category: full-length one act
genre: historical docu-drama/storytelling
running time: 75 minutes
setting: Various Locations In 12th Century England
period: The High Middle Ages
characters:
Matilda, the Empress, mother of Henry II
Stephen, her cousin, and rival for the English throne
Eleanor, a French duchess, married to Henry II
Adelin, Matilda’s younger brother, a ghost
story:
In the late autumn, on a rock in the English Channel, the ghost of William Adelin, crown prince of England, rises from the deep to chat with the audience and step in and out of the dreams of his sister, the Empress Matilda, who is running from the siege of Oxford Castle, fleeing up the frozen River Thames in the dead of a winter night. Her foe is her cousin Stephen, who awakes on a spring morning to attend the funeral of his maniupulative and ambitious wife, and suffers so deeply from survivior’s guilt over the wreck of The White Ship that killed Prince William (and put both Stephen and Matilda in line for the throne) that he can’t even enjoy his newly aquired crown. On a summer day years later, Eleanor of Aquitaine gathers flowers for a local festival, and gives advice to the unborn baby she hopes will one day inhereit the throne from herself and her husband- Matilda’s son, Henry. Never speaking directly to one another, co-existing in separate seasons and years, each of these pivitol figures in the English Anarchy speculates on the meaning of life, the cycles of time, and whether we can find in the patterns of history, comfort in the assurance of ressurrection, if not necessarily success.
author’s comments:
This play, in retrospect, is a triumph, and I still feel that it is one of the most sophisticated things I have ever written. Developed over 2020-2021 as four separate one person shows, and then spliced together into a full production which became the last full production produced at the EXIT Theatre on Eddy Street, before it closed that December, it is at once the culmination of years of interest in and love for medieval history, and the most articulated manifestation of my particular brand of existentialsim. Nick Trengove (who had directed each of the previously staged installments) and I built the final script in my apartment while drinking our way through numerous bottles of wine, literally cutting each of the one-person plays into paragraphy by paragraph blocks and then re-arranging them like a puzzel until we found the cadence and progression that felt like it told the story we wanted to tell, namely one of coming to terms with the cycles of life, while trying to transcend them to find something like meaning in the face of oblivion. Without question something that could only have come from my pandemic experience, I find it bittersweet to look back on, proof that I used that time well, and a reminder of how much I (and so many others) lost.
Performances:
The EXIT Theatre, August 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 2022 at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco, California. Directed by Nick Trengove. Lighting by Curtis Overacre. Scenery by Nick Trengove. Props and Costumes by Kyle McReddie and Nick Trengove. Artwork by Cody Rishell. Photography by Doug Despres. Stage Managed by Curtis Overacre. Cast: Fred Pitts (Stephen), Cat Leudtke (Matilda), Max Seijas (Adelin), Katherine Park (Eleanor).
