Mulatto
Hey there! I’m finally working on my blog. That’s because I finally read a play. I’m in San Francisco working on Uncle Vanya and I have a fair amount of time with not a lot to do. So I’m reading and I just read a doozie of a play by Langston Hughes called Mulatto. Whoa.
The play is intense. It borders on melodrama but it has a verisimilitude that lifts it above that. The writing is visceral and immediate. A rough outline of the events is simple. A white plantation, owner, Thomas Norwood, has fathered 5 mulatto children with his housekeeper, Cora. One died in childbirth; one, William, the darkest, has become a field hand and behaves like the other blacks on the plantation; two daughters, Sallie and Bertha, both who are light skinned, although Sallie is the only one who appears in the play; and finally Robert or Bert, who resembles his father both in looks and temperament. Sallie is being sent off to school where Bert has recently returned from. She leave early in the first act. After she leaves, Norwood is visited by another white man, Fred Higgins, who does yeoman’s work giving a hefty amount of exposition.
From him, we learn that Bert was involved in a altercation in town where he spoke back to a white woman. Bert is “uppity” and does not know his place. The problem though, is that Bert knows that Norwood is his father and wishes to be acknowledged as his son and heir. He wishes to be treated like and recognized for his white parentage. Nothing doing in this world. He and Norwood argue and it ends with Norwood dying at Bert’s hand. He is then pursued by a lynch mob. Cora has some moving monologues about her plight and Bert returns home to find some measure of redemption by taking his own life in his ancestral home, coming in the front door like a man.
The play really worked on me. The relentlessness of the story, the harshness of the language, the inevitability of the plot, and the resoluteness of the characters, all worked together to drive the tragedy forward. The language used is positively brutal. Every imaginable racial slur is used by nearly everyone throughout the course of the play. My modern ears were burning. Also the black characters are all written in “dialect” as was common in the 30’s, with the exception of the educated Bert. Although the play takes place after the Civil War and slavery's “end”, the social structure on this plantation retains most of the features of the antebellum south.
This play has a standout role for an African-american woman in her 40’s in Cora, not something you can say about many plays. She seems a weak character at first but in act two has some demanding and potent monologues. Like The Crucible, the audience wishes desperately that there was some way for the characters to see each other’s point of view, but time and custom have forged their paths so completely and thoroughly that there are no options for these characters to behave other than they do. Were they to, the audience would suffer a betrayal that would render the play trivial and stupid. By sticking to the truth of the events, time, and characters, the play moves out of melodrama and into something approaching a forceful tragedy. I would very much like to see this play produced.

Wow. I have put this off. Sorry to anyone who cares. I am going to start again. This time I will limit my goals to more modest ones. I will do a maximum of two plays a week and a minimum of one. When I meet those goals with more ease, I will increase to three a week. I enjoy doing this and I hope whoever reads them finds them remotely interesting. So... to begin again...

This is not so much a play as a poetically polemical piece for theatre. It is called Self-Accusation by Peter Handke. I have read some other work of Mr. Handke. He is very experimental and German and language obsessed. His pieces often involve careful use of words. I wonder how they work in their original language.
It has a special kind of performance designation called Sprechstuck. It is designed to be spoken by one man and one woman. There are no characters. Each performer stands at a microphone and speaks either alone or in unison, quietly or loudly. The entire text is to be spoken. As there is no set delineation as to who speaks what lines, so each production will be different. Thus, there is freedom in interpreting the gender associations of the text.
The text is roughly ten pages. It is comprised of several loosely related paragraphs each filled with statements. Some are contradictory. Examples are things like: I came into the world. I became. I was begotten. I originated. I grew. Those are in the first group. Then later there are things like: I played. I misplayed. I played according to rules which, according to existing rules, were against convention.
There is a rough development in the text which begins with the imagined thoughts of and infant and develop greater complexity and meaning as the piece moves forward. Given that the performance space is meant to be bare and without ornamentation, I wonder if the performers could just read the text after deciding to how to best assign the lines to each other.
I like this piece. It requires some thought and effort to get meaning from it. It is also extremely flexible in meaning and yet at the same time fairly fixed. It is a complex piece in its intention and yet simple in it’s execution. I think I would like to try to produce it.   

I feel a little uncomfortable writing about this play because it is a new work and unpublished. However it is a play, I have read it and I will actually be appearing in it in September, so… damn the torpedoes.

The play is a very short one act, almost a sketch, called Once Upon a Mattress Store . It is very funny. There is a mattress store with a bluff, quirky salesman who is about to close the store when a final customer turns out to be a hapless thief. He would like to rob the store, but, alas, there is no money as it has been deposited already,

Very funny dialogue ensues and a cute twist ending completes it. I don’t want to give it away because I hope some of my friends who might read this will come and see it. ​

It’s cute and very entertaining.

Back after battling depression. Today’s play is The Poor of New York by Dion Boucicault from a book called American Melodrama which features four plays from the mid to late 1800’s that were written by and popular with Americans then. The play certainly qualifies as a melodrama, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a drama in which many exciting events happen and the characters have very strong or exaggerated emotions”

​The plot is fairly simple: an evil man takes advantage of a virtuous family. There is however a bit more going on in this play and as a result it is more interesting than its basic plot would suggest. Gideon Bloodgood is the evil man, in this case he is a corrupt banker who is about to abscond with the bank’s remaining assets as his investments have failed. He is interrupted in his plans by his wiley clerk Badger who has rightly surmised Bloodgood’s plot. Just as Badger suggests blackmail, a sea captain, Captain Fairweather, shows up with, not only a great name for his job, but with $100,000 that he would like Bloodgood to safeguard for his family while he is away on his next voyage.

So Bloodgood can now run away with Captain Fairweather’s money as well or just use it to save his failing bank. Badger now has more ammuntion to work his blackmail scheme and, as they come to terms, Capt. Fairweather shows ups to get his money back after hearing that Bloodgood is not as trustworthy as he first had heard. A fight ensues and Fairweather is killed. Bloodgood and Badger dispose of his body after which Bloodgood gives Badger money to be silent. Badger moves out west and Bloodgood is saved from financial ruin. Thus ends Act 1.

in Act II we meet our heroes: the Fairweather family, Mrs. Fairweather, the Captain’s widow, son Paul, and daughter Lucy; Mark Livingstone; and, finally the Puffy family, Puffy, Mrs. Puffy, and son Dan. Twenty years have passed. Livingstone is a member of the “new poor” having lost his fortune in the recent wave of bank failures. He has been force to shun his former posh society because of his poverty. He meets the Fairweather’s who have been hiding from society since their father was found dead and apparently robbed of the family’s fortune. In the interim, the Fairweather’s have been living with their faithful servants, The Puffy’s. Livingstone had once been engaged to Lucy but when she and her family were disgraced into poverty, that plan was abandoned. Now that both are poor again the romance rekindles.

Livingstone attempts to get a loan from Bloodgood who has become even more wealthy in the intervening years, Bloodgood’s daughter, Alida is in love with Livingstone and also, mistakenly believing him to be still wealthy and connected, thinks he will get her into the upper society of New York where she longs to be. This causes a rift in the romance of Lucy with both agreeing to not wed to save the other from disgrace. Badger shows up to continue blackmailing Bloodgood. The play ends with Bloodgood starting a fire in the tenement housing of our heores to destroy an incriminating letter. Bloodgood is arrested by Badger who turns out to be a long term undercover cop. Good wins, evill is punished and all is right in the world.

The things that strike me most about the play and why I find it interesting are threefold. The first is the character of Badger; second is the odd class structure; and third is the Bloodgood family and its veiled antisemitism. Despite the terrible reveal at the finale, that Badger is a policeman on a longterm assignment to entrap an evil banker, throughout the play Badger is fascinatingly amoral and charming. The revelation of his true nature is so fleeting and forced that one has no sense of it and, in hindsight, still thinks of him as an appealing rogue.

The class structure of the play is strange. Livingstone and the Fairweathers are poor but not truly proletariat and therefore deserving of more pity because of their previous high class status, Livingstone delivers a speech in which he laments losing wealth and station because there is more humiliation in having become poor that being born to it. He envies the Puffy’s, who are hardy working class folks, unpretentious and kind. Out of pity and duty, they care for their former patrons, the Faiweather’s,knowing that, as genteel people, the Fairweather’s lack the fortitude to bear their hardships unaided.
Bloodgood is an odd and obvious villian. A widower, he is driven to his misdeeds, mostly out of a blind passion to see his daughter become patrician. His daughter is a spoiled voluptuary. While not overtly Jewish, there are some indications that, despite being freakishly wealthy, access to acceptance by the patrician class is somehow denied to him, in a way that the Fairweathers and Livingstone would never be. The Puffy’s, the noble poor, do not harbor such aspirations and, knowing their place, are heroic. The ending is sudden and perfunctory and as mentioned before, trivializes one of the more interesting characters.

I like the play over all. I think because it is sincere in its support of the social hierarchy, it would be effective as satire.

I got called back to two plays so I am going to write about those two since I will read them before the callbacks.

The first is Judgment at Nuremberg by Abby Mann. This is a 2002 adaptation of Mann's script from the 1961 film script, itself and adaptation of his 1959 teleplay written for Playhouse 90. the film was a great success and is one I enjoy watching and one I own, I would love to see the live Playhouse 90 version but that is difficult to find. The film was nominated for 11 oscars and won two for Best Screenplay (Mann) and Best Actor (Maximilian Schell). Its praise and reputation are well deserved.

The play is a truncated version of the film. All of the main scenes and speeches are there. A few slight changes have been made. The Play concerns the last of the Nuremberg Trials, which were held to decide the guilt of the officials of the Nazi regime: the trial of the Third Reich's Judiciary. This trial, while probably the most important in terms of its moral and societal ramifications, came late in the process and with the uneasy alliance between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. coming apart, the public's weariness of the trials, and Germany's support needed at the onset of the Cold War, they were thought to be less important than the earlier trials of Speer, Goring and Hess. Thus efforts were made to rush to judgment and for leniency.

The play outlines the brilliant and complex defense that was put forth by a young German lawyer, whose efforts to make the entire world complicit in the rise of the Third Reich, are noteworthy and contain powerful polemics. The speeches of all of the main characters are all wonderfully written and moving to read. This is one of those plays that I like so much, I don't want to talk about but rather wish to instill in anyone who reads this with a desire to read it and find out for yourselves,

One of the changes from film to stage I like most is the change of race of the young adjutant officer assigned to Main Judge. In the film he is played by a young William Shatner, On stage the character is African-American and when he is asked whether he feels the Germans capable of evils as vile as the Holocaust, his answer is telling and poignant. A welcome addition.
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​In conclusion, I can say one should read this script. Or see the film. Or both. It will be time well spent.