Haley Wong (left) and Claire Siebers in Emma Horwitz’s Mary Gets Hers, a spoof of Hrosvitha of Gandersheim’s 10th-century religious play, Abraham, a production by Playwrights Realm.
Emma Horwitz’s new comedy, Mary Gets Hers, is a quirky coming-of-age story. Inspired by a 10th-century comedy, Abraham, by Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, Horwitz has retooled her work for contemporary audiences, with a lot of tomfoolery folded in, and director Josiah Davis, Horwitz’s long-time collaborator, has cast women in all the roles.
Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, born ca. 935 C.E., is purportedly the first known female playwright. But, unlike the earlier Roman playwright Terence, who created stories about women who were weak and morally corrupt, Hrosvitha’s dramas were about virtuous virgins devoted to God and who overcame adversity.
While Horwitz’s intention to shine a light on a remarkable medieval woman writer and her work is admirable, she unfortunately doesn’t succeed in creating a compelling spin-off of the original.
Wong as Mary with Kai Heath as the Soldier in Mary Gets Hers, directed by Josiah Davis.
Here is the plot of Abraham in a nutshell: A 7-year-old orphan named Mary is found by two hermits, Abraham (Susannah Perkins) and Ephraim (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), who are determined that Mary emulate her heavenly namesake, who is the “first virgin of virgins.” With their quotidian routine of psalm-singing, praying to God, and subsisting on a meager bowl of cereal, the hermits believe that they are showing Mary, by their own self-abnegation, how to gain eternal salvation. Mary has a plan of her own, however, and suffice it to say, it embraces a world beyond the monastic walls.
Mary Gets Hers misses the mark from the get-go by having its eponymous protagonist come across as far too cute. Haley Wong faces the difficulty of an adult actor trying to play a 7-year-old child convincingly; she winks excessively at the audience as she tries to pull off the illusion that she’s a pint-sized orphan. But there are other dramatic scenes that fail to take off in this slapstick show.
A case in point: When Ephraim pretends to present Mary with options for choosing her own path in life, he actually is setting a trap for her, in which he slyly interprets her momentary silence as a tacit agreement that she wants God to be her mystical spouse. Or, as he facetiously says to the waif who has scarcely said “Boo” since her arrival at the monastery: “Mary: Don’t say anything if you want to be betrothed to God.” Although Ephraim’s prank seems like a slam dunk for a big laugh, the comic timing is off. Chavez-Richmond’s Ephraim and Perkins’s Abraham are so busy chewing the scenery after their supposed moral victory over the devil that they hardly give the audience a chance to chuckle.
There are other rough patches, as in a pivotal scene after Mary, now a young woman, flees the monastery and eventually runs into the Master of the Inn (Claire Siebers). After introducing herself as Mary, and pointedly telling him that “I’m not the mother of God,” the Master of the Inn cunningly takes advantage of her youth and naïveté. He offers Mary food, wine, and lodging, and once she accepts, he begins to send a steady stream of his “friends” to her room. While this episode might easily hold the most dramatic tension in the story, as Mary loses her virginity and becomes a common prostitute, Horwitz’s dialogue between Mary and her various lovers is a snore, with a lot of nonsensical conversations punctuated by her johns’ saying, “I love you.”
Octavia Chavez-Richmond plays Ephraim, and Susannah Perkins is Abraham. Photographs by Daniel J. Vasquez Productions.
The drama gains more psychological heft when Abraham dispatches a soldier (Kai Heath) to find Mary and rescue her. Whether or not Mary continues in her worldly ways or repents is at the moral center of the story.
While love—parental, spiritual, communal, and erotic—is touched upon, the characters are so broadly written that it’s hard to glimpse for more than a nanosecond any character’s heart or soul. This production’s bizarre, offbeat humor sometimes smacks of a Marx Brothers sketch and at other times is reminiscent of a Monty Python film.
You-Shin Chen’s set design is mostly a swirl of dreary-looking curtains, with Cha See’s lighting adding a medieval mystique to their dusty folds. Camilla Dely’s costumes include the slapdash look of a Punch-and-Judy show, alongside the cowls and brown woolen tunics of the hermits.
Under Davis’s direction, the all-female cast looks like they’re having a helluva time on stage, bringing to theatrical life Horwitz’s adaptation of Hrosvitha’s Abraham. But judging by the sparse laughter from the audience, Mary Gets Hers is more of a groaner than mood-elevator.
The Playwrights Realm production of Mary Gets Hers runs through Oct. 14 at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (511 W. 52nd. St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with an additional evening performance at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 2; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday. For tickets and more information, visit mcctheater.org.
Playwright: Emma Horwitz
Director: Josiah Davis
Sets: You-Shin Chen
Lighting: Cha See
Costumes: Camilla Dely
Sound & Music: Kathy Ruvuna
