So I read another play. I will try to read one sooner next time. 
The play is Lady Frederick by M. Somerset Maughm. I got in a set of the plays by the same author on my Kindle Fire. The play is a three act comedy from the turn of the century. In fact, the first performance was 1907. It has a Shavian/Wilde kind of wit but lacks the heft and importance of those authors. This is very light stuff. Also, because it is from so early in the twentieth century it is quite sexist. And because it is British, it is tremendously classist. 

The plot revolves around a worldly, Irish woman, Lady Frederick Berolles whose title come from a convenient marriage. She's been living beyond her means in Monte Carlo with a bunch of rich British socialites. One of them, Lord Charles Meterson, has fallen in love with her much to his mother's displeasure. In an attempt to keep her son from proposing marriage which she believes Lady Frederick to be engineering to get out of debt, Lady Meterson sends for her brother, Paradine Fouldes to dissuade Lord Charles from proposing. Fouldes is a Wildean character, urbane, sarcastic, and world-weary. He is a good choice for the job because he was once in love Lady Frederick.There are a number on conflicts involving debt, blackmail, and marriage. Every male character in the play except the servants propose to Lady Frederick, those being a captain and and admiral. 

The admiral is the father of a character named Rose, and ingenue and love interest of Lady Frederick's younger brother Gerald, who is also on hand. Lady Frederick is trying to get Gerald married to Rose, a match not favored by the Admiral.

The play is rife with antisemitism. Lady Frederick's creditors are mostly Jewish. One is an unseen character named Cohen. The other is the captian who is portrayed as an unfeeling money lender and shameless social climber, not above using this financial hold over Gerald to secure a marriage with Lady Frederick that would give him a title and thus fulfill his father's dream of becoming part of the upper class. 

The Class politics of the play are gruesome and well they might be given who wrote it and when. That doesn't keep a couple of funny little scenes from happening. One is when a cockney dressmaker has come to collect a debt from Lady Frederick, a silly little moment of which Shaw would have been quite proud. The other is when Lady Frederick uses makeup to turn away an ardent suitor. 

As I read this play I enjoyed it. It seemed a kind of silly entertainment of the kind that would now be found on television. I don't need my plays to be heavy and arty but I think the prevalence of television has caused this kind of light entertainment to be found less on the stage. Most of the modern plays I read, even ones that are "funny' have some major social commentary lurking in them somewhere. This play was meant a very light entertainment. 

As I thought about the play and it's very conservative social messages, by the time I was done I was it, I was saddened by it. It flirts with the progressive by having a "liberated" woman as it's central character, a character whose "liberated" qualities nearly bring about her ruin until she is saved by her rich British friend who would rather have an Irish social climber around than a Jewish one. Be careful of 'liberation's" false promises. 

The play's charming start led to a sad and disheartening finish. Witty lines can only take you so far. It was kind of sad watching some characters one likes forsaking their most likable qualities so that the British class system can remain in tact.  

Today our play comes from an Everyman edition of plays called "Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century". The play is called The Family Legend, a Tragedy in Five acts by Joanna Baillie. It is a tale of warring scottish clans and is written in Shakespearean iambic pentameter blank verse. I really enjoyed reading this one. 

Unlike the last two there is an easily discernable plot and characters who talk mostly to each other. They also do things as well as talk about them. Calling this play a tragedy would have Aristotle very annoyed. Two people die and that's not nearly enough for a good tragedy, but also the people who die are hardly sympathetic. They are noble so that is in their favor, but for the people we most care about, all is well at the close of the curtain or after passing the last period. 

The play is about two scottish clans, the Campbells and the Macleans, who were often at war and seemed rather to have enjoyed fighting. They are now at peace because the new chief of the Macleans has married Helen, the daughter of the old Campbell chief. All seems quite well, but Maclean's vassals miss war and don't much like their new young chief and are distrustful of his lovely, "bewitching" bride. They are also think ill of the the "unnatural" baby that is now heir to a unified Maclean/Campbell chiefdom. They plot to kill Helen and her child and get the war back going.

The language is very Shakespearean. "Thee"s and "Thou"s are all over the place, as is that strange poetical syntax where the verb inverted is. Unlike Shakespeare, there are no prose characters. Even the slightly silly clownish characters speak in verse. Reading verse plays like this one realizes both Shakespeare's greatness and his averageness at once.The play was written in 1810, about two hundred years after Will's heyday. It very closely follows his style and does so quite credibly, but there is never quite his gift for turning a phrase or fashioning a metaphor. The verse however is solid, well formed and fun to read aloud. One realises, reading this, that there are a lot of blank verse out there and that while Shakespeare was very good at this style, he was not the only one who wrote this way. 
 
The plot is very melodramatic, and reads more like a history than a tragedy. I would love to see ,more plays like this produced because I am tired of the same Shakespeare show after show. There are some good speeches and some fun characters like Helen who is the embodiment of all good that ever was, Maclean whose inability to function at court is his undoing and Sir Hubert De Grey,Helen's ex who is the most perfect of men. 

Someone somewhere (maybe me) should produce this.

It has been too long since I posted and I am sorry about that. I had another play done earlier but apparently it did not get posted. Still it has been too long since the last time I read a play. I just finished one. It was a very, very, difficult play to read. It is called Daytrips and it is by Jo Carson and like the last play, Judevine, It is from New American Plays 2 and was published in the Early 1992. The play was written in 1988/89. 

I did not like this play. I wonder now, having read two plays in this book, whether the things I dislike most about these last two play are things that were either popular in the the late 80's/90's or that the editor of the book just happens to like these things. Both Judevine and Daytrips have the same major problem. at least as read. This play, Daytrips, has extensive production notes explaining that the style of the play is fairly splintered. This play is essentially the story of a woman. Patricia who helping with her elderly mother who is suffering from alzheimer's disease and also visiting her even more elderly Grandmother who doesn't have full blown alzheimer's but is a difficult and prickly personality. 

The play is non-linear and at first I thought this may be a technique to help give the audience a sense of the memory loss that is central to the problem of alzheimer's. I don't think that was the case when I finished as the main problem of the play shifted to the grandmother. The play shifts from dream and forward and back in time somewhat but it is ultimately a cluttered mess. 

The biggest problem with this play, like Judevine, is too much narrative. There is a character who is called Narrator and that character describes much of what goes on. We don't get to see it just hear about it. But this Narrator has a split function. She is also Pat's inner voice or some meta-version of the character Pat. There four actors in the show and two of them are playing Pat or some variation of her. Rose, the Grandmother and Rhee, the mother, make up the other two actors. The character of Rhee is also divided in two (but thankfully played by one actor) Rhee who is affected by the disease and Irene who is not. In some scenes  Rhee talks and others Irene talks. Also sometimes the Narrator takes on other characters, a nurse, a pharmacist, etc., etc.

As mentioned before the play is non-linear and thus the scenes aren't linked clearly from one another and are often as long as three exchanges. That gives a very stuttery stop/start feel to the play. The play has too many scenes. Only a few of these would be interesting to watch and work together to tell a story. The point of the play is to show you how difficult Pat's situation of dealing with these two crazy people. She dreams of and is obsessed with stories about people in similar situations who kill their charges. 

There is far too much telling and not enough showing. This is further aggravated by the fact that both Narrator and Pat narrate. To further the confusion at one point in the script the author would like all the actors to switch roles (but only if it works after rehearsing it). I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that in a play about 44 pages long at the 32 page mark. The play isn't meant to have a set and takes place in many different environments that are described, as well as dreams.


The point of the play seems to be to relieve the guilt of Pat. This play is not good. I will have another play read sooner.  

I finally finished another play. It took a while partly because 1) being at a high school reunion takes up more time than you expect, 2) I had other people to visit too, and 3) I can be seduced to watch bad television of which I am mightily ashamed. Another contributing factor was the play itself. It is from a collection of plays from the early 1990's called New American Plays 2. 

Judevine.
by David Budbill. 

The play was difficult to read. It is a word picture play based on the author's poems about a small town in Vermont. The author is also somewhat precise in what he would hope to see in a production. He wants very little set, costumes, or props. That is not much of an issue for me. As both an actor and an audience member I relish those moments of shared imagination which often develop from such minimalism. In this play, however, the author also encourages that the actors also produce all the sound effects. There are a lot of sound effects called for and some of them are quite extreme to ask a group of actors to create, the sound for instance of a welding shop or a semi passing through town. I'm sure it could be done and possibly to great effect. The problem was that as I read the play and was told each sound effect, I began to imagine a group of actors trying to make that sound. This distracted me from the text and I had to re-read sections because I forgot what was going on. 

And now we come to another problem with the play. It is more of a word picture that a play. Because it was drawn from poetry, it is very language heavy in a precise way that demands more focus and imagination when reading it than more conventional plays. There is a lot language that is not the "show don't tell" kind and much is somewhat poetic in nature. I spent so much time thinking about how this show would be staged I couldn't focus on the events.

Another thing was that was no story arc. We would meet characters, hear their life stories and then move to another. Sometimes those characters would resurface and then I had to try to remember who they were and how this scene might fit into their lives as revealed by the text and it wasn't always clear. Some characters were hard to remember. It forced me to re-read things I was already re-reading for other reasons. 

Frankly I found the play to be distinctly untheatrical. It was a collection of half prose poems and half lyrical poems strung together. I didn't much enjoy it. It had a documentary nature as if to say, "Lets' look at the lives of these unsung poor inhabitants of this town." but there was too much of an author's voice. Especially given that there was an author character onstage narrating much of the play. There was character named David who was a poet who had just moved to town. Annoyingly there was also a character called The Female Narrator. I kept wondering who this person was and why she lacked a character. There was an Ensemble voice which spoke mostly imagistic text. Who there were exactly was also confusing. Clearly they were stating the impressions of the David/Poet character, so they must be some kind of extension of him, but they were distracting. 

Their presence was further complicated by the author's note that their line could be spoken in unison or divided up by the director as he saw fit. That made me again think mostly of how this would play on the stage technically and not the emotional or impressionistic content.

Ultimately I did not like this play because it lacked drama, events, and clear characters. It was trying very had to be something like a staged Spoon River Anthology mixed with some Our Town but it lacked the focus Spoon River and the weight of Our Town.