The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1988)

Folks need to stop auditioning with the tuna fish monologue from Christopher Durang’s Laughing Wild (1987). It’s a go-to comedic monologue for people who need a funny and check a list of “ten best comedic monologues for women” or something, I don’t know where they get it. People born in 2001 can’t possibly have ever seen this show. Anyway, the "Child of Prague" monologue is right there and I’ve never seen anyone try that.

When I was a sophomore at the Ohio University’s School of Theater, I played the role of Father Donnally in an undergraduate production of Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo. I recently came across my script, upon which I had drawn a faithful self-portrait (see right) as the character Father Donnally.

For the run at the Public Theatre in 1985, the role of Father Donnally was originated by Richard B. Shull who is best-remembered by my generation for performing as the judge in Billy Joel's "Keeping the Faith" music video. The role of Paul was performed by another Ohio University School of Theater grad, J. Bill McCutcheon who played Uncle Wally on Sesame Street fame and also Dropo in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

There was much about this play that I did not understand as a nineteen year-old undergrad. Alcoholism for one, child loss for another. A thinly veiled roman a clef about his own family (the playwright played the protagonist in the original production) Bette is a woman who desperately wants lots of children, but only her first survives. Bette and her husband “Boo” have the Rh factor, which was why my own grandparents’ children all died, in utero or shortly after birth.

Self (Father Donnally) with Katurah Nelson (Bette)
"The Marriage of Bette & Boo"
Ohio University School of Theatre (1988)

We say quite simply that a couple “can’t have children” but what we’re really saying is that they tried, probably several times, with heartbreaking results. After two miscarriages and a stillbirth, my grandparents adopted my father.

Father Donnally is a figure of patriarchal uselessness. He and a doctor are supposed to be played by the same actor, the only character who is not a member of Bette and Boo's family. A different actor played the doctor in this production.  

In the play Bette and Boo, every time another child is expected the doctor arrives with a swaddled bundle, drops it on the floor and announces dispassionately, “It’s dead, the baby’s dead.” In the Forum Theatre at O.U., the doctor dropped the baby from the lighting grid over the stage. On opening night, each announcement got bigger and bigger laughs from the packed house of supportive theater students.

The second weekend of performances was Parents’ Weekend, and that Saturday night there was absolute silence or uncomfortable moans whenever we made a dead baby joke. I asked our director, Dr. Condee, why all our parents didn’t laugh. 

He said quite simply, “Maybe they don’t think stillbirth is funny.”

Wayang Kulit (shadow puppetry)

Thanksgiving weekend was a pleasant, familial affair. For several years we have been feasting in the Cleveland area, to be with my folks. As this was the first holiday without father, we decided to return to Athens. I drove my Mom down, my brother flew in from the Twin Cities with his family. It has been relaxing with books and puzzles and games and television and not too much Facebook.

There were so many journeys and events I only got one run in down by the bike path. For a Thanksgiving weekend, that is odd.

Saturday I connected with Dr. Condee, the subject was shadow puppets. Since the early Aughts the good doctor has been collaborating to bring the arts into O.U.’s Southeast Asian Studies program, with an emphasis on wayang or shadow puppetry. He’s traveled extensively in Bali and Malaysia and in our brief interview he had many delightful stories and information.

He also brought a portfolio of puppets!

Traditional wayang focuses on two narratives, Rāmāyaṇa, the love story of Rama and Sita, and the Mahābhārata, and epic tale of good and evil which, according to Condee, makes The Odyssey read like a short story.

Performing the entire Mahābhārata would take ages. Peter Brook produced part of it, and it took over nine hours. Most often artists choose the present part of the tale, which is called a trunk story. However, you can also tell original stories using various characters from the epic, and that would be called a branch story.

Red Onion, White Garlic is a folk tale for children, not part of either of these epics, though we will be incorporating wayang into the performance. Part of my conversation with Condee was to gain further insight into the practice, and how that might affect the way I think about my script, which I am in the process of writing.

We met at Donkey, which is apparently our established hangout. He had brought both plastic puppets, and also two more traditional characters made of hammered leather. The walls of the coffee shop were hung with art so available projection space was cramped, but it did mean there were several bright spot lights which was very helpful in cast these incredible, colorful shadows on the wall.

He described to me several companies, including those which experiment with certain performance traditions, expanding the possibilities of shadow art while maintaining the spirit of the craft.

In the most traditional performance, one player works all of the puppets and provides all the voices from behind a screen roughly four feet high and eight feet wide. Flickering light from an oil candle give the characters the illusion of subtle movement, like a living thing. The closer a puppet is to the screen the greater the detail, the further away they become diffuse - but much larger.

Larry Reed’s company ShadowLight often uses many players, behind but also in front enormous screens employing computer projections and light which keeps puppets in focus no matter how far they are from the screen and close to the light.

Our meeting, though brief, greatly improved my understanding of the practice, and I look forward to further study. Later, I got a plaid, wool sportcoat from Athens Underground.



Red Onion, White Garlic at Talespinner Children's Theatre opens April 8, 2017.

The Great Globe Itself: Creating Vertical Space

"Inner Below" humor.

In the six months since Bill Condee and I last shared tea, I composed the first draft of The Great Globe Itself, the play which inspired me to contact him. During that same time, he traveled to Malaysia on a Fulbright to teach, lecture and conduct research on Malaysia shadow puppetry.

When I reached out to him yesterday, informing him that I was spending a brief 36-hour period in Athens and did he have time to chat, he promised to quickly read the script I had sent several weeks earlier in preparation for our meeting. In that way, it was much like my preparing for his theater history class my sophomore year.

Much of his guidance is of a piece with one of my concerns about the production in general, which is making sure the audience, any audience, comprehends where we are and what is happening.

A few days ago the design team met to have our first production meeting, to discuss the set and costumes and overall concept. One of the questions is how we can make a single set (all three scenes take place at one of three "Globe Theatres") reflect three different time periods.

One of our interns has been tasked with dramaturgical study, and will be producing essays to be included in the program, which will act more like a study guide, to be sent in advance to libraries and schools in preparation for the production.

Finally, we will engage a dialect coach, so that characters from each time period have a distinct, regional accent.

So, Dr. Condee. We meet again.

However, I am aware it all come back to the text. In our meeting, the good Doctor suggested there are not enough "sign posts" of what is to come, and clearly laying out time, place, and facts.

This has been a major concern of mine, as I have been writing this piece for an audience who knows little to nothing about Shakespeare and his time, rather than for an insidery piece, full of private jokes for literary-minded people. Every line in Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is hilarious - if you have the entire first folio memorized.

As our conversation continued, even he suggested some very funny bits of business that involve the discrediting of John Cranford Adam's theory of the original Globe having included a small, intimate stage in the rear of the space, for intimate scenes. This area (now referred to as the "tiring house") would feature the worst sight lines and acoustics, and render the play unwatchable to those who had paid the most pennies to see the production!

But I would have to explain all that, as I just have, in order to mock it.

However, these things are relevant and important to "getting" the first scene:

• Who are these men? Burbage is clearly important historically, but he's more important that described here. The man who originated the roles of Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth? These things are not obvious.
• John Fletcher, his significance is also not emphasized enough.
• What makes it exciting for audiences to enter and experience a play at the Globe Theatre?

For that last question, we turned to my wife Toni who was joining us.  She has often expressed her great love of the Re-imagined Hanna Theatre™ as the most beautiful theater space in Cleveland, and  using the Hanna as a model of experience has been helpful to creating this work. In the play I describe what it is like to play on the stage of such a space. However, what is not coming through is what it feels like to be in the audience.

Actually, I have tried to do that, with the character of the tour guide in 2005 at Shakespeare's Globe, but perhaps that is too far along in the proceedings.

Following the first reading, one of those in attendance expressed their view that the play successfully portrays the Globe as its own character. When I asked this question, "Is the Globe a character?" Condee disagreed. Not to him, not enough, and this opinion is important to me because he is the theater space guy.

The theory is that players would drag their cart into a courtyard and thereby have not only listeners on the ground before them, but also makeshift galleries, provided by those hanging out on the balconies rising several floors into the sky. This, presumably, was the model for not only the Globe but also Blackfriars.

Hanna Theatre, Cleveland

This creates vertical space to be filled by the performer. Condee rose to his feet in the coffee house (to the amusement of those in proximity) to enact a grand vertical gesture, his open, out-stretched palm rising from right in front of him, to over his head, his gaze following his hand.

Intimate, introspective gestures will not do. You cannot bend over and emote into your hands, the acoustics and sightlines in the original Globe were simply too poor, it was a necessity to draw your audience to you.

My wife's question, then, was how to present this in the numerous spaces to which this production will travel. Each of them is flat, they are horizontal spaces, with audiences at the same level or below, as in a traditional proscenium. Should the players - the characters - in the place, convey the struggle to connect.

Each new question threatens to turn the piece into a dialectic, a play about space, which could be exciting, I guess. Returning to the motivation of the players themselves, Condee returned to the subject of signposts, and whether it were possible to foreshadow future events.

At first, I was leery of portraying people, in the moment, realizing their destiny, as that would be too odd, people don't do that. Each of the days represented are ordinary days which are a catalyst for future opportunity. Do the players comprehend in the moment the magnitude of their own future significance?

I guess I am really only referring to Wanamaker here. He's only a young adult in his featured scene, and nowhere near the point in his life where he has germinated his legacy. However, there is someone else in the scene who has the potential do it for him.

To be continued.

Shakespeare's Audience (book)

A couple months ago I met with a professor of mine, it was the first time in over twenty years we had been in each other’s company. He looks the same, though he was much younger than I am now when he was my director, theater history professor, and curriculum advisor. His hair was thin then, and it is the same now, whereas mine is just gone.

Dr. William Faricy Condee is today Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. During my time as an undergraduate I spent sophomore year in his theater history class (for which I read absolutely nothing) and I took a course of his on theater architecture. I also like to brag that I am the only person at O.U. Ever to be directed by the good Doctor twice, as a sophomore in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and as a fifth-year in the world premiere of The Hanged Angels by W.R. Smiddie.

Condee's expertise is in theater space. He has written two books, Coal and Culture: The Opera House in Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2005) and Theatrical Space: A Guide for Directors and Designers (Scarecrow Press, 1995) in addition to numerous articles on the subject.

The architecture course I took was a summer course, so I and a classmate were the only actors in attendance, with a dozen or so “others” who were complete to fulfill liberals arts credits. Condee impressed we two to make a few points abut the relative importance of space. He chose a scene from a translation of the original Medea, and the "Gentlemen Caller" scene from The Glass Menagerie, and asked us to perform each in a small, windowless office in the basement of the T-Com Building, and by the light of a candle. The Tennessee Williams piece played quite well, but we were never loud enough the suit the Doctor for Euripides.

Then we took the class to Peden Stadium and we stood at the fifty-yard line and performed both scenes again.

One way to look at is is, you have to consider the space when choosing which production to mount. But the more basic observation, though not obvious to me at first, is that these plays were written for their intended spaces. Nobody wrote intimate plays in Ancient Greece (that we know of) because they were producing work for the “theatron”.

Currently I am tossing ideas around my head for a new play about The Globe playhouse, the theater for which Shakespeare wrote his plays. This is why I finally, at long last, got in touch with my mentor. That’s a lesson, kids. Stay in touch with your mentors.

On the date in question, last April, Condee had an hour to spare and I had a lot of really, uh, super questions prepared … like, what effect did the space have on Shakespeare’s work?

He said, “I have no idea.”

That was like, the best question I had.

However, the hour passed quickly, as I told stories from the past twenty years, to kind of justify my existence, and he gave me a bibliography. He strongly recommended Architecture, Actor and Audience (1993) by Ian Mackintosh, and also Shakespeare’s Audience (1941) by Alfred Harbage, among others. It was this second that I went through rather swiftly, for though it is an academic investigation into the demographics of the audience for the Globe theater, it is charmingly written, easy for the layman, full of facts but also colorful details.

I did begin the Mackintosh book, and now intend to finish it. The view from the Globe “tiring house” and stage is very different from that of its audience.

“Their builders succeeded in getting as many people as close as possible to the actor without jeopardizing the actor’s primary task of communicating with every spectator, however distant.” - Mackintosh, p. 10

Such was the feeling I had a couple weeks back, standing on the stage of the Hanna Theatre, upon the thrust stage. I was leading a small tour through the all the Playhouse Square theaters, and as is my wont, began in the massive 3,200-seat State Theatre and concluded in the intimate 550-seat Hanna.

Looking out, from the edge of the platform thrust (the only such professional stage in Cleveland) I had the sensation that the balcony was leaning towards me, a feeling at once emboldening and vertiginous.

LOWIN
Planted upon this scaffold,
A swaying sea of ragged heads at my feet,
I feel twenty hands high.
The eyes of merchants without number,
Men of means within the galleries,
So close that I could slap the wig off of a lord.
Slap it right off. Not only with my words --

FLETCHER
My words.

LOWIN
-- But with my mitts. That close.

David Hansen © 2014

Early estimates (dating from early last century) of the size of that crowd were based on modern fire codes or a basis of contemporary seating, one which includes seats. Those scholars suggested the Globe held around 500 as well. Since that time, we take into account the fact that those in the pit stood, fire codes did not exist, and that even the galleries were packed. A contemporary account suggest a number as high as 3,000 but was probably two-thirds or half that. That is still an awful lot of people in an intimate space.

One of the things I truly enjoyed about Harbage’s book is that it dispels certain points of conventional wisdom, and in doing so honors the Elizabethan people, and the reputation of Shakespeare himself.

When speaking of Shakespeare’s audience, the opinions of members of the clergy are often quoted, those who despair at the den of sin and vice represented by the theater. In this case, they are speaking specifically of the building itself, and not the content of the work.

Harbage’s careful examination of contemporary accounts provides no indication that more crimes took place in a public theater than anywhere else. If anything, it indicates the opposite. He could also find no indication that those who publicly warned against the attendance at the theater actually ever went there themselves.

Of the private theaters, they said nothing. When the working class were priced out of attendance, and only those who could afford could attend, apparently everything was copacetic within the hall. But Shakespeare did not write for those houses, he wrote for the Globe. And Shakespeare was and is the more popular playwright.

As Harbage puts it, “The difference between Shakespeare and (John) Fletcher is, in some inverse fashion, the difference between a penny and sixpence.”

The documentable fact is that Shakespeare was popular in his own time, and very popular. The conclusion based on the assumption that those in the higher (more expensive) galleries were erudite and intelligent and those in the pit a mob of cat-calling thugs is that that Shakespeare wrote part of his play for one class, and part for another.

But that would make as little sense then as it would today. The so-called “groundlings” were intelligent, they were trained professionals, craftsmen and apprentices, and most likely regular theatergoers. Listening to plays was something they (unlike you) did very often. They were self-trained in hearing, in listening and appreciating.

William Shakespeare was successful because he wrote everything he wrote for everyone.

To be continued.

"Shakespeare's Audience" by Alfred Harbage
Columbia University Press, 1941

"Architecture, Actor and Audience" by Ian Mackintosh
Routledge, 1993