Edward II
Red Hen Productions
Edward II was first performed in or about 1592, just one year before Marlowe–an open homosexual, outspoken atheist, and sometime spy for Queen Elizabeth–was killed at age 29 in a tavern brawl. (The fight supposedly began as a disagreement over the bar bill, though historians have also suggested political assassination and a lovers’ quarrel.) The play is rarely done nowadays; Chicago audiences may know it from Derek Jarman’s 1991 movie version, from a stunning British production starring Ian McKellen shown on PBS almost 30 years ago, or from Bertolt Brecht’s reworking of the Marlowe script, presented by the Absolute Theatre Company in 1986. Though considered by some scholars to be the playwright’s most complex and mature work, Edward II is unlikely to appeal to theatergoers who pat themselves on the back for sitting through Shakespeare. The Bard’s lofty rhetoric, lyrical poetry, and playful juggling of tragic and comic elements are absent from Marlowe’s bleak meditation on sex and politics–and then there’s that hideous ending.
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Yet Edward II recently opened in not one but two productions. These ambitious, proficient offerings come from adventurous, itinerant nonprofit off-Loop ensembles: the Journeymen (best known for their brilliant low-budget Angels in America last summer) and Red Hen Productions (a new adjunct to the commercial LeTraunik Productions operation). The shows were in fact scheduled to open on the same night until technical problems forced the Journeymen to move their opening back a few days. It remains to be seen whether the troupes cut into or bolster each other’s audience, but the competition provides a remarkable display of young talent dedicated to bold, uncompromising, risky work. The companies’ artistic leaders haven’t merely provided different stagings of the same script–they’ve created their own distinctive adaptations by cutting, reorganizing, sometimes even radically reshaping the original text. The language is Marlowe’s, and the story is the same one he pulled from Holinshed’s Chronicles (also the source for many of Shakespeare’s plays); but the contrasting flavors of the two shows shed light on a neglected classic in sometimes fascinating ways.
Appropriately, both Red Hen and the Journeymen focus on human drama, seeking it alternately in intimate interactions between two or three people and in churchly and courtly ceremonies staged to further the characters’ aspirations. The Journeymen’s visually imaginative production is particularly strong in this regard: director Pullen contrasts the characters’ verbal duels with long passages of pageantry, ranging from the candlelit funeral procession that opens the evening (Edward takes the crown from his father’s bier and places it on his own head) to the sardonic ceremony signaling Gaveston’s downfall (the barons silently kneel when Edward walks past them toward his throne, then pointedly rise as the exiled Gaveston walks by in the other direction). These and other ceremonial episodes–which benefit from Alex Ferrill and Jonathan Watkins’s live music, ranging from Gregorian chants to martial trumpet calls to evocative flute and chime melodies to a bouncy folk-rock setting of Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”–do not add pomp for its own sake but create an experience to be shared by viewers and performers. Pullen places the audience on either side of a long, rectangular playing area; since the audience’s chairs are at floor level, some of the action is hard to see unless you’re in the front row. But mitigating the problematic sight lines is a marvelous intimacy, which also compensates for the terrible acoustics (exacerbated by the periodic rumbling of the el).
On a purely consumer level, the Journeymen’s Edward II has the edge: everything else aside, it’s cheaper–$12 a ticket as opposed to Red Hen’s top price of $25. (Red Hen is operating under an Actors’ Equity contract calling for one union actor, MacGowan, as well as a union stage manager, but the quality of the non-Equity Journeymen production is just as strong.) But both these productions merit attention for their strong choices: I found much to admire as well as criticize in both, but there’s no disputing the commitment, individuality, and talent that make this twin-spin one of the new year’s signal theater events.
