any meaningful way.

In Hamnet, Hamnet was stuck at eleven years old, and could not understand why. He was a modern child, who sporadically used google and his cellphone throughout the show’s 60 minutes, but his father was a man of the Elizabethan era, clearly indicated by his costume, and they both drifted in and out of whatever reality the other inhabited. The boy’s relationship with his father was almost always divided by the transparent theatrical wall on the back of the stage that intermittently put either Hamnet or his father on one side or another.

Even when they shared “real” space, they continued to inhabit their own spheres, asking questions that have no answer, alternating between longing, sadness, resentment, and confusion. Although they both longed to connect to one another, neither could let go of their own pain enough to see how they haunted each other. Hamnet was forever frozen as a child, and even though he understood his father’s greatness, and he had the luxury of the full history of the world at his fingertips on his phone, he could only understand his father through his own loneliness. When he appraised his father for the first time, he responded as the abandoned child that he was:

Hamnet: I thought you were supposed to be a great man.

Shakespeare: I am.

Hamnet: You just look like a man.

Shakespeare. You can be both.

Hamnet. Oh.

Pause

Shakespeare: I’ll prove my greatness to you. Ask me anything.

Hamnet: Why did you go away? (27)

By casting such a young child in the production, Dead Centre and Murphy made Hamnet’s scattered, uneven suffering a compelling childlike confusion. The production both recognized Will Shakespeare’s pain and condemned him for it, putting his experience to that of his son. In the intimacy of BAM’s Fisher studio space, the man seemed much less relevant than the son who hovered on the precipice of the hellmouth, trying to understand why the world was moving ahead and he was staying in the theatrical overlap between two worlds.

The reality - that Shakespeare might not have been a good father or husband was one that can be resisted if we believe that Hamlet meant something to the man, that it was a way of articulating or managing his grief, as O’Farrell’s novel suggests and the 2026 movie made explicit. Allowing us to pity him makes Hamlet feel more meaningfully connected to the construction of the author and avoids the implication that the iconic Bard of Avon might have been, at best, a mediocre human being in the lives of those who loved him. Like Hamlet’s uncertainty and the interminability of grief, we are left with questions, and our own ameliorative speculations. In the Dead Centre’s afterworld, no such comforting certainty was allowed. At the close of the play, as both Hamnet and his father drifted away, the audience was left staring at its own reflections, confronted with the fictions or theatre it created to ascribe meaning to inconceivable losses and the shadows of people we never knew to begin with.

A brief trailer for Hamnet is available on YouTube and can be viewed here.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has always attracted an interesting crowd but in the late 1950s in England, it briefly became popular as a vehicle for variety comedians, and because of that, established a framework for sketch comedy that remained popular for decades afterwards. It was, perhaps, a generative trap, keeping accented or working class actors marginalized in the classical theatre, but regardless, created genial class-war fodder for years to come.

As I think I’ve mentioned in a previous history, the Rude Mechanicals’ scenes easily lifted out to be its own small play, and during the 1960s, Pyramus and Thisbe took on a little life of its own, attracting light entertainment and becoming a bit of a staple on British television. In 1957, The Crazy Gang produced Shakespeare’s play-within-the-play for a half-hour variety show called The Music Box. The Crazy Gang was a kind of vaudeville supergroup who had come together for a long-running show at the London Palladium in the late 1920s. They included Charlie Naughton, Jimmy Nervo, Bud Flanagan, and “Monsewer” Eddie Gray. At the time they produced Pyramus and Thisbe, they were all comfortably in their 1960s, but nonetheless, the sketch was incredibly popular, and most likely a host of imitations.

The role of Nick Bottom has long held a particular kind of attraction for stars wanting to dabble in Shakespeare. From Louis Armstrong in Swingin’ the Dream to Dawn French for the Crucible in 2021, it has consistently attracted comic actors which makes perfect sense when we think about the play itself. The role of Bottom, defined as it is by improvisation, bombastic comedy, and a demand for attention, is perfect for a comedian looking to make a transition into serious acting, and in the late 1950s, this is exactly what Frankie Howerd attempted to do at the Old Vic.

Frankie Howerd is, obviously, one of England’s most beloved stand up comics, and the star of many a Carry On film, but early in his career, he harbored aspirations of being a classical stage actor, and as such, accepted a role in Michael Benthall’s production of Dream at the Old Vic in 1957. Howerd was well-suited to the role, and in spite of the fact that he hadn’t memorized his lines by the first performance, earned good reviews. Instead of remembering his speeches, he relied instead on his established celebrity to improvise what he could not remember. The Plays and Players review notes that Howerd was more of a pantomime actor, indicating his aptitude for slapstick clowning, which is a logical way of seeming to appropriate Shakespeare without sabotaging either Howerd’s schtick or the production. The reviews noted Howerd’s comedy skill as superlative to his acting prowess, and although he was successful as Bottom, the production failed to launch him as a serious actor. Although he was arguably not great, classism definitely played a role in the critical response to his work. In 1965, The Times asked Olivier about the “controversial subject” of using class-based accents in Shakespearean production - Olivier demurred, referring instead to “the mysterious impulse of stage logic” as the driving force of ‘realistic’ accentry in Shakespeare, noting that “for some mysterious reason the Cockney accent is very seldom welcome in Shakespeare except in the Eastcheap scenes in the histories”. ^[1] Shakespeare, he seems to suggest, is not for all markets. The working class comedians of light entertainment could do Shakespeare, but only in limited roles

Howerd returned to Shakespeare in a 1959 half-hour television special “Shakespeare Without Tears,” in which he essentially reprised and modernized his Bottom for popular television. Howerd played an inept would-be Shakespearean actor, with neither the talent nor refinement to prevent him from humiliating himself when he finally blusters his way onstage during a performance of Hamlet at the Old Vic.

In “Shakespeare Without Tears,” Howerd is an unemployed actor, obsessed with his own sense of grandeur to the point where he loses his job as a waiter, and very nearly his rented boarding room, because of his inability to stop daydreaming about theatrical superstardom. He is eventually (and inexplicably) hired by the Old Vic. He presumes he is employed to perform but arrives to discover that he is merely a dresser to the eminent (and deeply unpleasant) Shakespearean actor Jeffrey Manning. Howerd’s fraught relationship with the imperious Manning leads him to accidentally throttling another colleague accidentally, which results in him being promoted from the understudy to the role of Horatio in Hamlet. Unfortunately for Howerd, the experience of playing to such an esteemed crowd is sufficiently overwhelming that he crumbles under the pressure, parroting out a cacophony of famous Shakespearean lines in a meaningless jumble, instead of his given speech. The scene climaxes with Manning and Howerd viciously dueling out of frustration, knocking down the scenery, other actors, and innocent bystanders. At the close of the half hour, Howerd returns to his landlady, brandishing his Old Vic contract, which, in the final joke, is revealed to be a restraining order. There is a critique in the show that reverses Howerd’s actual experience at the real Old Vic and villainizes not only the perfectly-spoken arrogance of Manning, but the well-heeled audience members who cannot appreciate the hapless actor.

Other performers fared better on stage. On 24 June 1964, as part of the ITV’s Sunday Night Theatre series, Benny Hill starred as Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later known by the unpleasant nickname “King Leer,” Hill needs little introduction. Like many of his peers, Hill frequently played with the pretensions of high culture, performing a sketch in 1955 that offered a Shakespearean interpretation of Little Bo Peep as part of an episode that offered a series of stylistic variations on the nursery rhyme. A monologue was performed by Hill in an approximation of Olivier’s Richard III, replete with pudding-bowl wig. Hill’s performer, named Olivier Lawrence, delivered his speech with full seriousness. At the time of filming A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hill was riding a wave of popularity that was inspired by his sketch comedy show, Benny Hill, which ran for two seasons in 1962 and 1963. Notably, however, he was celebrated for his ability to inhabit characters, not to stand apart from the mini-dramas he built within each sketch. Although Hill was surrounded by established classical television stalwarts including Anna Massey, who played Titania, and Peter Wyngarde, who played Oberon, the comedian was the lead actor in the performance, acquiring solo billing as the main draw for a Sunday night television audience.

Like Frankie Howerd, Hill was not trained as a classical actor but instead was required to bring his celebrity to the role, essentially presenting Benny Hill in Athenian garb. Directed by Joan Welch-Kemp, the overall production was lavish and well-costumed, utilizing Mendelssohn’s music to eloquent effect. The production is a 1950s attempt at historicity, employing Greek costume, offset with contemporary touches such as the characteristically stacked hairstyles of the 1950s for the women. Defined by his west-country accent, Hill’s performance as Nick Bottom is somewhat awkward, because, in part, Hill was trying too hard. The performance lacks Hill’s distinctive comic touch, particularly during his scenes with Titania, although that might also be credited to the enormous papier-mâché donkey head that he was required to wear for the part. However, although he was kept in check for the rehearsal scenes, Pyramus and Thisbe was given over to Hill’s unique brand of performance, and this served the play well.

The BBC production also worked because it took its lead from the success of The Crazy Gang. The Mechanicals were padded out with a who’s who of popular comic entertainers, easily recognizable from sitcom television, drawing together a celebrity ensemble whose populist connections created an alternative company to the fairies and lovers, all of whom were themselves readily identifiable by their associations with televised theater. Flute was played by Alfie Bass, who was a recurring character in the long-running Robin Hood television series and was most recently seen on the sitcom The Army Game. At six foot seven inches tall, Bernard Bresslaw’s Wall was an imposing figure, bringing Bresslaw’s characteristic slow charm that had won him popularity in The Army Game and, more recently, in the hit comedy Our House, in which he starred alongside comic actress Hattie Jaques. Bill Shine, who played Starveling, was a regular player in such comedy shows as The Frankie Howerd Show and The Tony Hancock Half Hour as well as performing in the comic St. Trinian’s movies. Both Arthur Hewlett, who played Snug, and Miles Malleson, who reprised his role of Quince (which had previously been seen in the BBC’s 1958 production), were established bit-part players in a variety of television and films, readily identifiable to a lay audience.

Pyramus and Thisbe allowed Hill to unleash his well-loved persona of the jovially bumbling fool. After spluttering with indignation at Peter Quince’s ongoing prompting, Bottom immediately forgets the last word of the line “I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot” (5.1.172) and is grudgingly forced to turn to his director. His scenes with the Bresslaw are affectionately inept, as Bresslaw collapses in ticklish laughter as Bottom pounds the bricks on his chest and stomach. Bresslaw’s immense height is played to advantage with the physical comedy around the height of the wall’s chink, once accidentally knocking Hill in the throat, and looking deeply uncomfortable as Alfie Bass’s Thisbe snuggles up against him. In fact, Bresslaw, who possibly maintained the closest level of celebrity to Hill, was classically trained at RADA, and the decision to replace Variety entertainers with sketch and sitcom comedians more effectively ties the performance to the script than Howerd’s performance.

The trend of casting beloved comedy actors as Bottom continued, and benefitted both Shakespeare and popularized the trope of bad performance. In 1970, Jim Dale (another Carry On! Star, perhaps more familiar to American audiences as the Mountebanke in Pete’s Dragon) performed the role. In 1970, Ronnie Barker also played the role in a BBC television show (thankfully, a clip can be found here). Of these comedians, only Dale, who was a comic actor, as opposed to a comedian, was able to transition into a serious acting career. His 2014 off-Broadway show, Only Jim Dale, presents the distinction in how it frames him as a comic actor who loves Shakespeare, as opposed to a comedian trying to negotiate the next stages of their career through Shakespeare.

In the 1960s and 1970s, then, when variety actors were perhaps constrained to and by this singular role, the pretentiousness of Shakespeare was fodder for light entertainment. Ironically, Pyramus and Thisbe became a template for the kind of sketch comedy that such sketches thrived on. Following Howerd’s lead, the British comedy duo Morecambe and Wise probably did it best, turning their inability to do “the serious stuff” into comedy gold, recruiting classical stars from Glenda Jackson to Laurence Olivier to their show, just to be sabotaged. Being shut out of Shakespeare, comedians gently and lovingly turned the tables on the implicit snobbery that kept them out of serious work, and mined Shakespeare for years to come. The Beatles even decided to try their own hand at the most lamentable tragedy, in their pop music show, Around the Beatles in 1964. The Beatles’ version is probably too well known to have its own LTH, but if you haven’t seen it, you can find it easily on YouTube, and you’re in for an absolute treat.

Notes

^[1][1] ‘Olivier on Choosing an Accent for Shakespeare’s Peasants’. 1965. Times (London), February 18, 1965, 19.

In recent years, Adam Rapp has finally - and perhaps surprisingly - reached Broadway. He earned praise for his work on The Outsiders, and Jesse Green described his 2019 The Sound Inside as a “gripping small-scale mystery.” For those of us who have long admired Rapp’s writing, such recognition is overdue and perhaps even scant, considering the breadth and ambition of his body of work. Rapp has always been a brilliant, risky writer, resulting in a career that one might argue has taken too long to reach major stages.

In the early 2000s, Rapp’s work was in development at every ambitious downtown theatre. These early projects most often featured the brilliant Paul Sparks, an actor whose unconventional demeanor was perfectly suited to performing Rapp’s off-kilter and occasionally apocalyptic losers. Sparks was also attached to early workshops of Rapp’s breathtaking one-man show, Nocturne. The role eventually went to Dallas Roberts when it was produced at New York Theatre Workshop in 2001, which was admittedly an excellent choice, but Sparks lingers in my mind as a should-have-been casting for this spectacular piece.

Nocturne is a devastating chamber play that begins with the startling admission that “fifteen years ago I killed my sister,” a statement that echoes throughout the play as the character, named only as the Son, slowly unfolds the automobile accident at their house in Gael Drive. While driving too fast home one day, in his 1969 Buick Electra, the Son hit and decapitated his younger sister as she played on the driveway. Unusually for such a play, the revelation of the murder is not the climax of the play - the accident itself is given to the audience simply and horrifically at the end of the first act:

My sister’s boy lies in the street. It looks like a doll’s body. Legs. Feet. Yellow socks perfectly folded. Bits of lace turned down - my mother’s touch. Shoes so small it’s as if they were born out of a children’s fable. Hands. Arms. Neck. A small white dress with blue flowers. Anemones. Buttercups.

Her head is across the street. It has rolled into the Petersens’ driveway.

Later, the narrator explains, they discover that, although he was speeding, the brake line of the Electra had snapped. The question of culpability, the numbness of the knowledge that the guilt is irrelevant, and the struggles to love the son in the wake of the accident, shatters the family. The son tells us of his mother’s subsequent abandonment of him and his father, her depression, his father’s perilously close brush with the murder of his son, with almost clinical indifference. Life exists alongside the Son, like music in another room, as he navigates life in New York through voracious reading of the lives of others. Eventually, a fragile reconciliation with his dying father shifts the stasis within the Son, and enables him to consider a tentative move towards the warmth of a “red-headed girl with the gray-green eyes.” Grief remains, he explains, like changing temperatures, or “a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowls grow thick with humidity.”

Roberts was soft and restrained in the production, which sat perfectly on New York Theatre Workshop’s spare stage, directed as it was by Marcus Stern. Brantley described how his performance, like Rapp’s play, resisted romanticisation of suffering. Instead, he describes Roberts as “deliberately awkward in his woundedness, with a voice coated in protective irony and eyes that widen with stabs of repressed pain reasserting itself.”

Nocturne is a remarkable play. It’s demonstrative of Rapp’s subtlety and restraint as an author, which is more remarkable in light of his early career as the play sat alongside Stone Cold Dead Serious, Animals and Plants, Trueblinka, Finer Noble Gases, and my personal favorite, Faster. These plays are surrealist comic nightmares, characterized by disgusting losers, stasis, and occasionally earth-shattering threats. Trueblinka is a graphically violent Southern Gothic, and Stone Cold Dead Serious is an exploration of middle America that sees Wynn Ledbetter struggling to make his way out of the midwest to the finals of a video game conference in New York. In Faster, two petty criminals are waiting in a Chicago basement to sell a small girl to a man from Oswego, who may or may not be the devil (spoiler: he is). What characterizes these plays is a commitment to comedy, vulgarity, and a hyper-realism, all of which is consistently delivered in dialect that borders on (but never tips into) parody. These plays are defined by excess as much as Nocturne is shaped by restraint.

What we see in Rapp’s early work is experiments with form and a path through dramaturgical homage, from Beckett to Shepherd, and the influence of his almost-contemporaries such as Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. The quiet introspection of Nocturne is a stark contrast to these early, ebullient works, and perhaps offers a look ahead to the types of plays that made Rapp more approachable to a mainstream audience.

When Charles Ludlam died of an AIDS-related illness on May 28, 1987, at age 44, the New York Times rightly lamented the loss of “one of the most prolific and flamboyant artists in the theater avant-garde.” What was also lost in his demise was likely the funniest version of Shakespeare’s grotesque tragedy, Titus Andronicus, that the world would ever see.

Most famously known for his Victorian parody, The Mysteries of Irma Vep, Ludlam was a trailblazer. He had established his Theatre of the Ridiculous in 1967, which thrived in small downtown theatres and the vibrant gay arts community of the era. Ludlam, who described his work as an “ecological theatre” that recycles culture, taking “abandoned refuse, the used images, the shoes from abandoned shoe factories, the cliches, and search for their true meaning,” created camp spectacle as both flamboyant escapism and a more subversive act of refusal. In one of my favorite descriptions of his work, one unattributed fan explained that “Ludlam is to the giggle what Artaud is to the groan.” Ludlam’s theatre wilfully camped classical tropes and theatrical cliches, declining to take seriously heteronormative standards that were frequently absurd, foolish, and unnecessarily oppressive. He was no stranger to early modern theatre, either. He launched his theatre with an over-sexed, futuristic, hilariously weird adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, in a play entitled Conquest of the Universe, or, When Queens Collide (it was revived for its fiftieth anniversary at LaMama ETC, staged by Ludlam’s partner, Everett Quinton).

With this in mind, then, it seems to make sense that Ludlam would be attracted to Shakespeare’s grand guignol-esque early tragedy. Titus Andronicus is a play whose defining aesthetic is excess and frequently tips over into absurdity. The catalogue of horrors that characterizes its dramaturgy - from Lavinia’s rape and mutilation to Titus’ cannibalistic revenge plot - is punctuated by dark comedy and hysterical laughter. At one point, Titus, behanded, asks Lavinia to carry his severed hand in her mangled mouth. Her uncle’s response to the sight of her mangled and abused body is to stand and give a lengthy and eloquent speech to try and frame the sight he cannot process. From Tamora’s ridiculous disguise as revenge, to Titus’ equally comical chef’s costume, the play continuously tips over into a dark humor that is designed to disorient the audience member and prevent the kind of sympathy that a play such as Lear elicits. In Patrick Page’s recent interpretation at Red Bull Theatre Company, I was surprised at the howls of laughter the tragedy elicited, and more than a little gratified when one of two of the most hysterical gigglers behind me walked out at intermission and loudly asked “what the f-ck did I just watch?”

It is also a little surprising, perhaps, that Ludlam was writing his adaptation for such a major stage as the Delacorte. Papp had initially been a little resistant to producing Larry Kramer’s groundbreaking AIDS play, The Normal Heart, but ultimately produced it at the Public in 1985. Still, in the late 1980s, the AIDS crisis was still surging across the gay community, unchecked by any meaningful government intervention, and at the time of Ludlam’s death, it was only five years since Larry Speakes’ infamous press conference at the White House in which he laughed about not having the “gay plague.” America was still seven years away from radical art such as Ron Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life that would confront the queer-coded hypocrisy of religious iconography, the gay male body, and conservative values through the centering of ritualistic blood-letting on stage. Moreover, the Delacorte is a popular space with which Papp rarely took artistic risks, knowing, as he did, that Central Park productions were needed to appeal to the broadest possible audience.

With this context in mind, it is fascinating to think about what Ludlam might have written. Titus Andronicus is a deeply masochistic play, one that fetishizes the wounded body and the rituals of violence and bloodletting, binding them up with abuses of reproductive sex and debates on whose bloodlines deserve to endure and whose do not. Crushingly, no trace of the work remains.

There is a coda to this almost-history, however, that occurred in 2019, that perhaps offers a glimpse of what might have been. In April of that year, the iconic Taylor Mac’s play, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, arrived on Broadway. The play, which starred Nathan Lane, enjoyed a limited run, and told the story of Gary, Janice, and Carol, the clean-up crew whose job it was to put away the bodies and bring order back to Rome following the butchery at the end of the play. Mac, who likely needs little introduction, wrote a play that imagined Titus Andronicus as “a tragedy longing to be a comedy” and that culminated in an orchestrated “Fooling” - a Mel Brooks worthy musical number featuring a live baby (alas, in spite of the script’s insistence, the Broadway production used a doll), some stuffed flying squirrels, and perhaps most importantly, a chorus line of dead, naked Roman men with a high-kicking chorus line of erections. Gary’s fooling promises to be a spectacle so grand that it cannot be ignored, and a joyful and saucy refusal to be subjugated by someone else’s tragedy.

Mac’s play deserves much critical attention and much more love than it received. It does not stand as a LTH in its own right because it is well-documented, and can likely be seen in snippets online, but what is commonly overlooked, I think, is its legacy as fulfilling the promise of Ludlam’s long-lost adaptation. Taylor Mac’s extraordinary career as a playwright can sometimes feel overshadowed by judy’s (Mac’s preferred pronoun) breathtakingly flamboyant costumes and concert performances, but nonetheless frequently articulates a sensitivity and awareness of not only gay history, the theatrical and cultural heritage that inspires judy’s work. Almost certainly, Mac was aware of Ludlam’s lost play, and even more vigilant of the obligation to the politics of the outsider perspective that Ludlam’s theatre was representative of. Indeed, as Daniel Pollack-Pelsner notes, Mac thought of Ludlam’s legacy when judy says ““I even have Gary say, ‘We’ve got to make this ridiculous!’”

In the twenty-first century, the Public Theatre has embraced its instinct to produce experimental musicals that offer a critical eye on the state of America - successes such as Hair, Hamilton and Suffs sit alongside more controversial efforts, such as 2010’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. In 2019, the Public produced David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s not-quite musical (it self-defines as “a play with a musical), Soft Power, which staged a reverse King and I as an Asian-American fever dream the morning after the 2016 election. The play was, unhappily, inspired by an attack on the playwright in 2015 and the surge in Asian-American hate that followed the 2016 election.

Soft Power is a frenzied, camp parody of the classic musical tradition. Explaining such a wickedly over-stuffed play is always a challenge, but here goes.

The year is 2016, David, the playwright, is approached in Brooklyn by Xūe Xíng (played with aplomb by Conrad Ricamora) , from Shanghai, who wants him to write a musical on commission about a marriage, entitled Jiāng Cuò Jiù Cuò – Stick with Your Mistake. Fittingly enough, David is on his way to see Hillary Clinton speak at a Lincoln Center campaign event. As Xūe and David watch The King and I, Xūe explains that the goal of Jiāng Cuò Jiù Cuò is to reverse the soft power of cultural production that The King and I embodies and instead bring Chinese values to the world.

The morning after the election, David is stabbed in the neck, and, drifting into unconsciousness as he struggles towards the Brooklyn hospital, he falls into a delirium that sees The King and I performed at the Dragon Theatre in Shanghai, before drifting into a madcap medley of musical numbers that documents Xūe’s trip to the United States in the loosest approximation of The King and I’s dramaturgy. Unsurprisingly, to anyone familiar with Hwang’s work, particularly his objections to the infamous casting of Jonathan Price in Miss Saigon, all of the white characters are played by Asian Americans. It is deeply indebted to the American musical, with songs nodding to The King and I, My Fair Lady, and even a smattering of Gilbert and Sullivan, in the play’s absurd attempts to explain the electoral system as an example of American democracy at work (this extraordinary scene is available on YouTube and can be found here).

The musical prominently features Hillary Clinton (played by Alyse Alan Louis) as a central character and the love interest of Xūe. In the musical within the play, she arrives at the McDonalds fundraiser “in a sexy pantsuit”[1] and is described as “sincere, well-meaning, and smart. Sadly, however, she’s trapped in a system which forces her to perform in a circus,”[2] as she pulls off her pantsuit to reveal a sexy wonder woman outfit while dancing for the crowd. Representing the angry white male voter is literary icon Holden Caufield, explaining to Hillary that “American Men are sick and tired of being told what to do (to Hillary, then Xūe, then DHH) By you and you and people like you.”[3]

The freshly defeated Hillary and Xūe fall in love, and when the new president declares war on China, Xūe rushes to the White House to try and fix it, convincing senators and the MAGA men milling around the opportunity to be a part of the new Silk Road economy, if they agree to follow China’s practice of appointing new leadership outside of the election. Xūe’s anti-democratic advocacy causes a rupture with Hillary, and David’s hallucination closes with her singing dejectedly about her refusal to turn away from democracy. When David comes to in the hospital, the musical ends with a reprise of Clinton’s ballad, sung by “a whole chorus of faces - most of which look like mine”[4] and the promise that “Dà nàn bù sĭ bì yŏu hòu fù. Good fortune will follow. If we somehow survive.”[5]

Directed by Leigh Silverman and choreographed by Sam Pinkleton, the production was a maximalist effort that left critics both enthralled by its boldness and occasionally bemused by its intentional excess - Jesse Green notes that this is a show that not only merits, but needs, a second viewing to understand. Helen Shaw’s complaint that the show needs to settle into its flow appears to have been taken on board when it moved to DC with Arlington’s Signature Theatre, where it was tightened to run as a 90 minute rocket blast, the experience of which Nathan Pugh described as “a theatrical sucker punch, and it left me winded.”

This production might not necessarily qualify as a little history, particularly considering that it was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. It failed to secure, however, the audience it needed to move to a Broadway house, and Pulitzer’s description of the play as a “multi-layered and mischievous musical” feels like an attempt to circumvent the blunt-force anger that drives Soft Power and define it as something more intentionally playful rather than camp. Soft Power is quite camp - arguably any musical is. Bypassing Susan Sontag’s vague insistence that camp is inherently apolitical, in the twenty-first century theatre, camp is increasingly a tool of refusal and a dramaturgical strategy. By committing itself fully to the marginal with more aplomb than the marginal merits,[6] camp succeeds because it refuses to take seriously (and therefore validate) the hegemonies that drive a society to accept, for example, a white man playing a Vietnamese club owner, or even the rhetoric that fuels the hatred leading to a man being stabbed in the neck.

Soft Power’s camp methodology, then, exposes and laughs at the American political system, the Great White Way (emphasis on the white), and arguably, the very idea of American soft power. To describe the play as “mischievous” downgrades its impact and unnecessarily invites an audience to relax. In the year 2026 when the political system is embodied by an actual cage-fighting match on the White House lawn and white supremacy is actively suppressing the telling of American history, we might do well to re-examine Hwang’s hilarity and embrace the refusal his fever-dream manifests. We are America, after all, and need not stick with our mistakes.

Notes

[1] Soft Power, 2019, 41.

[2] Soft Power, 2019, 42.

[3] Soft Power, 2019, 42

[4] Soft Power, 2019, 100

[5] Soft Power, 2019, 103

[6] Booth, Mark. “CAMPE-TOI!: ON THE ORIGINS AND DEFINITIONS OF CAMP.” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, p.69.

Although the Federal Theatre Project collapsed in 1939 amid accusations of Communism and internal strife, its legacy as a grassroots theater organization lived on in various initiatives around the country. At the same time the FTP was founded, Congress also invested in the not-for-profit producing organization, establishing the American National Theatre and Academy to build a network of national theatre productions and institutions across the country. Although the ANTA invested in regional productions, it was largely criticized for its New York City focus and not considered to be representative of American regional theatres. Communities seeking grassroots theatrical representation had to create their own opportunities.

During the 1960s, Black artists and theatre critics became to demand such opportunities. Tired of the white establishment not making enough space for African American drama, theatre activists became increasingly vocal about the need for an African American Theatre tradition. The emergence of theatres such as the Negro Theatre Ensemble, the American Negro Theatre, and the New Lafayette Theatre sat alongside advocacy work by artists such as Ed Bullins, Woodie King Jr., or Floyd Gaffney made significant gains towards establishing a Black American theatre tradition, work that expanded far beyond the metropolitan New York area. In 1966, writing about the exclusion of Black playwrights on major stages, Douglas Turner Ward for a severance from traditional white theatre spaces, and instead imagined how,

for a Negro playwright committed to examining the contours, contexts, and depth of his experiences from an unfettered, imaginative, Negro angle of vision, the screaming need is for a sufficient audience of other Negroes, better informed through commonly shared experience to readily understand, debate, confirm, or reject the truth or falsity of his creative explorations.^[i]

For Ward and many of his peers, a Black theatre movement was about more than writing plays for major playhouses and white audiences. If a Black arts culture was going to be successful, it needed to cultivate a discursive space for Black Americans to share their experiences. This could not be achieved in white-dominated spaces which characterized many of the metropolitan playhouses. Like The FTP before them, artists realized that they needed to bring theatre to local communities.

In 1963, Doris Derby, John O’Neal, and Gilbert Moses founded a theatre troupe in Tougaloo College, Madison County, Mississippi, with the explicit goal of building a new Black arts tradition in the Southern States. They released a manifesto that outlined the organization’s goals:

A Free Southern Theater can demonstrate that the present reality can be altered and that the Negro must play a leading role in that transformation. Our fundamental objective is to stimulate critical, creative and reflective thought necessary for effective participation in democratic society.

Specifically, we hope to:

--promote the growth and self- knowledge of a new Negro audience,

-- liberate the creative talent that has been denied the opportunity of expression

– provide a forum in which the Negro playwright can deal honestly with his own experience, express himself in what may prove to be a new idiom, a new genre, a theatrical form and style unique to the Negro people are are blues, jazz, and gospel in the realm of music,

– emphasize the universality of the problems of the Negro people,

- -strengthen communication among Southern Negroes,

--add a necessary and cultural and educational dimension to the present Southern freedom movement,

--assert that self- knowledge and creativity are the foundations of human dignity.

From the beginning, the FST was an activist project. Its Board of Directors included leadership from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which O’Neal and Derby were also members.

Supported by a Ford Foundation grant, the group produced its first show, Martin Duberman’s documentary play, In White America, which launched its tour on June 13, 1963, in Jackson Mississippi. The troupe performed in public spaces - churches, community centers, local halls - touring a total of 16 towns in the region. The FST offerings were diverse, including Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It also hosted community discussions after each performance. In addition to its theatrical programming, the organizers also established a writing workshop entitled BlkArtsSouth, led by Tony Dent and Kalamu Ya Salaam. During this time, the FST transitioned from operating as a racially integrated company to consisting exclusively of Black members, often performing original poetry or dramatic works developed within the acting and writing workshops, including member Tom Dent’s one-act play Ritual Murder.

The FST faced difficulties from the onset, both from without and within. Their work was radical and dangerous to perform. Threats from the Ku Klux Klan were ongoing and severe enough that an African American Armed Defense organization, The Deacons for Defense and Justice, committed to protecting the theatre company on their tours. The harassment from White Supremacists was part of the company’s decision to relocate to New Orleans, where the members felt safer. In 1965, they launched their first season at St. John’s Institutional Missionary Baptist Church. Internal strife about the future of the organization, however, also created challenges, as members sought to move in different artistic directions and also drove the move to New Orleans. There was also, allegedly, resistance to the fact that some members of the organization’s leadership were primarily based in New York City, and some of the group wanted to ensure the company was fully based in the southern region. This was, after, all, a community initiative and best served by people with permanent roots in the region.

In New Orleans, the company followed in the footsteps of radical troupes such as the FTP or the Living Theatre, with political theatre including two of John O’Neal’s plays, When the Opportunity Scratches, Itch It and Where Is the Blood of Your Fathers?, as part of their commitment to a theatre that reflected contemporary Black American experience. Promoting Black voices was the company’s raison d’être. Tom Dent articulated the struggles to find a space in White culture for Black experience when he recalled his failed experiment to adapt Brecht:

I remember Richard Schechner once suggesting that we adapt a Brecht play [for the FST] to fit the southern Black situation… So I set out to adapt this play, I forget the name of it… I was trying to make the merchant a white oyster-boat captain in St. Bernard Parish, and the serf a Black oyster-boat worker, and every time I tried it, it came up more unreal; it was ridiculous. What became obvious as we went through those changes was that we couldn’t just change the insides of the white-oriented material to make it Black, we had to invent something entirely new, our whole concept of Theater had to change.^[ii]

Dent’s failure illustrates the validity of Douglas Ward’s observation. Shared Black experience required a theatre that was built from the ground up with Black communities in mind. What authors, no matter how canonical, could not speak to the African American experience the way that Black writers could.

In 1972, the FST stepped into television broadcasting, running two seasons of a show called Nation Time before cancellation in 1974. Throughout the 1970s, the organization lost momentum. Crucially, much of its funding came from New York connections, which slowly fell away as the founding members left. The FST formally ended its operations in 1980.

While the FST succumbed to the common financial pressures that have led to the decline of many notable companies, its legacy as a community and activist theatre in the South cannot be ignored. It organized a robust Black Arts movement in the southern states and embodied the FTP’s earlier goals of creating a regionally specific, touring company that gave communities theatre that was relevant and spoke to their lived experiences. One oral history of the FST recounts a performance of In White America, during which one audience member later recalled how “they were telling my story on that stage.” In a moment where Black History is being actively erased, and history rewritten around the omission of African American experience, the legacy - and perhaps re-emergence - of such theatre, defined as part of our National Theatre movement, feels more urgent than ever.

Notes

^[i] Turner Ward, Douglas. “American Theater: For Whites Only?” The New York Times, Sunday, August 14, 1966, 93.

^[ii] Dent, Thomas C. 1971. “Beyond Rhetoric Toward a Black Southern Theater.” Black World, April 15–25.

In 1968, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald and Brother Jonathan Ringkamp, a Franciscan Monk and educator, produced a community-theatre project entitled Everyman and Roach featuring a cast of local teenagers, as street theatre on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue as part of what would become the Everyman Theatre. Sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts and Culture Association, The Everyman Street Theatre was a community theatre collective with a “no rejections” policy and a willingness to adapt the show to meet the tastes of its audience.

Everyman is a Medieval morality play and a perennial favorite of drama geeks everywhere - I even have seen enough productions to have a favorite (the RSC and Théâtre de Complicité, The Other Place, 1997, thank you for asking). The play was likely written during late fifteenth century and it is part of the morality play tradition. It is not subtle. Everyman is a wealthy man upon whose doorstep Death appears, ready to collect. Everyman begs for time to find someone to join him on his journey into the unknown, and Death graciously agrees. Everyman visits his old friends, Kindred, Cousin, and Goods, all of whom refuse to join him in death. Deep in despair, he accidentally meets Knowledge, who leads him to Confession, and eventually rediscovers his starved and impoverished Good Deeds, who agrees to accompany him to the grave. At the end of the play, Everyman learns that death is a journey he must make alone and he moves cautiously into the unknown, comforted by his redemption. What may seem surprising for such a heavy-handed narrative, is how funny and moving Everyman can be. The dramaturgy is simple, elegant, and full of space for theatrical experimentation.

Ringkamp and Fitzgerald updated the play so that Everyman is a discotheque owner. He is ambitious and ruthless, with henchmen named Amico, Bull, Whip, and Knife, in a seedy world full of sex workers and fortune tellers. Overshadowing his world is an insatiable Death Machine, played by several actors who were dressed in muted white, grey, and blue, and accompanied by the angel of Death. Death is the only certainty in this world, and there is no place for Good Deeds, Knowledge, or Confession.^[i] The religious undertones of the original play were vacated in favor of an emphasis on community, friendship, and shared mutual affection. When the Death Machine comes for Everyman, he is, predictably, abandoned by his associates, girlfriend, and henchman, Finally, Everyman recovers a social outcast named Roach, who he had previously rejected as a friend. Roach unsuccessfully offers himself to the Death Machine in place of Everyman, but as they move towards the Death Machine, Everyman uses his strength to knock Roach out and move him safely out of the grasp of the Death Machine, sacrificing himself for his only true friend. As Gisolfi D’Aponte describes it, “Everyman defies the awful figures which comprise the Death Machine - Suicide, Disease, Pallor, Sickness, Old Age, Time, Violence, War, Accident, Poison, Madness - by entering into their midst and proclaiming that Death is “nothing.””^[ii] When Everyman succumbs to the inevitable, he does so with the love and support of Roach and is, like the Medieval Everyman, redeemed by his deeds.

The show was populated by amateur actors who were mostly teenagers and when it arrived at the Lincoln Center in 1971 for its Outdoor festival, its cast grew to accommodate 300 young New Yorkers. In the earliest production, Everyman was played by Eugene Washington and Michael Darden as Roach, both amateur actors about whom little is now known. Fitzgerald herself joined the ensemble, playing a fortune-teller who warns Everyman (to little avail) of the need to choose love over material possessions. When he asks her to tell his future, she tells him that “Baby, your character is your future”.^[iii] Everyman and Roach was played in playgrounds and in the middle of neighborhood blocks, the actors wore regular street clothes and included volunteer audience members who would play the part of God and sealed Everyman’s fate by condemning him to death.

The production was also known as Everyman: An Epic Rock Opera and included lyrics such as these, sung by Everyman when he thinks the Death Machine has come for his mother instead of him:

Maybe I should take care of all

Those things for her myself.

It would please her,

But I haven’t got time.

That’s the trouble with being a Big Man

There’s only time for doing big things.^[iv]

The lyrics were composed by John Orlando and Jimmy Justice and described as a “folk rock-combo,”^[v] but the musical appears to have been constantly adapted to suit the different cultural groups it played to across the city.

Everyman and Roach was always a community endeavor. The company, led by Fitzgerald and Ringkamp, also included choreographer Elizabeth Keene and producer Dolores Kagan. Together, they held after-work auditions for the principal actors and rehearsed with nightly theatre games, improvisation, and collaborative direction, and rehearsals were always open to the public. Although the skeleton of Everyman and Roach remained the same, the rehearsals shaped out the individual production choices.

The critical response to the show ran the spectrum of complementary and condescending. Although nobody questioned the value of the project, or the enthusiasm of its cast, some critics (unsurprisingly, Clive Barnes for the New York Times) were tart about the skills of the amateur actors, while others such as Leo Pushkin writing for the New York Telegram, were able to understand that this was an amateur production and recognized the although the talent as raw, there was much to be enjoyed in this “stirring and vital experience in our contemporary culture.”^[vi]

The production was first staged in 1968 and went on to enjoy several different iterations around the city, constantly adjusting to its new neighborhoods. It was tremendously successful and toured around New York City for years, playing at LaMama ETC, on the Upper West Side, at BAM and even at the Lincoln Center as part of its outdoors Festival in 1971. It is estimated that overall, it played to more than 500,000 spectators, and it was filmed for Channel 13. As the company grew, Everyman and Roach also played in repertoire with a rock-opera adaptation of Macbeth, entitled Mister Esteban.

The impact that Everyman and Roach, this forgotten adaptation of everyone’s favorite morality play, should not be underestimated. There was a DC chapter of the community theatre project as late as 1990. TIt was an important community project in a city that was transitioning out of the capitalism of the 1960s and heading into the crushing economic decay and urban chaos that characterized the following decade. For testimony to the importance of this project, there exists a wonderful Facebook page dedicated to the company’s work with some truly fantastic photos, and perhaps more importantly, comments from Everyman and Roach alum, who testify to the impact the production had on their lives.

Notes

^[i] Schreiber, Earl G. “Everyman in America” Comparative Drama, Vol. 9, No.2 (Summer 1975): 99-115, 108.

^[ii] Gisolfi D’Aponte, Mimi. “Everyman and roach” in Retrospect: A Study of Street Theatre that Worked.” Educational Theatre Journal 27 1990 (2): 206–215, 168.

^[iii] Everyman: A Rock Opera, pp.25a, quoted in Schreiber, 110.

^[iv] Everyman: A Rock Opera, pp.38, quoted in Schreiber, 111.

^[v] Gisolfi D’Aponte, 208 .

^[vi] Dryden, quoted in Gilsofi D’Aponte, 174.

The one thing that Broadway fans might love as much as a smash hit is a flop. Carrie: The Musical, Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, King Kong all have rightly earned their bottom-of-the-barrel place in Broadway lore. Tucked away in this parade of trash is Leo Rost and Jimmy Horowitz’s musical, Marlowe.

Following the global success of Hair in 1967, there was a surge in increasingly derivative rock musicals, or rock operas that were met with critical scorn and audience indifference. The lightening-in-a-bottle that was Hair occurred because it abandoned the traditional structure of the musical, launching giddily from song to song, piecing together its string of vignettes as a means of capturing the feeling of a moment, not offering a concrete narrative. But that did not stop Broadway producers from trying to sniff out a formula that would bring popular music to the stage. The subsequent success of Galt MacDermot’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, with its beautiful youthful cast and music that made the audience feel like they were taking a midsummer stroll through a hopping El Barrio neighborhood, convinced producers that rock music was the next big thing on the Great White Way.

It was not. Failures, including the Meatloaf-starring Rockabye Hamlet (to be featured in a future LTH) were received as out of date, and, perhaps the worst sin of all for a youth culture, were clearly trying too hard. As anyone who has a teenager well knows, even the best intentions become “cringe” when called out for their inauthenticity. Over the decade after the debut of Hair, repeated attempts were made to capitalize on the rock musical, but younger audiences did not show up, presumably having a real alternative in the extravagant theatrics of global rock bands such as The Who, Queen, or Styx to fill that urge.

The derision heaped upon Rockabye Hamlet was not enough, however, to stop director and choreographer Don Price taking a swing at one of the coolest playwrights of the Renaissance (apologies to Ben Jonson). On paper, Christopher Marlowe is a terrific subject for a musical. Born the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, he made his way to London, where he started writing plays that are, even now, still scandalous in comparison to that of his colleague, Will. The one extant portrait of Marlowe shows him to be a dazzling beauty, with a much better head of hair than Shakespeare and he was commonly thought to have been a spy for Elizabeth’s “spymaster general,” Sir Francis Walsingham. Marlowe’s works encouraged rumors that he was all kinds of atheist, and the infamous Baines note, which condemned him to arrest for heresy, quoted him as saying (among other blasphemies), that “all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools”. This testimony alone would have convicted him had he actually been arrested, but he was murdered in a Deptford bar fight before that could happen, stabbed in the eye by one Ingram Frizer, allegedly, in a dispute over who would pay the bill (although the plot absolutely thickens when one discovers that Frizer was also almost certainly on Walsingham’s payroll). Marlowe is a wild ride and his life pales in comparison to his plays that are often wickedly funny, bitingly cruel and devastatingly nihilistic. Quite frankly, there should be many more Marlowe musicals than there currently are.

So, perhaps, with that in mind it is even more of a tragedy that Rost, Horowitz, and Pino threw away their shot. The musical is dreadful - if you have 38 minutes of your life that you don’t need back, you can watch a clip here. The narrative follows a love triangle between Will and Kit, surprisingly, for those who know of the incessant rumors about Marlowe’s sexuality, over a young woman, Emelia Bassanio. This narrative is presumably an extended allusion to Shakespeare’s sonnets and their Dark Lady, which themselves earn a mention in the musical, as Will laments his mediocre poetical and dramatic skills in comparison to his peer. Patrick Jude played Marlowe, Lennie Del Luca Jr. played Shakespeare, and Lisa Mordante played Emelia, for which she earned a Tony nomination.

It was a spectacular mess. In an attempt to modernize the text, the characters were all dressed in disco versions of early modern clothing - tights and codpieces abounded, but they were topped with sparkly waistcoats and paired with lepoard-print boots. Emelia wore a black leotard, tights, and tassels under her cloak. Frank Rich delightfully explains that Jude’s Marlowe would have been “the toast of any small-town shopping-center disco.” The plot was equally chaotic as the love story barely propelled the narrative forward. Rich describes a scene where “there’s a musical number in which Marlowe, ‘’Willy’‘ Shakespeare and Richard Burbage get stoned on marijuana provided by Sir Walter Raleigh - who has passed it on from his good friend Pocohantas.” I can’t even follow that with adequate commentary.

Critically, the lyrics fared little better, and for good reason. In one romantic duet between Kit and Emelia, they sing to one another “We’re not trying to find where God is/ We’re just exchanging bodies,” accompanied by music that would have not been out of place on 1980s cable TV erotica. In his television review, Stewart Klein eviscerated the “tasteless lyrics written by a ninny incapable of rhyming the word “nonny” before admitting that he left at intermission. All critics noted the terrible sound quality throughout the production and wondered, given what they were listening to, if that might not be for the best. Incredibly, Rich suggested that even if it did not go down as one of Broadway’s legendary wrecks, it was still bad enough and vulgar enough to be utterly entertaining in its own way.

Audiences did not agree - it seems that there is such a thing as bad publicity. Marlowe ran for 48 performances, beginning previews on October 7, 1981, opening October 12 and closing after 40 regular performances on November 15th. Perhaps they should have included more tobacco and boys.

Perhaps due to his own strict religious upbringing, Rudkin’s work is often a brilliant and fascinating deconstruction of faith, whether it be religion, nationalism, or belief in humanity. One of his other more well-known plays, Afore Night Come, is a tightly wound exploration of the ritual killing of a transient fruit-picker in the Black country, in a masterclass of escalating tension. Similarly, his radio play, Cries from Casement as His Bones are Brought to Dublin uses the funeral of Roger Casement, repatriated to Ireland, to explore how his sexual alienation was an essential part of his political identity. Rudkin’s work is theatrically ambitious, stunning in its use of language, and offer deeply profound, and often hopeless interrogations of the savagery that lies beneath the façades we create.

The Sons of Light began life in 1965-1966, originally entitled The Sea. Described by the New Statesman as a work of “reckless imagination,” it tells the story of Pastor Bengry and his three sons, Samuel, Michael, and John, who move to a remote Scottish island that is, following the death of almost all of the children on the island at sea, at the hands of the previous Pastor, bereft and clinging to the threadbare religion that barely sustains them. The only children remaining on the island is the schizophrenic daughter of the wheelchair bound Manatond, Shelia and Stephen Yescanab, whose appintment as Pastor Bengry’s new steward shocks the community. Underneath the island, a government experiment unfolds, led by the Strangelove-esque Dr. Debewhol.

The “soldiers” who work in the mines underneath the ground, were reprogrammed by a combination of institutionalized sexual sadism implemented by the head guard, Holst, and a made-up religion that is presided over by the King of Love who is, in actuality, the hypnotized Manatond in a mask and Robe. The faith Holst offers binds the suffering of the body, through the labor and punishment he brings, to the promise of ascension into heaven and the arms of the King of Love. Nonetheless, while the soldiers have been psychologically stripped of their humanity, as Dr. Debehwhol acknowledges, religion becomes a necessary fiction to recast their endless suffering as joy. Put simply, even under the island, humanity perseveres. When the guards have sent a work shift to bed, Corporal Gower, identified by his gold trim on his work uniform, draws together three friends who surreptitiously and clumsily play a game of family, not entirely knowing what such a unit actually is.

As the discovery of the underworld becomes increasingly inevitable, twins Michael and John each die mysteriously, in ways connected to Dr. Debewhol. When Michael is blinded, the ointment that Dr. Debewhol gives him kills him painfully. Samuel, in turn, is dragged into the sea by two deformed figures who mysteriously appear in the fog. John and Stephen are left searching for hope.

Stephen, however, inspired by the Pastor’s faith in him, stumbles upon the underworld and encounters Gower at play. After Gower mistakes him for an angel, Stephen tries to help him escape by leading him up through the water, out of the caves, and into the world. After Gower mistakes Stephen’s horror at his daylight appearance for disappointment, he returns to Holst and the King of Love, who murder him. Stephen convinces John to dress in the robes of the King of Love, and return below with him, where the soldiers revolt, murder Holst, and free themselves. At the end of the play, the black rock of the island is crawling with white bodies moving towards the light, as Shelia, in a rare moment of lucidity, walks into the sea to give herself to the water.

As is to be expected with Rudkin, the language is brutal and devastating in its simplicity, creating transcendent moments that would challenge any director. When Gower appears for the last time, to document his murder, he is described in the stage directions thus:

In terrible silence, amid the charnel ruiny: white, goldenheaded, pure, the primal essence, GOWER himself.

Like a Jacobean tragedy, the constant presence of violence, the extremity of the characters, and the deeply mythological premise of the play could easily tip into camp, but for an ambitious director, the specificity of the language will always anchor the play and reduce the need for theatrical tricks. Gower’s account of his own torture is so well crafted that it reduces the success of play down to the honesty of the actor above all else. He explains that, after dissecting him as he watched,

“I would not undo, they could not even split my fork. At last Holst said “we must ease him with saws.” Holst hagged me, most careful; and why he sawed me through my armpits and my groin, I uttered not one cry. Why was that? I came apart quite easy then.”^[i]

Because Rudkin’s language is so precise, and his world so vivid, the play welcomes a bare-bones staging, leaving the island to the audience’s imagination. It should be easily stageable, but it is relentlessly devastating, requires a large cast, and, running at easily three hours, does not lend itself easily to commercial theatre.

The Sons of Light was originally imagined as an eight-hour epic, and was first drafted in 1967, 1969-71, and again in 1975, after which it was finally staged in what would become the published “final” version. On his website, Rudkin recalls Peter Hall abandoning the project and realizing that “I knew I was going into a lifetime in the wilderness.” It was first produced in 1976 for the Tyneside Theatre Company at the University Theatre in Newcastle, directed by Keith Hack, in a large, proscenium arch theatre, which gave the play a “monumental, operatic, hallucinatory, visual presence,” according to Rudkin.^[ii] It was then staged in 1977 for the RSC, directed by Ron Daniels, and staged in the much smaller black box theatre, The Other Place, with audiences on three sides. This was, presumably, a much more intimate experience, that the New York Times described as “a stark, simple workshop production” for a play that could (and maybe should have) filled the National’s great Olivier stage.^[iii] In the United States, the play had a staged reading in 1995 at Oberlin College, but the college itself admitted that it would be unable to create a production of this magnificent, ambitious play.

At this particular moment in history, facing the rise of nationalism, the reassertion of systemic violence in the name of religion, and the dehumanization of the working individual in the rising technological age, the plays of this era are compelling for their honesty, their outrage, and their vision. In his brilliant essay, “The Theatre of Good Intentions,” Mac Wellman invites us to refuse the sterility of moral uplift, with its “aesthetics of intentions”^[iv] and “poetics of gentility”^[v] and with this in mind, we might do well to revive Rudkin’s brilliant, bleak play that asks us to stare into the darkness with him, and refuses to flinch when we then struggle to look into the light.

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Notes

^[i] Rudkin, David The Sons of Light. London: Methuen, 1981

^[ii] Rudkin, author note.

^[iii] Gussow, Mel. “Uncommon New Plays By Tom Stoppard And David Rudkin” The New York Times, August 6, 1978, section D, pp.4.

^[iv] Wellman, Mac. “The Theatre of Good Intentions,” Performing Arts Journal, 1984, Vol. 8, No.3 (1984): pp.59-70, 60.

^[v] Wellman, 62.

In January 2019, the Nuyorican Poets Café staged four readings of Ishmael Reed’s new play, The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda. In May of the same year, under the directorship of Rome Neal, a full production was mounted at the downtown theatre, and was revived later that October for another brief run. The project was funded, in part, by the iconic American novelist, Toni Morrison. The play is a somewhat didactic, but culturally significant response to Miranda’s Broadway juggernaut, Hamilton, which itself needs little introduction. For the sake of the uninitiated, Hamilton is a biographical musical about Alexander Hamilton, and tells the story of the country’s founding fathers entirely in rap, staging these white American ancestors such as Hamilton, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, as their immigrant descendants, played almost exclusively by actors of color (the notable exception being Jonathan Groff’s scene-steating portrayal of the mad king George III).

Premiering at the Public in 2015, Hamilton happened in a moment that was fallaciously categorized as “postracial.” The fantasy of postracialism - a world in which race relations in the United States are reconciled, having finally achieved the dream of equality - was a popular label used (most likely by white liberals) to characterize the era during the presidency of Barack Obama. Postracial logic suggested that, if a Black man can ascend to the oval office, then it is reasonable to assume that the races within America are finally on level ground. Hamilton was a key cultural artifact in the promotion of this fallacy, with its famous recognition that “Immigrants! We get the job done” becoming one of its central slogans. Buzzy promotional moments such as Miranda freestyle rapping in front of a delighted President Obama in the White House’s Rose Garden cemented Hamilton’s role in this historic projection of melting-pot utopianism. In this moment, Miranda was styled as the theatrical voice of a generation and the champion for Broadway actors of color.

Even prior to the ascendency of Donald Trump and the white supremacy he brought with him, there was a growing backlash against Hamilton that eventually bloomed in Reed’s play. Critics objected not only to the larger whitewashing of American history, but the play’s extreme sanitation of the Schulyer family’s ownership of slaves and Hamilton’s complicity in their business of owning human beings. Reed, in particular, took issue with Miranda’s claim that Hamilton was in any capacity an honest abolitionist, and suggested that the staging is the same “bullshit”^[i] that occurs when schools ask young children to dress up as the founding fathers, celebrating men who would have refused to recognize the humanity of these children and scaffolded America’s definitional documents around an intention to keep their ancestors enslaved. Reed had been openly critical of the musical, both in terms of its form and content. As early as 2015, He wrote:

Now the masters, the producers of this profit hungry production, which has already made 30 million dollars, are using the slave’s language: Rock and Roll, Rap and Hip Hop to romanticize the careers of kidnappers, and murderers.^[ii]

As far as he was concerned, it was perhaps equally insulting that the romanticization of slave-owning Americans was enacted through artistic forms that evolved as an act of cultural emancipation.

The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda is structured in the style of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. One night, while enjoying the dizzying heights of his success, Miranda is visited by a stream of ghosts, including Ben, an unnamed Black woman (both of whom were Schuyler family slaves), a dispossessed Native American man, Harriet Tubman, Hamilton himself, a white indentured servant, and finally, Diana, a young woman who had escaped her enslavement by Hamilton’s in-laws, only to be torn apart by dogs in her second attempt to claim her freedom. In Reed’s play, Miranda is a naive simpleton, who believed in the veracity of Ron Chernow’s source book, because “It’s 800 pages long.”^[iii]

The ancestral spirits who visit Miranda educate him in the violations inflicted upon their community by the Schulyer family and the founding fathers and ask him to recognize the sanitization of the story he wrote. The unnamed woman even points out that the Caribbean-born Hamilton might have been “passing for White, too. He rejected his own kind in order to rise in White society.”^[iv] The ghost of Hamilton is appreciative of his new-found face and impatient with Miranda’s growing regret. He points out that Miranda is like the indentured servant who bought into a system that advantages him at the expense of Black oppression because of the extent to which he is beholden to his Broadway investors. When Manuel confronts Hamilton biographer Chernow, he is scornfully dismissed. The play ends with Miranda rejecting his agent’s request to follow Hamilton with a musical redeeming Columbus, and a monologue during which he acknowledges his own naiveté.

The New Yorker defined the show as a dramatization of Reed’s critical essays and Knockturnal described it as “a hit piece come to life onstage.” Jesse Bueno’s Lin Manuel Miranda was genially dumbfounded, as he sat through a stream of educational monologues in what the New York Times termed “classic activist theater,” even as it admitted that Reed’s play occasionally sacrificed dramatic form to ideas. Nonetheless, the small theatre on East 3rd Street was sold out nightly with crowds laughing appreciatively and activated a critical response that slowly continued to gather momentum in discursive spaces on the internet, resulting in a significant backlash when the show was televised for Disney Plus in 2020.

Miranda’s response? While he resisted any direct commentary on Reed’s production, shutting down curious reporters with the help of his publicist, he has indirectly acknowledged the discourse that Reed began. In a tweet dated July 6, 2020, he acknowledged the criticisms as “valid,” offering the somewhat unsatisfactory excuse that he simply didn’t have time to address the nuance and complexity of who these men were. Miranda’s arts activism and unbridled support for the theatre community is part of who he is, and a forgiving reading might allow that, in a fit of early 2010s well-intentioned naiveté, he told a story that wasn’t his to tell. His ongoing reluctance to explicitly acknowledge Hamilton’s practice of subjugating Black experience to white narrative, however, gives credence to Reed’s disdain that these narratives persist in the corporate theatre world because of artists unwilling to bite the hand that feeds them. Miranda’s first real follow-up to Hamilton, his adaptation of the iconic New York odyssey, The Warriors, is likely to hit the Great White Way within the next season or two, and the popular understanding of race in America has changed greatly since 2015. We shall see what Miranda delivers.

Notes

^[i] Reed, Ishmael. The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda. Brooklyn, New York: Archway Editions, 2020.

^[ii] Reed, Ishmael. “Hamilton: the Musical:” Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders…and It’s Not Halloween” Counterpunch. August 21, 2015. https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween/

^[iii] Reed, 39.

^[iv] Reed, 38.

In November 2000, Rattlestick Theatre produced a small festival of play readings honoring the late Harry Kondoleon, centered around a production of his final play, Saved or Destroyed, adapted and directed by Craig Lucas. The play was produced with an all-star off-Broadway cast, including Julie Halston, Michael Doyle, Scotty Bloch, Larry Pine, Michi Barall, and Ray Anthony Thomas.

The festival was a celebration embedded deeply within Rattlestick’s core values. Founded by playwrights Gary Bonasorte and David Van Asselt, the small collective of writers who made their home at 224 Waverly Place (where the company still resides) built its early mission around mentoring young, primarily gay writers. Kondoleon, who was born in 1955 and died in 1994 of an AIDS-related illness. He was a long-standing friend of many of Rattlestick’s original playwrights and a well-regarded downtown dramatist, known primarily for absurdist plays, such as Self-Torture and Strenuous Exercise, The Vampires, Christmas on Mars, as well as his 1989 tragedy, Zero Positive. He also authored two novels - The Whore of Tjampuan and Diary of a Lost Boy.

Saved or Destroyed was unfinished at the time of Kondoleon’s death. Any attempt to describe the play is messy and chaotic because the play itself is messy and chaotic. In Saved or Destroyed, actors rehearse a play about two families on vacation in Maine. Over the course of many years, cousins Karin and Vincent fall in love, have multiple pregnancies, and come to loathe one another. Along the way, insinuations of incest arise when it is revealed that Karin is adopted. Resentments between the two families build, are unpacked and overcome as things progress. It is deeply tasteless and wickedly funny. At one point, Anne and Lucille, the mothers of the young couple, force their children to have sex as a means of impregnating Karin with the reincarnated soul of Lucille’s miscarried baby, Poppy, while their fathers, Maurice and Ivan, perform fertility dances and complain about unhappy familial relations. Later in the play, the soul of Poppy appears and refuses to come back down into their disastrous world and eventually, all of the characters die - sometimes as the characters within the Maine play, or as the actors playing them - Anne, the actress, is quickly revealed to be suffering from terminal cancer and Vincent is shot by a frustrated audience member. When the play concludes, Karin and Vincent are reborn among a pile of bodies, cradling Karin’s new baby. In Saved or Destroyed’s final lines, Karin peacefully insists that all she has left “are my emotions and true feelings and they haven’t been thrown in the garbage pail on the way. They sustain me.”^[i] Thus, it ends in carnage and hope. Craig Lucas has described it as a play about moving from one world to the next.

Considered unwieldy and incomplete, Saved or Destroyed is characterized by its elaborate and emotional stage directions. Rather than amend or overwrite Kondoleon’s annotations, Lucas decided to embrace them and dedicate his production to Harry’s absurdist spirit. He recruited actor and playwright David Greenspan to embody the stage directions by playing Harry Kondoleon as an angel, “wearing shiny red shoes, an impeccable suit and a manner as polished and piercing as the dialogue he wrote.”^[ii] Greenspan was ridiculously adorned in a pair of tinsel wings and a cheap, artificial halo. His soft-spoken, puckish Kondoleon operated as an all-knowing, dapper Greek Chorus, lovingly guiding both the actors and his audience through the play, unseen by the performers and in league with those in the house who were trying to make sense of his vision.

Greenspan’s presence reframed the play-within-a-play as an existential theatre, played out in accordance with the wishes of an authorial presence whose actions are (mostly) explained to the audience, but not the participants in the drama. Arguably, because of this, Greenspan’s Kondoleon created a play within a play within a play. John McDermott’s set was minimal, using Rattlestick’s slightly battered black box theatre as the existential void in which the characters struggle with a small house on the back wall to signify the vacation home of the central play. Rattlestick’s tiny backstage dressing room is clearly visible, with the vanity mirrors reflecting the actors’ attentive patience as they waited for their next scene.

Although the characters drifted in and out of the terrible theatre they are asked to perform, Kondoleon’s presence took the edge off any potential feeling of crisis. He frequently went so far as to physically move props and actors, always reminding his audience that the heavenly artist’s loving hand offers the promise of meaning, even when the actors in his play might not see it.

In characteristic Kondoleon style, the production was once deeply absurd, tasteless, and hilarious. Jokes about incest, abortion, and death abound and none of the characters understand the shift in rules or allegiances, or the increasingly incomprehensible boundaries between one layer of the play and another or between comedy and tragedy. When Maurice wanted to meditate on his loss of faith, he and Lucille hurriedly ate bananas, because, as he explains to his audience, “if I do the speech eating a banana it’s going to come off satirical.”^[iii] Greenspan/Kondelon turned to the spectators and, with a wry smile, reiterated “they are both eating bananas. The sound of the waves continues. This can be a particularly restful point in the play. I hope there are others.”^[iv] As anyone lucky enough to see him perform knows, David Greenspan is an actor whose soul spills out of every role he inhabits; under his care, Kondoleon was mischievous, playful, and occasionally confounding, but always benevolent and careful in the treatment of his creations.

By staging Kondoleon’s vision in its inchoate beauty, Lucas centralized the unifying presence of the playwright, and submitted his directorial ego to the dream-like imagination of Kondoleon - it is no coincidence that Ben Brantley described the production as “one of those once-in-a-blue-moon stagings that seem to have stepped directly, full-blown and radiant, from an author’s imagination.”^[v] At the end of the play, the actors collapsed, lying on top of each other and a small mound of mattresses, under the watchful eye of Greenspan’s Kondoelon, who never left his characters alone even as he moved them along to a place the audience was not allowed to know. An artist will, it seems, only give us so many answers.

The central proposition of Kondoleon’s play is the question of whether the actors (or the actors within) have been saved or destroyed by the questionable art they inhabit; under Greenspan angelic hand, Kondoleon’s query is clearly answered. By staging Kondoleon, Lucas’ production refused to take seriously the tragedy both within and around the play, both offering guidance on the dramaturgy of the play itself and countering the exclusively tragic narrative of the AIDS crisis that claimed so many artists during the 1980s and 1990s through its celebration of Kondoleon’s art. Embodying Kondoleon’s presence within the stage directions with Greenspan refuted tragedy as the primary trope of gay existence during the end of the century, in favor of an aesthetic luminescence that understands the life that a playwright extends to the work they leave behind.

In spite of its brief three-week run, the play was immensely successful, with Rattlestick’s small, cozy auditorium often full of Kondoelon’s nostalgic friends cherishing the opportunity to send off their beloved playwright and friend. Craig Lucas won an Obie for the production and the play was published in 2002, prior to a London production, ensuring that Kondoleon’s work lives on.

Information on donating to the Harry Kondoleon Playwrighting Fund can be found here.

^[i] Saved or Destroyed. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002. 41.

^[ii] Brantley, Ben. “A Writer is Reborn, his Halo in Place.” New York Times, November 4, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/movies/theater-review-a-writer-is-reborn-his-halo-in-place.html

^[iii] Saved or Destroyed, 18.

^[iv] Saved or Destroyed, 18-19.

^[v] Brantley.

On the continent, the market for English entertainment was significant, and during the closure of the English playhouses that began in 1640, taking light entertainment and short plays to Europe was a lucrative business. Traveling players often presented abridged or modified versions of what was seen in early modern English commercial theatres. Although sometimes full evenings of plays were required, just as commonly, snippets of plays, songs, dances, juggling, were more suitable for touring. An application to perform in the city of Dansk in 1622 described its program as “not only beautiful religious but secular comedies and tragedies, during all of which beautiful and pleasant music will be performed just as during said comedies and tragedies excellently beautiful ballets, disguisings and English dancing will be seen” (Brandt 71). At this time, Shakespeare was not recognizable by name, so his stories were often pillaged, stripped of their language, and presented as broadly sketched out melodrama or comedies.

Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) was one of Germany’s most popular playwrights, and in 1648 or 1649, he wrote a play entitled Die Absurda Comica Oder Herr Peter Squentz. In his comedic play, which he credits to the influence of the Nuremberg writer Daniel Schwenter, lower-class working men perform the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe for the King and an amused aristocracy. Sounds familiar? Most Shakespeareans certainly think so. The names are changed to localize the text to its German setting—Bottom becomes Pickelherring, Peter Quince becomes Peter Squentz—and they perform not in Athens but in the town of Rumpelskirchen. But the plot follows fundamentally the same trajectory as that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fifth act, in which the artisans form a company, assign roles, and ineptly perform the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe for a derisive court.

It is not clear how Gryphius came to access Shakespeare’s comedy. What we do know is that the rude mechanicals’ scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream lifted easily out of the larger play and were popular as burlesques, mini-plays, and even operettas throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pickleherring was also a popular clowning type on the German stage, created by English actor Robert Reynolds a decade or so earlier. With its strong physical comedy and its broadly satiric tone, it makes sense that Shakespeare’s most lamentable comedy was easily adaptable for different contexts and likely transferred well to different cultures.

Gryphius most likely did not, however, know he was adapting from Shakespeare. While several eye-witness accounts document performances of Pyramus and Thisbe in Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century, it was translated and adapted by Schwenter, and this is almost certainly Gryphius’ source. The Absurda Comica is generally assumed to have been performed as a companion piece to his own tragi-comedy Cardenio und Celine.

Gryphius’ revision of Shakespeare’s playlet was more invested in physical comedy—one eye-witness to the staging of the play recounts the lioness giving birth on Thisbe’s mantle, a spectacle that was presented using a jug of blood and a litter of real kittens who ambled around the stage (Brennecke 66). Another contemporary account of a performance by Johannes Von Rist, describes the play’s dependence on slapstick. He recalls how

The King and all the gentlemen and ladies laughed themselves almost to death to see Pickelherring with his round red beard, and prettily dressed in women’s clothing, strolling up and down. He walked mincingly and talked in a tiny voice, as though he were a ten-year old girl. (qtd. in Brennecke 64)

While in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the biggest buffoon is Nick Bottom, the actor who wants to play all of the roles, In Gryphius, the playwright Peter Squentz, the playwright, is the overreaching artist, signalling the work of the playwright that marks a transition from straight plagiarism

to adaptation. Squentz is given a seventy-line speech to set up the play before the court, presumably performed over a dumb-show. He engages in a lengthy prologue, introducing himself to the King as “the most important man in the whole world” (II.81).

The Absurda Comica also differs from the source in its use of music. Gryphius’s text includes a new song by Meister Lollinger, who played the fountain where Thisbe waits for Pyramus. The song is suitably terrible:

I am the very living fountain,

Purr, purr, purr

And water I can count on

In winter and summer;

So don’t be out of humor.

In any kind of weather,

Before, behind, I spout together

Purre, purre, purre, re, re, rea.
I flowed so fast and free-o,

Purr, purr, purr,

All could have drowned in me-o.

Here drink to all I’ve guided,

If hams you have provided;

There’s water here for scrubbing,

Far better than a tubbing.

Pyrre, pyrre, pyree, re, re, re.

The inclusion of the song not only makes the Pyramus and Thisbe play a little more consistent with the standard artistic fare of itinerant players but also gently mocking their imagined amateurism, making the Absurda Comica a loving parody of popular theatre at the time. It is, perhaps (intentionally or not) a transitional moment away from imported entertainments to the beginning of a German theatrical tradition. By beginning in rustic comedy, Gryphius is following a popular Renaissance poetical trajectory that would lead him through drama, and into devotional verse, narrative, and epic throughout the arc of his career.

The addition of music to the Absurda Comica also has implications for the history of this little corner of Shakespeare in performance. Gryphius’ dramaturgical additions look ahead to the way in which Pyramus and Thisbe will later get the musical treatment by (among others) Frederick Lampe, and Richard Leveridge and even Henry Purcell, and establishes a history of adapting the Rude Mechanicals’ scenes that is still ongoing today. In 2014, Dmitry Krymov’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), staged a surrealist fantasy of Shakespeare’s Most Lamentable Tragedy, that can arguably be traced directly back to Gryphius’ gentle metatheatrical parody of his own theatre. Without ever likely realising it, then, Andreas Gryphius most faithfully stole the very essence of Shakespeare’s comedy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Notes

Brandt, George W. German and Dutch Theatre, 1600-1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Brennecke, Ernest. Shakespeare in Germany, 1590-1700. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964

In 1964, on the 2nd and 3rd of September, Osvaldo Riofrancos directed Federico Garcia Lorca’s El Retablillo de Don Cristóbal (“The Puppet Theatre of Don Cristóbal) and La Zapatera Prodigios (“The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife”) in a makeshift temporary theatre in Central Park, by the 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue entrance.

The productions were a part of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) mobile offerings, which toured the city alongside a program that also included the Papp-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an evening of Puerto Rican poetry and music, and ballet performances, all spread throughout the summer. The Lorca plays represented an attempt to launch a Spanish-language Mobile Unit, helmed by Riofrancos and that would eventually result in the short-lived Ibero-American Theatre Workshop. In the wake of his murder by right-wing nationalist militia, Lorca’s plays had been banned in native Spain, but in the United States, they had begun to see stagings in off-Broadway, community and college theatres.

Presenting a reputed Communist playwright was perhaps a bold choice for Papp, whose high-profile appearance in front of the House un-American Activities Committee in 1958 still lingered in local memory, visible in small pockets of opposition that emerged whenever the NYSF toured public schools. It was a marker of Papp’s tenacity and the festival’s success that the NYSF could embrace Lorca openly as their inaugural Spanish language event. On the opening night, Papp had prepared remarks in Spanish, but at the last minute, he was overcome by stage-fright and reverted to introducing the plays in English.

Riofrancos’ role in this remarkable initiative is often overlooked. He was an Argentinian-born director and community organizer who began his New York career founding a home-made 30 seat theater for his El Primer Teatro Español in an apartment on 14th Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan, after a year or two of giving acting lessons to young people in a small loft nearby. In 1962, he joined with director Phoebe Brand to produce Zapareta in English and then staged a season of modern Spanish theatre at New York University. It was during these six years of producing “Theatre in the Street,” to which Riofrancos also gave the unwieldy name of “Theatre for English and Spanish for Mobilization for Youth” that Papp found him and proposed a partnership.

The two plays were chosen for the Festival because they were the plays that Lorca wrote for his own touring theatre in Spain, in either 1905 or 1906. The plays, which are broadly funny, folkloric stories, were intended to appeal to the roughly 1600 adults and 400 children who attended the first show in Central Park. The evening starred popular TV star and Puerto Rican Traveling Theater founder Miriam Colón, Riofrancos, Hermes Franqui, and Alfonso Manosalvas, in addition to amateur actors and children from the local community. The set was simple, with plain white walls on the two levels of the unit’s stage, and actors clad in brightly colored traditional Spanish costumes. As the Shoemaker’s young wife, Colón wore a vibrant embroidered red dress and flowers in her hair.

The production was staged on “an immense towed truck, 40 feet long, divided into several sections”^[i] which unfolded into an octagonal stage with audiences sitting on wooden benches and folding seats around five sides. At the end of the show, the production was packed up onto its repurposed sanitation truck and moved, over the space of a week, from the Lower East Side to Tribeca, through Brooklyn, and up to the Bronx, where it closed on Sunday 6th September in the playground of PS149, on 145th Street and Third Avenue. The production cost approximately $22,500, which is the equivalent of a little over $230,000 in 2026.

The plays were a tremendous hit, playing to large, appreciative audiences. Writing for El Diario-La Prensa, critic Fecliciano Jaspe celebrated the pantomime in Don Cristóbal, complimenting the “classic puppets with their absurd movements, their dizzying clubs, their shrill gestures.” Although less enamored with Riofranco’s diction that “unfortunately, did him little favor,”^[ii] the company’s effort was well-received by the audience, some of whom came to see the plays, and some of whom just came to get out of their apartments on a warm night - “the plays were a bonus一gratefully accepted,” as Mrs. Angelina Blanco explained to The New York Post, while enjoying the evening out with her children.^[iii]

The popularity of the night with Lorca birthed a short-lived but fruitful partnership between Riofrancos and the NYSF. The following year, Riofrancos directed Romeo y Julieta, translated by the poet Pablo Neruda and in 1966, he staged Leon Filipe’s translation of Macbeth. Unfortunately, the ongoing financial struggles to maintain the Mobile Unit meant that, despite the popularity of these shows and a workshop production entitled “Shakespeare in Spanish, Lorca in English, and Pantomime in Silence” that was produced some time around 1967, there was not enough financial support to continue and the workshop faded away. Nonetheless, Riofrancos’ legacy is still visible in the Public’s recent recommitment to bilingual Shakespeare, presenting Alfredo Michel Modenessi’s translation of Romeo y Julieta in 2021 and its 2025 Mobile Unit bi-lingual production of Much Ado About Nothing.

Notes

^[i] Alonso, Alberto. “NY Shakespeare Festival Continues on Wheels; Spanish Theater on September 1st.” El Diario-La Prensa, July 28, 1964.

^[ii] Jaspe, Feliciano. “Garcia Lorca in Central Park.” El Diario-La Prensa, September 3, 1964.

^[iii] Navarez, Alfonso. “Central Park has a Hit - in Spanish” New York Post. September 2, 1964.

So, Little Theatre Histories is an attempt to restore that balance. On the first and third Thursday of every month, join me on a trip into the archives, where we will discover your new favorite actors, reconstruct shows that have unjustly fallen by the wayside, and envision the productions that never quite made it to the stage.

We’ll start soon. Please take your seat.