Michael Urie (left) is William Shakespeare, and Ryan Spahn is his servant, Francis Sir, in Talene Monahon’s comedy Jane Anger.
Poking fun at Shakespeare has been a fruitful pastime for more than a century. George Bernard Shaw enjoyed taking the Bard down a peg in his reviews of Victorian productions. In the 1950s Richard Armour wrote cheeky synopses of the plays in Twisted Tales from Shakespeare, and in 2015 the Broadway musical Something Rotten made fun of Shakespeare himself. Now actress and playwright Talene Monahon has done her bit to twist the dagger a few more times into the playwright with an often funny and splendidly acted Jane Anger.
The full title of Monahon’s play announces its overriding comic spirit, echoing the rogue pamphlets of the period, such as Thomas Harman’s A Caveat Or Warning For Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds. Monahon’s subtitle for Jane Anger is The Lamentable Comedie of Jane Anger, that Cunning Woman, and also of Willy Shakefpeare and his Peasant Companion, Francis, Yes and Also of Anne Hathaway (also a Woman) Who Tried Very Hard. Anger, incidentally, was a real person, who in 1589 reputedly wrote Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, a feminist pamphlet arguing for equal rights.
Amelia Workman plays Jane Anger, an advocate for women’s rights, and Talene Monahon plays Anne Hathaway in Monahon’s new comedy.
The play opens with Amelia Workman’s deep-voiced, forceful Jane entering clad in a black beaked medical mask, a long black coat, and black gloves—the preventive attire worn during the plagues of the Renaissance. She introduces herself and sets the scene: London in 1606. The pestilence is raging. Houses are marked with an X and sealed when a plague victim is carried out.
Amid the turmoil, Jane boils with rage and apprehension: “I don’t know how many more plagues I’ll see the other end of.” She describes the distancing measures of the epidemic, a.k.a. “the Pony Rule”: “That is, strangers should use their ponies to enforce distance from one another. … And if one has no pony, one should leave the length of an imagined pony.”
Then the scene shifts to a study in a London apartment where Shakespeare (Michael Urie) and a servant named Francis Sir (Ryan Spahn), who is also an apprentice with the King’s Men, are reviewing the goods Francis has just brought back. “Did you pony?” asks Shakespeare. “Oh, I ponied,” Francis responds. Shakespeare, however, can’t remember Francis’s name, and Francis reminds him: “Sir!” Suffice it to say that Monahon has wrought a riotous Abbott and Costello routine for the actors, who play it beautifully.
Francis: I am Sir.
Shakespeare: Surely it is I who am Sir.
Francis: O yes, sir.
Shakespeare: I am asking what your name is.
Urie’s Shakespeare is unfulfilled despite his having an adoring wife in Monahon’s Anne Hathaway. Photographs by Valerie Terranova.
And so on. There are exchanges about Francis’s age—he claims to be 16, though he looks older—and Ryan Spahn makes the lowly servant the emotional heart of the piece. Francis is by turns ambitious, coy, and groveling; he’s Shakespeare’s Eve Harrington, and Spahn displays superb comic chops in the role. Urie’s Shakespeare is less likable but almost as amusing: he groans about his writer’s block; his rivalry with Ben Jonson (“Ben Jonson is notoriously prolific during plagues”); and his uncertainty about his reputation. “The Rape of Lucrece,” he recalls with satisfaction. “A stunning work, and, I think, a title that will age well.”
In addition to a gift for anachronistic intellectual humor, Monahon exhibits a talent for bawdry. Shakespeare needs sexual stimulation, and his best work has been done during relationships with two lovers known from the sonnets. “The Fair Youth and the Dark Lady,” says Francis. “Your two paramours.” The Dark Lady, Shakespeare remembers, liked “ruff play.”
Before long, Jane Anger arrives, and eventually Anne Hathaway (Monahon herself), the wife from Stratford whom Shakespeare hasn’t seen in seven years. Will has meanwhile decided to rework an old play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir: And His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella, by changing the I in Leir to an A. But, as Anne discovers, Jane has a history with Will. As Anne realizes that she is excess baggage and the Dark Lady of the sonnets is not her, the play turns more serious. The women bond. Jane enlists Francis to read the sonnets and show Anne their unpleasantness:
Francis: “Her false speaking tongue.”
Jane: “Saying she’s a liar.”
Monahon’s knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature is deep—a bit of business pays tribute to John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi—but ultimately the play is an entertainment for theater aficionados, with old jokes about agents, actors’ vanity and playwrights’ egos given a sparkling new package. As the drama shifts to earnestness and women’s rights in the late scenes, it becomes tonally jarring and gruesome, albeit in a Monty Python–esque way. Nonetheless, Monahon is a comic voice one hopes to hear again.
Jane Anger plays at the New Ohio Theatre (154 Christopher St.) through March 26. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Monday and Wednesday-Friday and at 8 p.m. on Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit JaneAngerplay.com.
