1.+De+Angelis

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 1 discussions ONLY.//
Melissa Lee (The Ohio State University)

=April De Angelis's //**Playhouse Creatures**//=

= = In “Riddle of the Sphinx,” a 2005 article she wrote for //The Guardian//, April De Angelis takes stock of the status of women in theatre and asks the tough question: “at present, women artistic directors are less well represented in British theatres than at any point in the past 20 years. Moreover, last year there were 218 new plays staged in Britain—only 38 by women. In the light of these statistics, did women’s companies make a difference?”

Founded in 1973 and energized by the political activism and optimism of the decade, The Sphinx Theatre Company (formally The Women’s Theatre Group) embarked on an artistic mission prescribed by an unapologetically feminist agenda designed to make a difference, to challenge the patriarchal status quo, and above all to demonstrate that drama by and about women is relevant and vital. This sets the stage for De Angelis’s commission from The Sphinx in 1993 for a play with an all-female cast of five. To answer the call, De Angelis chose an historical subject: //Playhouse Creatures// rouses ghosts of theatre past, transporting us to the stages of Restoration England when women were, for the first time in English history, given royal “leave” to represent female characters in performed drama. In choosing her subject, De Angelis’s play pays homage to the first English actresses while at the same time offers itself up as a metatheatrical yardstick against which we—as women and contemporary theatre artists and scholars—can’t help but measure ourselves.

//Playhouse Creatures// is a memory play; memory is not only key to its dramaturgy but to its reception. The story of pretty, witty Nell Gwyn—orange girl turned professional actress turned king’s mistress—is a familiar one. To the extent that this historical character and lore of the period lives in our collective cultural memory is significant, creating in the theatre what Marvin Carlson has termed a ghosting effect, where our real life knowledge and experience of a person, place, or thing bleeds over into our reexperience of its simulacrum on stage. According to Carlson, the (re)dramatizing of the familiar produces a kind of double vision that encourages the audience to compare the known with its theatrical representation. De Angelis’s recycling of historical material invites this dual consciousness from a distinctly feminist perspective. The women performers on stage who embody the five female characters of //Playhouse Creatures// play women who are stage performers. Not only does the physical theatre and stage space function as a material bridge to the theatrical past, the female flesh that treads the boards invokes the ghosts of actresses past. We cannot help but place the female bodies in performance before us on a continuum with their foremothers and sisters in the theatre; De Angelis’s play is too self-consciously self-reflexive to avoid the comparison. This awareness of the cultural and social narrative of actresses past and present fuels De Angelis’s biting satire and underscores the play’s dramatic irony. While coaching Nell, Mrs. Betterton offers, “Never underestimate the value of opening one’s mouth while speaking. One may go a long way in the theatre with an open mouth” (17), a double entendre that unfortunately has not lost any contemporary currency.

//Playhouse Creatures// is also a ghost play in a more literal sense. The play begins and ends in the nether world with characters that are neither here nor there, but stuck on a nondescript stage without a clear understanding of purpose or direction—the proverbial actor’s nightmare. The otherworldly Doll and Nell, lost souls who fill the time by reciting snippets of dialogue from a repertoire of forgotten plays, frame the main action of the play. As Doll our narrator to the past makes plain, the actresses, who perform in the same arena where countless bears were sacrificed to a national pastime, are simply the next creatures to dance for their keep. De Angelis’s bear pit turned playhouse is haunted by the specters of whip-wielding male keepers in the guise of aristocratic theatre patrons who, in exchange for entertainment that extends beyond the stage performance, bestow personal favor and expensive trinkets on their playhouse creature of choice. Although there are no male characters listed in the dramatis personae, in compliance with the conditions of the commission, De Angelis’s play is not devoid of male characters. The Earl of Oxford and Mr. Betterton, while silent and unseen, are nonetheless part of the dramaturgical fabric. The non-presence of the male leader of the troupe arguably reinforces the women’s autonomy—Mrs. Betterton may defer all questions to Mr. Betterton’s judgment, but his absence is conspicuous and in one respect works to facilitate transference of male agency to a female character. The Earl of Oxford may be politically connected and powerful, but in an especially cunning scene, the actresses call upon their craft, reciting the poetry of Shakespeare to cast a spell against the Earl to avenge his particularly humiliating and cruel treatment of Mrs. Marshall. Their performance seems to have worked, as we hear that the Earl experiences a particularly bad bout of luck with his health. These silent male characters haunt the play; however, the answer to the question of whether or not their unseen presence empowers or undermines female agency and authority remains ambiguous, adding to the complexity of De Angelis’s dramaturgy.

The play begins with Doll’s line, “It is a fact that I was born” (1). However tempered, //Playhouse Creatures// is a celebration of women, a testament to the enduring presence and participation of women in all aspects of theatrical endeavor that invites a dialogue about the female legacy especially as it is embodied in the most visible of women in the theatre: the actress. “The move towards greater theatrical and dramatic equality of the sexes has proved almost as slow and difficult after 1700 as it was during the last forty years of the seventeenth century. Seen in this light, the Restoration actresses is not without substance: if nothing else they made women an unstoppable presence on stage, creating a foundation on which succeeding generations built, and are still building” (Howe 177).

Works Cited De Angelis, April. “Riddle of the Sphinx.” //The Guardian//. 25 Aug. 1999. ---. //Playhouse Creatures//. New York: Samuel French, 1994. Howe, Elizabeth. //The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660-1700.// Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.