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Women Warriors in Romantic Drama
by Wendy C. NielsenWomen Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830: the woman warrior. The term itself, “woman warrior,” refers to quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and on occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, the woman warrior is a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal, despite the reality of women’s participation in select scenes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The central claim of this book is the woman warrior is a way for some women writers (Olympe de Gouges, Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Mary Robinson) to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. This project focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the stage simulates the public world that female dramatists and their warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the realm of fiction, but when audiences see women fighting onstage, they confront concrete visions of impossible women. I examine dramas in the context of their performance and production histories in order to answer why so many serious dramas featuring women warriors fail to find applause, or fail to be staged at all. Dramas about women warriors seem to sometimes contribute to the argument for female citizenship when they take the form of tragedy, because the deaths of female protagonists in such plays often provoke consideration about women’s place in society. Consequently, where we find women playing soldiers in various entertainment venues, farce and satire often seem to dominate, although this book points to some exceptions. Censorship and audience demand for comedies made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. I compare male (Edmund Eyre, Heinrich von Kleist) and female writers’ dramatizations of the woman warrior. This analysis shows that the difficult project of getting audiences to take women warriors seriously resembles women writers’ struggles to enter the ostensibly male domains of tragedy and the public sphere. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
by Lucia Nigri Naya TsentourouThis collection examines the widespread phenomenon of hypocrisy in literary, theological, political, and social circles in England during the years after the Reformation and up to the Restoration. Bringing together current critical work on early modern subjectivity, performance, print history, and private and public identities and space, the collection provides readers with a way into the complexity of the term, by offering an overview of different forms of hypocrisy, including educational practice, social transaction, dramatic technique, distorted worship, female deceit, print controversy, and the performance of demonic possession. Together these approaches present an interdisciplinary examination of a term whose meanings have always been assumed, yet never fully outlined, despite the proliferation of publications on aspects of hypocrisy such as self-fashioning and disguise. Questions the chapters collectively pose include: how did hypocritical discourse conceal concerns relating to social status, gender roles, religious doctrine, and print culture? How was hypocrisy manifest materially? How did different literary genres engage with hypocrisy?
Anima Mundi
by Don NigroDrama \ 8m, 5f (with doubling). \ Unit set. \ A young American poet arrives in London at the turn of the century, falls in love with a troubled dancer and has his fortune told by Madame Blavatsky. Each tarot card triggers a vivid scene from his turbulent future. Yeats in the tower, the Satanist Alister Crowley, and cranky Ezra Pound in the mad house are there as well as Oscar Wilde among some French ladies of easy virtue, a shell shocked Everett in no man's land, the bitter ballplayer Rex, and the manic Captain Blood. At a wild seance, Wilde's ghost is summoned to discuss God and chocolate eclairs. This poetic play traces the young American's search for his elusive love, God and the meaning of art in a stunning tapestry of memories and nightmares. A National Play Award finalist, this magical drama is central to the author's cycle of Pendragon plays.
Armitage
by Don NigroMystery / 6 m., 6 f. / Unit set / Zachary Pendragon rages among the tombstones of the family burial plot. Filled with hatred and waiting for him to die, his stepdaughter Margaret watches from their Gothic mansion in the east Ohio woods. So begins the dark and labyrinthine tale of a family with a complex and terrible history. Through Margaret's journal, Zach's memories, the batty poetry of Margaret's mother, and the memories of Zach's tormented son John, a Gothic tale woven back and forth in time and space emerges. It is a tale of desperate love and suspicious deaths, of desire, murder, madness, grief and terror. Having the richness and beauty of a complex Gothic novel or a Jacobean nightmare, this remarkable saga of happenings in the Pendragon mansion builds to a stunning conclusion that is guaranteed to surprise. Perhaps the most haunting of the author's cycle of Pendragon Plays, this mystery is both funny and grotesque, moving and hypnotic.
Banana Man And Other Plays
by Don NigroA table and some chairs. In New York, in the summer of 1964, Buster Keaton appeared in a short experimental film written by Samuel Beckett. In this play, set in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village that summer, two gentlemen named Sam and Buster attempt to communicate with each other, with the unlikely help of a chattery young waitress with theatrical ambitions, who mistakes Buster for Moe from the Three Stooges and Sam for his agent. A funny and moving play about the quiet, absurd heroism of two apparently very different but very great artists. In Banana Man and Other Plays. FEE: $35 per performance.
Beast With Two Backs
by Don NigroIn Greenwich Village in the late 1920s Al, an artist, moves into a rooming house on Macdougal Street and finds himself being pulled deeper and deeper into the lives of its inhabitants. Above him live Mary Margaret, a lost actress from Ohio, and her philandering poet boyfriend, Jem. Al meets Mary Margaret when she comes home drunk one night and blunders into his bed. He falls in love with her. The landlord, McLish, keeps bursting into Al's room to help him with his romance. McLish, a failed writer, has his own troubles: a beautiful but compulsively disloyal wife. And somebody keeps playing "The Saint James Infirmary Blues." Al's attempt to rescue Mary Margaret is the core of this richly atmospheric love story which vividly recreates the world of artists and writers in this era. (Mary Margaret also appears in his Anima Mundi and Laestrygonians.) In Pendragon Plays. FEE: $75 per performance.
Boar's Head
by Don NigroThis big, colorful, uproariously funny and ultimately moving play tells the story of the Shakespearean characters who meet at the Boar's Head Tavern in East Cheap. We see the scenes Shakespeare tells us about but leaves out of HENRY IV, PARTS ONE AND TWO, HENRY V, and THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, , centering on Doll Tearsheet, her unrequited love for Ned Poins, Ned's sister Nell, impregnated by Prince Hal, and Robin, a girl masquerading as a tavern boy, also in love with Ned. Bardolph, Mistress Quickley, Justice Shallow, Pistol, Jane Nightwork and a host of other characters who live at the edge of Shakespeare move to the center in this play, along with Jack Falstaff and a dead Windmill Keeper who might be Shakespeare himself. The language is rich, the characterizations compelling, and the play has a surprisingly powerful resonance of its own. The latest of Nigro's ongoing investigations of Shakespeare and his worlds. See also LOVES LABOURS WONNE, THE GIRLHOOD OF SHAKESPEARE's HEROINES, THE CURATE SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT, THE BOHEMIAN SEACOAST and ARDY FAFIRSIN.
Chronicles
by Don NigroComic Drama / 4m, 5f / Unit set / In 1920 the Pendragons gather for the first time in years at the crumbling family mansion in Ohio where Matt Armitage lies dying. As his daughter Dorothy, who can neither hear nor speak, provides a running commentary which is heard only by the audience, her wild sister Jessie chases their half brother John Rose from room to room and tries to fathom what betrayal is behind her father's refusal to speak to her mother. Uncle David, an eccentric poet, is back from scouring Europe for a lost girl. John Rhys Pendragon, the journalist, broods over his wife's death and the loss of his beloved daughter. Sister Lizzy bustles around trying to feed everybody while enduring her own grief as Sarah, the housekeeper, is being driven mad by the confusion. Trapped in the labyrinth of a darkly cruel history, these people nevertheless love each other and make each other laugh. Richly textured and intricately woven through time and space, this funny and moving addition to the author's series the Pendragon Plays.
Cincinnati and Other Plays
by Don NigroMonologues for the Theatre. Contents: Cincinnati Nightmare with Clocks Captain Cook The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (5 monologues, titles listed below) -Axis Sally -Dead Men's Fingers -Full Fathom Five -How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? -Notes from the Moated Grange
Cinderella Waltz
by Don NigroDon Nigro . Comedy. Characters: 4 male, 5 female. Single Set. Rosey Snow is trapped in a fairy tale world that is by turns funny and a little frightening, with her stepsisters Goneril and Regan, her demented stepmother, her lecherous father, a bewildered Prince, a fairy godmother who sings salty old sailor songs, a troll and a possibly homicidal village idiot. This play investigates the archetypal origins of the world's most popular fairy tale, contrasting the familiar and charming Perrault version with the darker, more ancient and disturbing tale recorded by the brothers Grimm. Grotesque farce and romantic fantasy blend in a fairy tale for adults.
Circus Animals' Desertion
by Don NigroComedic Drama / 3m, 4f / Unit Set / Set in the early 1940's, this funny play tells the eerie story of frustrating, neurotic and irresponsible but resilient and strangely appealing Becky Armitage. This young lady leaves a trail of chaos but always manages to land on her feet. Because her mother died when she was born, she was raised by aunts who do not know what to do with her. Nobody will tell her who her father is. When the DeFlores carnival comes to town, she is seduced in the hall of mirrors by Romeo DeFlores. He skips town leaving her pregnant. She marries the town librarian and he is a good father to her child, but when the carnival returns she conceives another child in the labyrinth of mirrors and her gentle husband begins to lose his mind. An addition to the author's Pendragon plays, this moving play features characters that also appear in Chronicles and November. In the series the Pendragon Plays
The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It
by Don NigroComedy / 4m, 3f / This unusual piece is subtitled "The record of one company's attempt to perform the play by William Shakespeare". When the prolific Mr. Nigro was asked by a professional theatre company to adapt As You Like It so that it could be performed by a company of seven, he devised a completely original play about a rag tag group of players led by a dotty old curate who must present Shakespeare's play. The dramatic interest and the comedy derive from their hilarious attempts to impersonate all of Shakespeare's characters. The play has had numerous productions nationwide and has become an underground comic classic.
Dark Sonnets of the Lady
by Don NigroDrama / Characters: 4 male, 4 femaleScenery: Unit set. A finalist for the National Play Award, this funny drama takes place in Vienna, 1900. A beautiful and brilliant young girl enters the office of Sigmund Freud to begin the most famous and controversial encounter in psychoanalysis. Dora is funny, suspicious, sarcastic and elusive. Freud becomes obsessed by her and he moves like a detective through the mystery of her mind, finding a lecherous father, an obsessed mother, an irritating brother, a sinister admirer with a seductive wife, and a lost little governess. Nightmares, fantasies, hallucinations and memories materialize on stage in a kaleidoscopic tapestry as Freud moves closer and closer to the truth about Dora's murky past. Is Dora sick or is the corrupt patriarchal society in which she and Freud are trapped the source of a complex group neurosis that binds the characters together in a web of desperate erotic relationships? The play becomes a war between Dora and Freud over the nature of truth and the uneasy truce between men and women. This tragic love story is laced with haunting Strauss waltzes.
Deflores and Other Plays
by Don NigroContents: Broadway Macabre Creatures Lurking in the Churchyard Deflores Doctor Faustus Gogol The Irish Girl Kissed in the Rain Wolfsbane
Dramatis Personae
by Don NigroDrama / 4m, 7f / Unit Set / In April of 1946 the elderly Alison Armitage is sitting by her window. She is certain the young man she sees leaning against his black Chevy at the end of the lane is Death and that he has come for her. What is left of the Pendragon family is waiting downstairs to see her, but she refuses to let them in. As they wait they are forced to speak to each other for the first time in years, confronting some longstanding grudges and considering some looming dilemmas. Featuring characters from several other installments in the author's cycle of Pendragon plays, Dramatis Personae offers fascinating insights into this complex and compelling family.
Fisher King
by Don NigroDrama / 8m, 4f / Unit Set / Arthurian legends are reborn in the Civil War era in this addition to the author's Pendragon cycle of plays. In the autumn of 1864, Major Pendragon and some of his men wander in a dark forest, unable to find their way back to the Union Army. They encounter a young man who wants to become a soldier, a tattered revival tent where a demented preacher speaks gibberish while his daughter operates a pump organ, and an old man fishing near a haunted mansion who leads them to the Holy Grail. This eerie play offers new insights into characters also seen in Armitage, Green Man and Sorceress. The author was awarded a Playwriting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for Fisher King.
Genesis and Other Plays
by Don Nigro9 Monologue plays, including: Animal Salvation, Boneyard, The Dark, Diogenes the Dog, Frankenstein, Genesis, Haunted, Horse Farce, Madrigals
Glamorgan & Other Plays
by Don NigroCollection of plays including: Fair Rosamund and Her Murderer; Give Us a Kiss and Show Us Your Knickers ; Glamorgan; Major Weir; Necropolis; Squirrels; The Weird Sisters; Within the Ghostly; Mansion's Labyrinth
God's Spies/Crossing T
by Don NigroComedy / 1m, 2f / Interior / This is a hilarious send up of religious television programs. A talk show is on the air that features interviews with people about their religious conversions. Guests offer testimonials of their faith. The first person interviewed by stalwart Dale Clabby discourses on devil worship in popular music. The next claims to have talked to God in a belfry. Her testimonial is hardly what Dale expects.
Great Gromboolian Plain
by Don NigroCollection of plays including: The Great Gromboolian Plain; The Sin-Eater; Ballerinas; The Lost Girl; The Babel of Circular Labyrinths Séance; The Dead Wife; Wonders of the Invisible World Revealed
Horrid Massacre in Boston
by Don NigroDark Dramatic Comedy / 4m, 4f / Interior / Jane Lamb, an orphan, finds a home at Mrs. Turley's Bunch of Grapes Inn in Boston during the Revolution. The colorful, eccentric and dangerous regulars she encounters there include a demonic roustabout who is a patriot, a traitor or a bit of both; Ophelia, a mad girl who talks to mice, and the Oyster Man, a street vendor obsessed with the Boston Massacre where he received a wound that has scrambled his brains to an alarming degree. Jane learns a vivid lesson about the dark underside of patriotic mythology in this nightmarish world of murder, secrets, betrayal and lunacy. This savagely funny, robust and haunting play is part of the author's series Pendragon Plays.
Laestrygonians
by Don NigroFull length, drama / 3m, 3f / Unit set / Silent film starlet Mary Margaret is alone in her Hollywood bungalow, about to kill herself. A former Shakespearean stage actor, now a drunken silent movie leading man with a bad reputation, calls on her and tries to convince her to face life. In the course of their hilarious conflict, images of the actor's past emerge. His efforts to help Mary Margaret live force him to deal with his own demons and find a way to cope with the terrible secret that eats away at him like the cannibal Laestrygonians in Homer's Odyssey. Funny and rich in character and language, this powerful and unusual love story, part of the Pendragon series of plays see page73, is rich with great audition monologues and scenes. Don Nigro's followers will recognize some of the characters from Chronicles, Anima Mundi, Beast with Two Backs, Autumn Leaves and Dramatis Personae--all plays from is series Pendragon Plays.
Loves Labours Wonne
by Don NigroComic drama / 9m, 5f (with doubling) / Unit set / Dark and strange, ribald, funny, sad and beautiful, this unique play takes audiences on an inspiring trip deep into William Shakespeare's soul. Late on the stormy night on which he is to retire to the country, Shakespeare staggers drunkenly onto the stage of the Globe Theatre. Longing for quiet, green Stratford yet grieving for the London theatre world that has been his life, he is tortured by memories and hallucinations of his early struggles in the vicious city quagmire. His daughters arise as Miranda and Ariel and join the notorious hack Robert Greene who comes from the dead to accuse him of Marlowe's murder. Queen Elizabeth makes a cameo appearance and people from his life mix with characters from his plays to create a wild hallucinatory investigation into the nightmare of art.
Lucia Mad
by Don NigroDark comic drama / 4m, 2f / Simple set / This lyrical, intensely funny and haunting play about the madness of James Joyce's beloved daughter Lucia traces the imagined course of her doomed love for the young Samuel Beckett and investigates the relationship of creation to love and madness. Joyce is living in Paris and deeply absorbed in the composition of his last great work in progress eventually to become his enigmatic masterpiece Finnegan's Wake . He adores his beautiful and gifted daughter Lucia, but is unable to give her the attention she craves. Her down to earth, no nonsense mother, Nora, also loves her, but must spend much of her time looking after her absent minded genius husband. When Joyce's young disciple Beckett appears, Lucia falls madly in love with him and Beckett is torn between his reverence for Joyce, his compassion for Lucia, and his terror of her bottomless need for love. Lucia has a sharp eye and a wicked sense of humor, and she retains both as she slips deeper and deeper into madness despite the best efforts of Joyce, Nora, Beckett, Jung and Napoleon. This is a wildly funny play with complex and vivid characters, rich language and an eerie, eccentric and melancholy beauty.
Mariner
by Don NigroThis wild epic celebrates the mad obsession and ambiguous triumph of Christopher Columbus. The charming Italian mariner and lover moves through the nightmare of his life, loves and struggles against authority and stupidity, confronting the wondrous and terrible fruits of his obsession. He is brought to judgment before the inquisition for the sins of lechery and pride. Kings, queens, mermaids, dead sailors, lovers, princes, fools and even madhouse inhabitants haunt and taunt the compromised hero. This play, commissioned for the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage, is rich in language, action, character and humor as it explores the consequences of exploration, discovery, madness and creation.