Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Shakespeare wrote plays that are worth the effort to (decipher and) enjoy. This becomes all the more clear when another playwright takes on a plot that approximates one of Shakespeare’s and then renders it for a modern audience in heroic couplets.
Such was the case with Lovers and Executioners, a play that my wife Kate and I saw last night at Sacramento’s B Street Theatre, where we have been subscribers for more than 20 years. It was adapted from Antoine de Montfleury’s La Femme juge et partie (1669). Montfleury was a contemporary of Molière, and, along with his father, also a playwright, a rival to the much more famous creator of modern French comedy.
Part of Montfleury’s plot was adapted by John Strand for a play commissioned by Arena Stage, the famous Washington DC theatre where my father directed many productions, and where my stepmother acted in many more. Arena Stage is also about three blocks from my mom’s apartment in Washington DC, so she has worked as a volunteer usher there after she retired from many years as a librarian. The 1998 production of this play premiered six years before my dad’s passing, so I was left to wonder if my dad saw or read the play. Surely he knew John Strand.
Ambitiously, and somewhat awkwardly, Strand has written the entire play in couplets. A poet myself, I would sometimes let my imagination drift from the improbable action of the plot to pay attention to the clever rhymes. I could see why Ezra Pound advised T.S. Eliot to remove the huge section of The Waste Land that was written in couplets, for Alexander Pope and John Dryden had already mastered that form, Pound said, and Eliot could not match their prowess. Eliot wisely took Pound’s advice, thus emphasizing the modern parts of the century’s seminal Modernist poem.
How does one write an entire play in rhyming couplets in the modern era? With the help of technology. A website that I use when crafting love poems for Kate, Rhymezone, had launched while Strand was working on Lovers and Executioners, so one could conject that the playwright used this service or another to find rhymes for his more ambitious lines. Consider this example:
BEATRICE:
Deliver me from secrets. To the keeper, they’re a plague.
GUZMAN:
It’s by secrets and deception that the great are made,
And undone.
That couplet anticipates a major theme of the play. Some of the rhymes in Lovers and Executioners were awkward, such as when lines keep ending with verbs (or, “such as when the lines with verbs do end”), leading to a stilted way of speaking that, I suppose, might mimic what we could hear in the 17th century French original.
The lover of Shakespeare will find insufficient subtext in this and most other plays written in verse. Pulling off the linguistic matches time after time is a sufficient feat, we might think, but this approach leaves insufficient room for puns, allusions, and other forms of multilayered wordplay that delight people who can track Shakespeare’s clever complexity in real time. Some of us lament the difficulty of Shakespeare’s language, but when viewing a play written in the same century as Hamlet, the absence of that linguistic and sometimes discursive difficulty makes the mere plot of a lesser playwright or translator (and perhaps every author is lesser than Shakespeare?) into the point of the play, and plots can wear thin without the language and characterization to make them come alive.
The B Street actors did a fine job, as we have come to expect. Kate and I have seen so many productions now that we feel we know the regulars, so we anticipate the treat of seeing how they will bring their own brand of humor, energy, and even pathos to their roles in each new production. My favorites include diminutive John Lamb as the earlier-quoted Guzman, exuberant pratfall artist Amy Kelly as the earlier-quoted Beatrice, and Peter Story as the apoplectic and bellicose Don Lope. Don Lope gets to cross swords with Melinda Parrett, the talented actress who in this one production plays the multiple roles of love interest, swashbuckling rival, and presiding magistrate for Kevin Kantor’s (lead) Bernard. Playgoers interested in gender and sexuality politics will find relevant themes in Parrett’s identity struggles as she wields both a rogue’s rapier and a judge’s gavel.
Is it safe to return to the theatre again? One hopes so. Each of our vaccination cards was checked at the door, and attendees were mostly (though not exclusively) masked. As someone who contracted Covid late last month from some Davis location or another, despite my avid adherence to mask and vaccination protocols, I am perhaps more Covid-paranoid than most. Not all the seats were filled for this enjoyable production, though word of mouth and the lessening fear of omicron may help with attendance. I was happy to attend. Theatres and musicians have been hit hard by the pandemic, so they deserve our support and patronage.
As an aside, radio and other forms of oral media, such as podcasts, also deserve wider recognition in this era. I was told by The B Street Theatre staff that my press credentials were being withdrawn because an audit revealed none of my reviews of or discussions about B Street Theatre productions. As the host of a radio show on KDVS since 2000, I have discussed all the B Street productions I have seen, sometimes with actual actors and playwrights. Once I was stopped on the street to discuss my recent on-air interview with Jack Gallagher as he was plugging his one-man-show A Stand-Up Guy. All that said, I do not publish transcripts of my show. A philosophical question: If an on-air personality lauds a play on the radio (remember radio?), does he make a sound?
For once, I have written up some thoughts here, so perhaps they will be discovered during the next audit of local journalists. Should that happen, I will just thank Buck Busfield, Jerry Montoya, Lyndsay Burch, and, our favorite, Dave Pierini for all their work bringing such engaging and meaningful theatre to the Sacramento Valley. As I do regularly on my audit-escaping radio show, in discoverable print I hereby encourage readers to visit and support local theatres in Davis and Sacramento, especially The B Street Theatre.
I hope you get to see this week’s Pub Quiz. Expect questions on topics raised above, and on the following: Visas and passports, data packets, cyclones, science fiction properties, passages of time, Alzheimer’s disease, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bohemians, famous casters, evacuations, inter-metallic compounds, popular Instagram properties, Soviet tanks, synesthesia in the 1980s, baptisms, opportunities to marry an Arab in Detroit, telephone men, dropouts, inspiring characters, words that rhyme and that taste sweet, Dominican friars, acids, soulful men, current events, and Shakespeare.
Thanks especially to my regular subscribers, including the members of Quizimodo, Original Vincibles, and Outside Agitators. Someone tell Keith David Watenpaugh that there’s a Star Trek question in this week’s Pub Quiz! If you would also like to subscribe, please visit https://www.patreon.com/yourquizmaster. I would love to send you the quiz every week.
Poetry Night is Thursday night at 7. We are meeting on the ROOF of the Natsoulas Gallery. You are invited.
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s Pub Quiz.
- Internet Culture. Every day, almost every writer glances at the letters BIU. What does the letter B stand for?
- Newspaper Headlines. UC Davis recently announced that it will begin using a nonlethal noisemaking machine to drive what “pest” away from a field on the west side of campus?
- European Geography. If one were to drive from Kyiv, Ukraine to Berlin, Germany, what capital city would one most likely pass through along the way?