Play a Day: Wonder of Our Stage

Monica Cross

For Monday, I read Wonder of Our Stage by Monica Cross and posted at New Play Exchange.

I am currently reading The Mirror and The Light, Hilary Mantel's third book in her trilogy of the life and work of Thomas Cromwell. If the first two novels taught us anything, it was dangerous the marry Henry VIII. This third book, which I am only partway through, teaches us how dangerous it became to marry anyone even related to Henry VIII.

Last spring I first read Wonder of Our Stage during the run of King Lear at Beck Center. Cross has since created a final revision, and so I wanted to read it again.

Mantel, in her latest work, echoes the premise of Cross's play, which is how fraught it was to be a female heir to the throne or monarch herself when it comes to matrimony. To marry a male foreigner of any rank is to be subordinate to an entire nation, to marry an Englishman is to be subordinate to a subject. Because women are subordinate, and even the Queen of England couldn't change that.

Wonder of Our Stage takes the world of Harold Bloom quite literally, that Shakespearpeare "invented the human," and this play is a deeply pleasurable contemplation on the nature of what it is to be human. The playwright here also playfully tweaks the myths surrounding Shakespeare and the suggestion that did not write his own work.

In the past I have made comment on fictional plays about Shakespeare, scripts in which he is present and those in which he is not. In any of these cases the cardinal sin is that a member of the audience must have brushed up their Shakespeare in order to appreciate the many inside jokes. This is not the case with Cross's work, which is enjoyable entriely on its own. 

Elements of many of the Bard’s work, entwined with homages to Frankenstein, Pinocchio, and all stories of a child or creation in conflict with their parent or creator. Elegiac and inspiring, this script is a must-read.

Who should I read tomorrow?