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Sex Tragedy Saturday Preview: The Insatiate Countess

11/22/2013

 
Sex Tragedy Saturdays come to a close this weekend with our reading of John Marston's* The Insatiate Countess. Though I cut the text for Countess back in 2012, Tuesday night's rehearsal was my first time hearing the play aloud: turns out the play is wilder, sexier, and funnier than I had ever imagined. The double bed trick of the sub plot ends with both the wives pregnant after having the best sex of their lives. Apparently, their husbands perform better when they think they are cheating on them. Meanwhile, embedded stage directions point to the Countess using oral sex as the means of persuasion when asking her fourth lover to avenge her. The puns turn darker when the Countess faces beheading for her part in the murder of her second lover. She is one of four characters who face execution as a consequence for crimes committed or supposedly committed to cover up their own deviances from the sexual mores of the day. All that sex and death makes for one wild ride: the play alternates from the truly tragic to riotously ridiculous and back. I am so hungry to stage it! If you are at all free on Saturday, please join us at 2pm at The Backdoor Theater for what I am sure will be a good time. 
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Portrait of Frances Howard, the Countess of Somerset

5 Things to Know in connection to The Insatiate Countess

1. The Insatiate Countess is loosely based on the execution of Bianca Maria, Countess of Challant, for adultery in 1526. Italian author Matteo Bandello wrote of the incident in Novelle, 1554 which François Belleforest translated into French in 1565. William Painter used Belleforest's text as the basis for his inclusion of the Bianca Maria story in his collection, The Palace of Pleasure, 1567. Painter's account was Marston's principal source. 

2. The first publication of The Insatiate Countess was in 1613 which happens to be the year that King James granted Frances Howard an annulment of her marriage to Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, so she could marry Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset. Two years later she would stand trial for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, an opponent to her marriage to Carr, who died around the time of Howard's remarriage. Frances and her waiting woman, Anne Turner, were found guilty of poisoning him, though only Anne was executed. How the Overbury scandal impacted the theaters (Jacobean drama had already taken a turn for the licentious) is a matter of scholarly speculation. 

3. Part of the ritual of execution in Early Modern England was the penitent speech, which the criminal gave on the scaffold, and which was published as both a deterrent and evidence of state power. As an example, Anne Turner's Tears, recounts Turner's final words. 

4. The Children of the Queen's Revel's were the first to perform The Insatiate Countess, which makes sense given that the repertory of the boys companies tended to the more satiric and erotic. 

5.  John Marston only wrote the initial draft of The Insatiate Countess. William Barksted and Lewis Machin finished the play. 

Sex Tragedy Saturday Preview: The Maid's Tragedy

11/15/2013

 
John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont’s The Maid’s Tragedy is a sensuous, sensational, and subversive play with a plot worthy of a romance novel and dialogue worthy of the highest poetic accolades. The set up is simple. When the King commands Amintor marry Evadne, sister to the soldier Melantius, despite Amintor’s engagement to Aspatia, he sparks a fire in his court that threatens to consume his kingdom as love and loyalty lead to insurrection. It is a drama filled with the sacred and the profane where vows have the weight of souls and no one is above mockery. 
The Kings Men performed The Maid’s Tragedy at court during the 1612 Christmas season. That winter Frederick V of Bohemia (1596 – 1632) arrived to marry Princess Elizabeth Stuart (1596 – 1662). Her brother Prince Henry (1594 – 1612) had spent much of the summer planning his sister’s lavish wedding, his death that winter delayed her nuptials from Christmas to Shrovetide. In light of  Elizabeth’s loss of her brother, the depiction of a King as a scoundrel, and the level of matrimonial anxiety throughout Maid’s Tragedy, it is interesting to imagine the chords the play may have struck and the nerves it may have hit.  

Over 400 years later, The Maid’s Tragedy remains a bold tale. One I was fortune enough to direct at The Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA as part of my graduate work with Mary Baldwin College’s Shakespeare and Performance program. Johnny Adkins played the role of Amintor in completion of his MFA thesis and we prepared the script together. It is exciting to hear our cut performed by a new and different group of actors. There is so much Shakespeare in Portland, I would love for other classical work to take root in the Portland theatre scene the way that the bard has, that’s what this reading series is all about. 
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Amanda Allen playing Evadne. Photo Credit: Woods Pierce
The Maid’s Tragedy is the second offering in Salt and Sage’s Sex Tragedy Saturday Staged Reading series and we hope you will join us for this wicked and juicy bit of Jacobean drama! Saturday November 16th at The Backdoor Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd, 2 pm. Tickets $5. Cash only. 

Cast includes: Jason Maniccia, Orion J. Bradshaw, Sara Fay Goldman, Arthur Delaney, Wendy Alexandra, Matt Pavik, Grant Davis, Jake Rossman, Scott Fullerton, Kate Belden, and Sarah Peters. 

Loss, family, and a sense of belonging

11/9/2013

 
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I spent the past two months directing Romeo and Juliet at a high school, as part of Portland Playhouse's Fall Festival of Shakespeare.  We closed last weekend, after three performances at their school and a culminating event at the Winningstad Theatre in downtown Portland, as part of a two-day marathon of eight high schools performing in rapid succession, laughing for each other, crying with each other, and cheering each other on.  The following Monday, I met with my students for a final time, for all of us to share some feedback on the experience of making a play together, in the context of eight high schools and a collaborative process.  After breaking the ice with some general remarks like "it was really fun" and "I'm going to miss you guys so much," one brave student shared with us how her sister had died when she was twelve, and ever since then, she had felt like she could never be herself and didn't fit in anywhere -- until this experience, where she found a family and a support system where she felt safe and loved and accepted for who she was.  This story spurred a slew of honest sharing that tended to fall into three categories: stories about loss/pain and finding hope again, stories about what "family" means, and stories about finding a sense of belonging.  My Shakespeare students created a stunning piece of art beyond their age and experience.  And, through creative collaboration, they learned lessons about trust, friendship, acceptance, hope, and support.

Salt and Sage is pressing forward, through our Sex Tragedy Reading Series, The Twelve Dates of Christmas, and then to Great Falls in January.  Asae is a work horse, accomplishing more than seems humanly possible, and I'm doing what I can to keep up.  Sometimes, it feels like far too much.  But I know there are things much bigger than me at work in this art we create.  I witnessed them in my students this fall, and I feel them when I dive into acting, the art I love.

Holiday Horrors and Cheer

11/3/2013

 
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The first rehearsal for Twelve Dates of Christmas is this afternoon! Well, not exactly. Today is the first rehearsal in which actress, Melanie Moseley, directress, moi (Asae Dean), and stage mistress, Elizabeth Garett are all in the same room. For the last two weeks Melanie, from the comfort of her home office in Portland, and myself, from the comfort of the Manchester Art Farm in Pittsburgh, have rehearsed via Google Hangout…talking through the beats, filling in the back story, and assigning accents to the various characters. Ginna Hoben wrote Twelve Dates of Christmas and loosely based the material off of her own adventures and misadventures in dating after having her heartbroken. Twelve Dates is the story of Mary, a working actress based out of New York City, who flies home to Ohio for Thanksgiving to spend her first holiday with family plus fiancé. The fiancé cancels on her, feigning food poisoning, and Mary catches him in his lie when she tunes into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and see him sucking face with another woman on national television. While Mary goes about the business of mending her heart, her family goes about the business of setting her up. What is a newly single girl to do, though? Cherish her aloneness? Carve a few more notches on her bed post? Search for signs of a new Mr. Right? The Twelve Dates of Christmas is hilarious and heartwarming, sassy and sweet. Today is about getting the play on its feet, figuring out some of the character’s core mannerisms, and staging a kick-boxing class that stirs up some sibling rivalry. Fun!
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We will post ticket information for Twelve Dates of Christmas soon. And for those of you who are sad about the passing of Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos or craving some classical fare, Salt and Sage’s Sex Tragedy Saturday Staged Reading Series starts next weekend with The Spanish Tragedy, come and have a bloody good time!  2 pm Backdoor Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Tickets $5. Cash only. 

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Salt and Sage Productions is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of Salt and Sage Productions must be made payable to Fractured Atlas only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
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  • Home
  • About
  • Past Shows
    • Hamlet and Twelfth Night
    • Cinnamon and Cigarettes
    • Twelve Dates
    • Midsummer Nights Dream
    • Alls Well That Ends Well
    • Meet Me in the Dark
    • Brilliant Playground
  • Asae
  • Contact