Playwrights in Person, part 2: Liz Duffy Adams (plus "Or," at the Magic)

When I went to see a preview performance of Or, at the Magic Theatre on Friday 11/5, playwright Liz Duffy Adams was in the house, and participated in a talk-back after the show. I have actually met Liz Duffy Adams on two other occasions, not that she would remember me -- first when I was an intern at JAW the summer they workshopped her play The Listener, and then last February at a Playwrights' Pub Night. So I didn't say hello to her, though I did ask her a question during the talk-back.

Or, (yes, that's the title) is a farce inspired by the life of Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn a living as a playwright. According to the show of hands at the talk-back, I was one of only 2 people in the audience to have read any Aphra Behn -- chalk it up to my majoring in drama at a former women's college, and being a proud female playwright with a nerdy interest in my predecessors. Under the "favorite quotes" section on Facebook, I have had, for several years, this morsel of Behn:

If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves, I lay down my quill--no, not so much as to make comparisons, because I will be kinder to my brothers than they have been to a defenseless woman--for I am not content to write for a third day only. I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero, and if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful world, and scorn its fickle favors.

I am no longer sure if, like Aphra, I "value fame as much as if I had been born a hero." But I am amazed at the guts it took for her to write this in the late 1600s--I find it inspirational, and so I keep it on my Facebook profile.

Clearly, Liz Duffy Adams also finds Aphra Behn an inspirational figure (and Or, has Aphra speak this very quote). The Aphra of Or, is a confident, alluring woman who can seduce both men and women, help thwart Catholic plots against King Charles' life, and, in between all this romantic and political intrigue, find the time to write masterful plays and poems. Yes, she is a superheroine! But somehow, that made me less interested in the play. I have often thought that if your reason for writing a play is to tell other people "So-and-so (or Such-and-such) is Really Awesome," the resulting play is not likely to be very good, because it will lack dramatic tension. So, watching Or, I already knew that Aphra Behn was Really Awesome, and therefore wanted more from the play. Considering the difficulties of being a female writer in 1600s England, I thought that the play's Aphra should have had more moments of vulnerability, instead of sailing through her life with such aplomb. Somehow, she manages to "have it all": enough time for indolent sensual pleasures, and enough time for writing! OK, I'm jealous.

One of the gimmicks of Or, is that this classic door-slamming farce is performed with just three actors; one (at the Magic, Natacha Roi) plays Aphra, and two others take on all the rest of the parts. Maggie Mason was hilarious and captivating in the female roles: saucy actress Nell Gwynne, surly housemaid Maria, and imperious impresario Lady Davenant (whose mile-a-minute monologue was the highlight of the play). But I thought that Ben Huber, in the male roles, didn't do enough to distinguish King Charles II from secret agent William Scot, and his voice sounded dismayingly Southern California. (The actors in this production employ their natural accents. Roi and Huber are American; Mason is English.)

At the talk-back after the show, I asked Liz Duffy Adams a very muddled, very playwright-nerdy question that went something like this: "When you're writing a play that's set in the past--and clearly you did a lot of research for this--how do you balance the desire to be faithful to what you know of the past, and to teach the audience about it, with the desire to just tell a story, you know, the requirements of drama?"

"I don't know, that's something I was asking myself all through the writing process," said Adams. "Did I succeed? You tell me."

I asked this question for a couple of reasons. Partly because I wrestle with this question when writing a play that's set in the past -- how to balance my desire to cram all my research and tons of themes into the play, with the need to make things clear and not leave too many loose threads. (I was recently talking with a friend about my play that takes place in the 1930s, agreeing with him that it suffers from my trying to cram everything in.) For, while I like big, ambitious, geeky plays, I also think that the primary purpose of theater is not to educate. Or, at least, not to educate about historical facts... it is to educate about human behavior and the human heart.

And I wasn't sure whether Adams had completely succeeded at achieving this balance between cleverness and emotion -- despite the breezy, farcical, "this is not a staid old history lesson" tone of her play. It seemed, from the questions people asked during the talk-back, that their primary interest in Or, was historic: they wanted to know if these events had "really happened" (Was Aphra Behn really a spy? Was she really King Charles' lover?). And they valued Adams not so much for her original writing and construction of a farce plot involving these characters, but rather for introducing them to Aphra Behn, and to an era of British history that many people are not familiar with. Wouldn't it have been better if they were so taken with Adams' writing that they had been full of questions about how she came up with this plot, these characters in these configurations? Or if they had talked about what the play made them feel, not what made them think? Or am I just an unredeemable playwriting-nerd?

Well, if I can be a woman and an unredeemable playwriting nerd, I guess I have Aphra Behn to thank for that.

Image: Maggie Mason as Nell Gwynne, Natacha Roi as Aphra Behn. Photo by Jennifer Reiley (found on the Magic Theater's Facebook photos page).

Men Who Read Too Much?

"Don Quixote in His Library" by Gustave Doré. Image from doreillustrations.com. (Click here to see it enlarged--the detail is amazing.)

I didn't expect to have more thoughts about literary characters who read too much so soon after my previous post, but inspiration can come from the oddest sources, and it did today.

I was reading Aphra Behn's delightful farce The Emperor of the Moon, which concerns a silly old doctor who is fascinated by astronomical and esoterical books, and is convinced that there is a kingdom on the moon. Two young men pretend to be princes of the moon kingdom in order to marry the doctor's daughter and niece. When the doctor finds out that he's been duped, and there is no lunar empire, he vows:

Burn all my books, and let my study blaze,
Burn all to ashes, and be sure the wind
Scatter the vile contagious monstrous lies.

Here the editor notes an allusion to Don Quixote, who also burns his books when he becomes aware that they have deceived him.

And that made me realize: in literature, it's not just women who read too much. Because the granddaddy of all those 19th-century female characters is Don Quixote de La Mancha--the most thoroughly literature-deluded character ever created. And one of the most memorable--and from one of the world's earliest novels.

I love how, nearly from the start, novels have satirized other genres, commented upon themselves, made claims about storytelling, described how a good novel requires a wise and critical reader. I just love that.

The missing link between Don Quixote and Northanger Abbey might be a 1752 novel by Charlotte Lennox called The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella (thanks, Wikipedia). It's the comic story of a girl who has read too much and convinced herself that she should behave like a beautiful and dazzling romance heroine. Thus she is ancestor to Catherine Morland, Tatiana Larina and Emma Bovary.

And also to Briony Tallis. Because I may be stabbing in the dark here, but I think I've discovered an Atonement allusion/in-joke. In the novel, 13-year-old Briony writes a play called The Trials of Arabella, and her plot has some similarities to Lennox's. Lennox's Arabella "suffers a severe illness caused by her leap into a river to escape imaginary ravishers" (source) and during her convalescence finally realizes that she can no longer live her life as a romance. Briony's Arabella "contracts cholera during an impetuous dash towards a seaside town with her intended" and during her convalescence realizes that "love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed" (source).

The more I think about Atonement the more it seems to self-consciously tie in with various literary traditions: country-house novel, war novel, modernist novel of shifting perceptions... and now, with references to Northanger Abbey and The Female Quixote, novels about reading the world versus reading a novel. And that's what gives it so much resonance and power--its reshaping of past traditions. Isn't the world's literary heritage grand?

Mighty Pens, Mighty Swords

I was talking to a fellow playwright last night and we got to lamenting the fact that while modern playwrights may create fantastic worlds on the page, our everyday lives tend to be quiet and constrained. We go to college and then get MFAs; we hole up somewhere and write a play; we submit it to contests; we format everything in that regimented one-page-equals-one-minute style... "Why don't we live back when playwrights actually did things?" we cried. These were the kind of adventurous writers we were thinking of, who don't seem to exist anymore:

• Christopher Marlowe, who is thought to have worked as a royal spy, which might explain his mysterious murder in a tavern
• Aphra Behn, one of my heroes (obviously!) who worked as a spy for Charles II in Antwerp in 1666, before turning to playwriting
• Samuel Beckett, who worked heroically as a courier for the French Resistance
• Vaclav Havel (another of my heroes, obviously!) whose plays, other writings, and political activism helped defeat Communism in Czechoslovakia

I especially like knowing this about Beckett. Sometimes he seems like such a distant and untouchable figure--the craggy sage whose plays espouse such a bleak, lonely vision--that he needs to be humanized, a little. So it's good to know that he fought for the French Resistance. And intriguing that his rejection of James Joyce's daughter Lucia helped drive her to schizophrenia. And comforting to visit his grave in Montparnasse Cemetery and see him buried next to his partner of 50 years, Suzanne--to know that despite the loneliness of his writing, in life and death he was not alone.

Photo from Wikipedia.

And I've always been intrigued by the notion of spying, à la Behn and Marlowe. They say Behn's spying contact, William Scott, was her lover--I hear that and I start imagining a scenario straight out of Hitchcock's Notorious, one of my all-time favorite movies. It also might be the most realistic espionage film ever made: it has no wacky James Bond gadgets, no superhumanly strong and intelligent spies, no shadowy government organizations. Just three heartbreakingly real and flawed people, and the shadowy mysteries of the human heart.

But of course, even if its emotions run deeper and its characters are more human than in a typical spy film, it's still a glossy '40s Hollywood product, and more exciting than anything I am ever likely to experience. Which brings me back to the beginning: what ever happened to the time when being a writer meant being adventurous...meant being notorious?