With her father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon, left), and his friend Cosimo (Jason O’Connell, right), young Artemisia Gentileschi (Kate Hamill) beholds Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes—a scene she will reinterpret in her most famous work.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.
In a month when an articulate, knowledgeable, law-abiding woman lost the presidency to a man who is none of those things, words like this resonate deeply:
Every daughter of mothers who ever sees this work will know she is not alone. She will see what it means to survive, despite the hands at your throat, to use your holy anger, to carve the light across the dark. … We will try to remake the world. Not just for us, but for those who are yet to come. Must we tell it again, fighting across the ages, that it is not I, I, I but we, we, we here!
#HerToo: Artemisia (Hamill) falls victim to Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldívar). Photographs by James Leynse.
Hamill, who stars in her own play, relies on the audience’s empathy and indignation as those words gush out of her near the end of The Light and the Dark, jolting the saggy second act with some last-minute electricity. The play also begins with a monologue by Hamill as Gentileschi, one that’s too long and starts to sound like an art history lecture. But once the stage is populated with other characters, the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi—as the play is parenthetically subtitled—come fully into focus.
Born in Rome in 1593 and motherless from a young age, Artemisia is raised and tutored by her father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon), an established painter. In her teens, she accompanies him to the studio, where she begins to study and work among other artists, including Agostino Tassi, a leering, unctuous blowhard. One day, while Orazio is out, Tassi visits the Gentileschi home and rapes Artemisia. Her father sues Tassi for violating the family’s honor, and when Artemisia must defend herself in court, she is tortured on the witness stand by means of a thumbscrew-like device, supposedly to prove the veracity of her testimony.
The first act is lively and introspective, capturing key episodes in Artemisia’s early life—seeing a new Caravaggio, painting her first masterpiece (when she’s only 17)—and conveying her passion and tangle of thoughts about family, art, gender, religion and social mores.
“The first act is lively and introspective, capturing key episodes in Artemisia’s early life.”
But the second act is dominated by a dragged-out, histrionic rendering of the Tassi trial. There’s too much yelling, especially by the judge (Jason O’Connell), and other conduct that seems unlikely, given the social contract of that era. Plus, it resorts to the contemporary courtroom-procedural trope of the surprise witness.
Then, instead of Artemisia’s great achievements—being depicted in dialogue scenes, they are just mentioned in her monologues. This deprives the play of some good drama, as does Artemisia’s hearing secondhand that Tassi (who was convicted but didn’t serve his sentence) has been welcomed back into the artists guild and that—in a tremendous betrayal of his daughter—Orazio is again fraternizing with him.
Joey Parsons, a regular in plays by Kate Hamill, has three roles in The Light and the Dark.
Artemisia learns this in a preposterous scene involving Maria (Joey Parsons), a prostitute who’d been the life model in the studio where Artemisia painted with Tassi and her father—and who shows up at Artemisia’s marital home demanding to pose for her. The whole episode rings false, since a 17th-century woman of Maria’s low social standing would probably not have such agency (she upbraids Artemisia for giving up painting and speechifies about how the art world needs women’s perspective), nor the means to get from Rome to Florence.
Parsons proves capable portraying a range of characters, not only Maria but also Artemisia’s 10-year-old boy apprentice and the Gentileschis’ crotchety cleaning woman. Broadway veteran Matthew Saldívar, as the scoundrel Tassi, makes the most indelible impression of the cast, while Harmon is very suitable in looks and demeanor as Papa Gentileschi.
Hamill’s performance could use more refinement and maturity when Artemisia is older, as she comes across as kind of petulant later in the play. The actress is stronger playing Artemisia as a child—her best moment may be the tantrum that 8-year-old Artemisia throws when Orazio tells her he’s sending her to a convent to be educated.
As for the anachronisms sprinkled liberally throughout the script and production: Some, like the men’s denim pants, are harmless. Others, like the Tarantino-level frequency of fuck, are distracting. Even without them, or Artemisia’s and Maria’s unsubtle pronouncements in Act II, the modern-day relevance of this centuries-old story would be clear.
The Light and the Dark runs through Dec. 15 at 59E59 Theaters. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday; primarystages.org.
Playwright: Kate Hamill
Director: Jade King Carroll
Sets: Brittany Vasta
Costumes: Jen Caprio
Lighting: Seth Reiser
Sound: Fan Zhang and Megumi Katayama
Projections: Kylee Loera
