Theatre Review —

A Hidden Satire Is The Best Revenge

By Julie Stern

Last weekend’s Shea Stadium mini-series between the Mets and the Braves gave rise to thoughts about the role chemistry plays in a team sport, especially Friday night’s game where the Mets came to bat in the eighth inning, down by a score of eight to one, and put together a ten-run rally. Talk about collective inspiration...

We didn’t actually see that game because we were at The Little Theater in Newtown, watching the Town Players’ opening performance of The Revenge Tragedy:A New Comedy in the Old Style, a comedy written, directed and costumed by Ruth Anne Baumgartner. Besides her skill as a playwright, which will be talked about in a minute, what was most noticeable was the chemistry that sparked the performances of the two dozen actors who were so at home and assured in the hands of a skilled director that they positively reveled in difficult language and pulled off the satirical touches with gusto.

Ms Baumgartner, a scholar whose field just happens to be Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, wrote this mock-Jacobean piece in 1979, when, as she says, she was “teaching at two universities and disillusioned by both.” Using the Renaissance convention of Italian-sounding names, she set her work in the mythical kingdom of Inania, and populated it with characters like Bursario, Illiterato, Pedagoggio, Tenurio and Vacuo, along with a couple of airheaded young women named Apathea and Narcotica.

In her program notes she explains “Inania is like the worst and most dangerous of our contemporary institutions of higher education, driven by budget alone, rewarding the obedient but not necessarily the able, rushing from fad to fad without genuine or participatory planning, willing to sacrifice substance for appearance, advised by marketers, viewing the academic community of administration and faculty as warring sides, sacrificing the great disciplines to pander to careerism, leaning increasingly on patches and part-timers to carry on an enterprise more and more hollow at the core,” while “students often seem [to the faculty] to have come to school for the parties, the intoxicants, and the Web access rather than for learning.”

When it was originally performed, the university administration missed the satire and thought it was a conventional Jacobean drama, thereby proving her point.

That was not the case in this Town Players “revival.”

As far as plot goes, Vacuo, the king of Inania, and Bursario, the Duke of Pragmatica, are pandering to the licentious Ripov by promising him the innocent and suffering virgin, Linguista, despite the fact she is already betrothed to Tutorio.

Rather than succumb to Ripov’s hateful attentions, Linguista drinks poison and dies. Vacuo and Bursario then try to placate the villainous Ripov by offering him Tutorio’s mad sister, Narcotica.

The enraged and grief-stricken Tutorio turns into a “revenger,” and joins his best friend Grammario in a revolutionary plot, backed by other disgruntled lords with names like Inglice, Filosofico and Historio, and the assistance of the court fool, Pedagoggio.

All this allows for lots of swordplay, poison, ghosts, songs, pantomimes and bodice jiggling. The participants are clearly having a wonderful time.

In keeping with the material she is using, Ms Baumgartner has written her play in verse, an achievement notable both for way she incorporates enough modern references to make it clearly accessible to audiences (who might have been expected to find this kind of language off-putting) and for the way she has coached her actors to master the diction so that it comes off smoothly and wittily.

The recorded renaissance background music sets a proper tone, the scene changes are deftly handled, and the swordfights are boffo within the tight confines of the Little Theater stage. This was an ambitious project and the cast clearly rose to the task.

All that being said, Ms Baumgartner might have benefited from the judicious hand of an impartial editor. It is difficult to cut out any part of your own creation, but the show did run for a tad over three hours, and that’s a long time, even for a very good thing.

 

(Performances continue Friday and Saturday evenings through July 22. Call 270-9144 for details or reservations.)