From left: Tony Roach as Mosby, Thomas Jay Ryan as Arden, and Cara Ricketts as Alice in the 1592 tragedy Arden of Faversham. Susan (Emma Geer) looks on from the rear.
The anonymously written 1592 play Arden of Faversham is just the sort of thing that Red Bull Theater specializes in: plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that have been overshadowed by the Bard. But even the best of Shakespeare needs pruning, and Arden has received a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for artistic director Jesse Berger’s production. The result is a mixed bag: necessary condensation of characters and cutting obscure lines, but also some wholesale rewriting.
David Ryan Smith (left) is Big Will, Zachary Fine is Michael, and Veronica Falcón is the Widow Greene. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Based on an actual case of marital murder, the play focuses on Arden, a wealthy, grasping landowner embodied by Thomas Jay Ryan, a stern presence when he’s dealing with his property, but a madly jealous man who suspects his wife, Alice (Cara Ricketts), is having an affair with Mosby, a handsome tailor who has worked his way up to steward in an enemy nobleman’s household (a position akin to that of Malvolio in Twelfth Night). Mosby (a smooth Tony Roach) maintains that his visits to the Arden household are to see his sister Susan (Emma Geer), Alice’s servant. The jealous Arden, under the influence of his old friend Franklin (Thom Sesma) and Alice’s ability to wind him around her finger, temporarily cools down.
The play picks up speed when Arden and Franklin, accompanied by Arden’s dim servant Michael (Zachary Fine), who is in love with Susan, leave the homestead for a month in London. Alice and Mosby hire two killers, Big Will and Shakebag, to kill Arden in London, with the assistance of Michael; the servant has been promised Susan’s hand, although she prefers Clarke (Joshua David Robinson), a foppish painter.
Ryan as Arden confronts Mosby (Roach).
One of the strengths of Arden is that its characters are constantly thinking on their feet, with alliances breaking up and re-forming. There’s a landowner named Greene—here the Widow Greene (Veronica Falcón)—who has been evicted from her home by Arden and throws in her lot with Shakebag and Big Will, two hilarious incompetents played with relish by Haynes Thigpen and David Ryan Smith, respectively. Their first attempt at murder is undone by Michael’s irresolution. Another attempt, on a moor in the dark, is foiled by their own stupidity.
Arden of Faversham is often cited by scholars as the first domestic tragedy—its hero isn’t a high-born prince or military genius, as in Hamlet, Tamburlaine or The Spanish Tragedy. At the same time, its grotesque combination of hilarity and villainy prefigures the flowering of Jacobean works by Webster and Middleton in the 1600s. But Berger and the writers often goose both the comedy and the tragedy.
For instance, Hatcher and Walat interpolate a slapstick scene demonstrating how to handle firearms badly that’s not in the original. And Michael, who is frequently ordered to fetch the horses when Arden and Franklin are about to embark, is performed so broadly by Fine that at times he snorts equinely and gallops offstage.
Moreover, there’s a subplot in the original involving
Geer (left) is Susan, with Ricketts as Alice.
A crucifix impoisonèd,
That whoso look upon it should wax blind,
And with the scent be stifled, that ere long
He should die poisoned that did view it well.
Walat and Hatcher wisely abandon that preposterous notion, transforming the effect to
That whoso would but grasp this cross should wax blind,
And die within just moments from its touch.
But while the alteration is smart and the language clearer, they have simultaneously changed the fate of one character and made another complicit in the eventual murders. One needn’t be a purist to object.
The observance of class, too, is indifferently handled. Director Berger allows the painter Clarke to actually put his hands on the face of Mosby, who has risen to a far higher social position. Such an act would be inconceivable for the time (even though the costumes by Mika Eubanks blur the period feel with high heels and shorter skirts). Moreover, Alice invokes Mosby’s station for a final insult: “If love’s a god, he’s false and wicked,/To make me love a tailor.”
Thom Sesma (left) plays Franklin, who has stronger than usual feelings for his friend Arden (Ryan).
The verse-speaking is fine, particularly Roach in a key soliloquy (“My golden time was when I had no gold”), and the comedy is plentiful. But the constant seesawing of alliances eventually becomes wearying, and the final moments are the weakest. As Susan declares “The doors are locked,” one can see them wide open on stage, with snow falling that will trap the killers! Recriminations fly, and the play winds up with an epilogue about everyone’s fate—an old device that is still a sure-fire way to tie up loose threads. Still, Arden is staged so rarely that even a production with flaws is worth a visit.
The Red Bull Theater production of Arden of Faversham runs through April 1 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre (121 Christopher St.). Evening performances are Monday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; matinees are at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. For tickets, visit redbulltheater.com.
