![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjA couple references to this play had gone past on my twitter feed, especially from Ellen Kushner, and when one of those references mentioned it was playing in the SF Bay Area this week, I made an impulse buy of a pair of tickets. Alas, my quest to find someone to see it with me failed, but the play itself was well worth the impulse.
Aphra Behn was a mid-17th century English poet, playwright, libertine, and spy. She was of obscure origins, both in the sense of being of working-class birth, and in the sense that she re-invented her history often enough that there is little certainty about the facts. She may have traveled to Surinam as a spy, she may have married a man named Behn, she definitely was an ardent royalist and supporter of King Charles II, and worked as a spy on his behalf in the Netherlands. She may have gone to prison for debt as a consequence of never being paid for her espionage work. She definitely wrote a large number of plays, novels, and poems. And her work has a frequent them of erotic desire between women, though the extent to which she may have acted on such desire is unknown.
Adams' play opens with the (possibly fictional) stint in debtors' prison and revolves around Behn's ambition to establish herself as a playwright, entanglements in royal politics (and with the royal person), and a nuanced and complex imagining of Behn's erotic interests, including a mutual fan-girling with actress Nell Gwyn that evolves into a make-out session. The sexual element in combination with the inevitably comic device of staging a seven-role play with three actors (via quick costume changes and precipitous dashing in and out of hiding from each other) put this performance solidly in the category of "romp".
High points (for me) were the framed-as-spontaneous poetic banter between Behn and King Charles, the Comedic Servant both claiming and transforming her identity as Comedic Servant, the fate of former espionage-entanglement William Scot, and the way that Behn can be distracted from just about any other activity by the need to scribble down some lines for her current Work In Progress. The performances were all solid, though the layout of the performance space in a sort of 3/4-round made some of the lines of sight sub-optimal.
The work was staged by the Anton's Well Theater Company, evidently a very new, very small, local group. I got the impression that most of the audience members (of which there were 15) had some personal connection to the troupe. The performance was in a smallish room in the Berkeley City Club (a gorgeous building a couple blocks from campus and one of Berkeley's several pieces of Julia Morgan architecture) in which a 15-member audience was a reasonable number. The Moorish/Romanesque style of the room provided a charmingly period (if not exactly 18th c. English) setting along with the minimalist set, deployed largely to enable the necessary entrances and exits.
The last performance is tomorrow (Sunday, Dec. 6) so I fear this review isn't likely to bring in any new viewers, but local folk may want to look into future productions by this group.
Aphra Behn was a mid-17th century English poet, playwright, libertine, and spy. She was of obscure origins, both in the sense of being of working-class birth, and in the sense that she re-invented her history often enough that there is little certainty about the facts. She may have traveled to Surinam as a spy, she may have married a man named Behn, she definitely was an ardent royalist and supporter of King Charles II, and worked as a spy on his behalf in the Netherlands. She may have gone to prison for debt as a consequence of never being paid for her espionage work. She definitely wrote a large number of plays, novels, and poems. And her work has a frequent them of erotic desire between women, though the extent to which she may have acted on such desire is unknown.
Adams' play opens with the (possibly fictional) stint in debtors' prison and revolves around Behn's ambition to establish herself as a playwright, entanglements in royal politics (and with the royal person), and a nuanced and complex imagining of Behn's erotic interests, including a mutual fan-girling with actress Nell Gwyn that evolves into a make-out session. The sexual element in combination with the inevitably comic device of staging a seven-role play with three actors (via quick costume changes and precipitous dashing in and out of hiding from each other) put this performance solidly in the category of "romp".
High points (for me) were the framed-as-spontaneous poetic banter between Behn and King Charles, the Comedic Servant both claiming and transforming her identity as Comedic Servant, the fate of former espionage-entanglement William Scot, and the way that Behn can be distracted from just about any other activity by the need to scribble down some lines for her current Work In Progress. The performances were all solid, though the layout of the performance space in a sort of 3/4-round made some of the lines of sight sub-optimal.
The work was staged by the Anton's Well Theater Company, evidently a very new, very small, local group. I got the impression that most of the audience members (of which there were 15) had some personal connection to the troupe. The performance was in a smallish room in the Berkeley City Club (a gorgeous building a couple blocks from campus and one of Berkeley's several pieces of Julia Morgan architecture) in which a 15-member audience was a reasonable number. The Moorish/Romanesque style of the room provided a charmingly period (if not exactly 18th c. English) setting along with the minimalist set, deployed largely to enable the necessary entrances and exits.
The last performance is tomorrow (Sunday, Dec. 6) so I fear this review isn't likely to bring in any new viewers, but local folk may want to look into future productions by this group.
