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Burn, Baby, Burn

God bless Jesse Berger. The founder and Artistic Director of Red Bull Theatre (named for a Jacobean-era London theatre venue, no relation to the energy drink), Berger has, in my own humble view, done more than any other individual I can name to change the fate of classic theatre in New York. I used to […]

God bless Jesse Berger. The founder and Artistic Director of Red Bull Theatre (named for a Jacobean-era London theatre venue, no relation to the energy drink), Berger has, in my own humble view, done more than any other individual I can name to change the fate of classic theatre in New York. I used to think of my hometown as the place where the classics, particularly Shakespeare and his contemporaries, go to die, smothered under top-heavy concepts, or sliced up and patched together to fit a famous star ill-equipped to fit him- or herself to the role. New York, in part because of the prominence of the great Broadway and off-Broadway houses, could not boast a great classic repertory company to compare with London (or, for that matter, Minneapolis). Individual productions (frequently imports from other cities) could be great or not, but there was little institutional continuity.

Red Bull is still quite small, and I hope it remains so, but its mission is large, and I hope its influence on the New York theatre scene proves so as well. That mission is to produce lesser-known Elizabethan and Jacobean classics – Shakespeare’s Pericles, Fletcher’s Dutchess of Malfi, Marlowe’s, Edward II – and now, The Witch of Edmonton, by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley (and for all I know seven other writers who didn’t rate screen credit). Everything I’ve seen at Red Bull has displayed a manifest love for the works in question, but the productions are never scholarly exercises – they are vital, living, highly theatrical in the best sense of the word. By putting on great but not-over-familiar plays from the golden age of the English stage, they remind us just what the stage can do, and can be.

The Witch of Edmonton, which I’ve never read and, indeed, had never heard of before, is a ripped-from-the-headlines true crime story, the kind of thing the Coen brothers would have seized upon had they been around in the 17th century. The play, as presented in this production (it was no doubt cut and simplified to a degree), follows two plots.

The first plot is the most Coen-worthy. A young man, Frank Thorney (Justin Blanchard), though the son of a gentleman, serves in the house of a wealthy aristocrat, Sir Arthur Clarington (played craftily by Christopher Innvar), and loves a colleague in the same service, Winnifred (Miriam Silverman). Unfortunately, his father (Christopher McCann) does not approve, and has threatened to disinherit him if he marries her. Frank marries her in secret, and conspires with his master to conceal the fact from his father until he has time to win him over. Sir Arthur is pleased to do so, since he knows Winnifred is pregnant by him, and finds the solution to his own problem in Frank’s hasty marriage to her. But the plan goes awry, as the father is not so easily won over, demanding that Frank marry Susan Carter (Christina Pumariega), daughter of a wealthy but humble yeoman (the complex and moving Sam Tsoutsouvas), whose means he needs to tap if he is to avoid bankruptcy. Frank, unable to weasel out, marries her as well. Lie builds on lie, until the only way “out” Frank can find is to murder Susan and pin the blame on a frustrated rival for her hand, the foppish Warbeck (Craig Baldwin). But of course, murder will out.

In the second plot, a poor old woman, Mother Sawyer (played powerfully by Charlayne Woodard), abused as a witch by all and sundry passersby, finally gives in to her rage and curses her abusers. This gives the devil an opportunity, and he appears in the guise of a black dog (Derek Smith, who apparently learned a thing or two playing Scar), offering his assistance to her in getting her revenge. Mother Sawyer showers the poor cur with love, suckling him from her own blood. Thus does she become a witch indeed rather than in surmise. But this devil dog, good Satan that he is, cannot harm anyone who does not seek his own damnation. Cuddy Banks (played with cuddly charm by Adam Green), son of her chief tormenter, actually seeks the devil dog’s help in either winning the love of Katherine (Amanda Quaid), Susan’s sister, or learning to forget her, but he never considers asking for dark arts to be employed (for example, he never asks the dog to do away with his rival for Katherine’s love), and so the dog merely makes a fool of him, playing more Puck than devil. Meanwhile, another woman (the already mad Everett Quinton) is driven to suicidal madness by Mother Sawyer’s witchcraft, and this action becomes the basis for her arrest, conviction, and execution, the true end at which the devil aimed all along.

The first half of the play fairly races along, the audience poised on the edge of our seats. The second, when justice is finally visited upon the two malefactors of the piece, moves more slowly, and one gets the sense that the playwright(s) didn’t quite know how to say goodbye with the same economy with which they said hello. Nonetheless, the second half contains several moments of visceral power. I’ll note three in particular: when Cuddy Banks proves the only mortal capable of wounding the devil dog, by pitying him at their moment of parting; when Frank Thorney, having taken refuge in the home of the father of the woman he has just murdered, and given a roast fowl for dinner, asks, in a Shakespeare-worthy line that sent chills down my spine, for a knife “to cut up my little chicken;” and the blackly farcical scene when Everett Quinton chases himself around and around the stage, playing both the mad Anne Ratcliffe and her distraught husband. And this isn’t even to mention the graphically staged burning of the witch on which the drama closes.

The great challenge for a modern audience with classic plays like this is connecting across the chasm of the heightened language, and crossing that chasm is Jesse Berger’s particular strength. He directs his actors to combine a basic emotional naturalism with a willingness to deploy frankly theatrical behavior. In the wrong hands, this would become camp, but in his the combination makes us believe these are real people who are performing their stories for us. And that makes for an extremely vivid evening of theatre.

And the staging serves the play extremely well. The intimate stage of St. Clement’s Church has been divided into two zones. In the center, a bed of dirt is the home of Mother Sawyer, and also the spawning place of the devil dog. Surrounding this, a catwalk, cornered by four gothic framework towers, represents the narrow bridge we all must stay on if we are not to be cast down. The audience, meanwhile, is also divided, the larger part on one side of the stage but several rows worth of seats placed on the opposite side, nominally “on” the stage but really forming a kind of sandwich to the stage on which the drama plays out. The lack of a back wall against which to lean effectively traps the characters on stage as they are in life; they are like specimens in a cage, and we the godlike scientists observing how they react when the devil is introduced into their midst.

This is likely the only chance any of us will have to see The Witch of Edmonton performed. I’d say that’s a shame, but the run has just been extended, so the chance is not yet gone. Moreover, if his record thus far is any indication, Mr. Berger must have dozens of similar forgotten treasures waiting in the wings for their chance to strut and fret once more, and I would not begrudge them their own hours to do so. So go see The Witch, and then come back for whatever New York’s mad theatrical resurrectionist digs up next.

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