Night on the Town

Yesterday evening Sean and I drove to Staunton, a small city about 45 minutes away from Charlottesville, to see a production of Beaumont's "The Knight of the Burning Pestle" at the American Shakespeare Center. We had dinner beforehand at a cute little place called The Pampered Palate. We both had Greek salads with the tastiest feta imaginable on top, and Sean also bought a bottle of blueberry wine, which we have not yet tried. I vetoed his attempted purchase of peach-flavored port, however.

The theatre at the ASC is a re-creation of the Blackfriars Theatre in London, which after 1609 was taken over by a group of actors from the King's Men, including William Shakespeare. It became their winter playhouse, while the more famous Globe continued to be their summer venue. Blackfriars was one of the earliest indoor theaters, and (according to Wikipedia, as ever) was the first to use artificial lighting and to play music between the acts. The ASC won't let you take photos inside, but here's one from Google:

We had seats in the fourth row from the stage, which cost a pretty penny today but, as Sean pointed out wryly, would have been the cheap seats back in the day. The ASC tries to present its plays in as close to the original format as possible: that means the lights stay on, audience members are up on stage (and, in last night's show, occasionally pulled into the action), and the actors double or triple up on roles with minimal costume changes. I've seen Shakespeare done that way before, most notably the Macbeth we saw in high school (three orgasmically-writhing witches, anyone?), but not any of the comedies.

The play is an exercise in meta-theatre; it starts out with a company of actors doing a comedy about a couple of lovers, when a guy gets up out of the crowd (the row behind us, actually) and starts heckling. He and his wife (both dressed not in Jacobean, but contemporary middle-class attire, with her looking particularly Jersey-ish) start demanding changes to the play, and the rest of the show revolves around the players' increasingly farcical attempts to both satisfy their demands and keep their own play going at the same time. Beaumont's original play apparently included a lot of contemporary music, and the program noted that they substituted modern music instead so that it would more relatable for the audience. Translation: when we went in to sit down before the show, the actors were in the balcony, in full costume, singing "Eye of the Tiger," and at another point a harried husband fends off his wife by singing a version of Lenny Kravitz: "Jacobean woman, stay away from meeeee...." All in all, I thought it was pretty hysterical. It was a powerful reminder about how hard it is to do justice to a play, especially a comedy that calls for lots of physicality and bawdy gestures, just by reading it; a couple of times as I was laughing particularly hard, I found myself thinking that I probably wouldn't have found the lines funny at all by themselves, but acted out they were awesome.

We're going to go back on Sunday night for a free preview of Othello. It'll be interesting to see the range these actors can play in just the space of a couple of nights!