Decibelle
Level
By Dorothy Chansky
Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman
By Ben Jonson
Shakespeare Theatre
450 7th NW, Washington, DC
Runs through March 9, 2003
Box Office (202) 541-1122
The Silent Woman was the name of a restaurant I used to pass
on the way to work one summer in the early eighties. The eatery’s
logo made clear why the titular female didn’t speak: she
was headless.
Ben Jonson’s 1609 play is just as misogynistic as the restaurant
logo. It is also funny, dark, stuffed with wordplay, and critical
of nearly every social stratum within earshot. The current production
at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, directed by Michael
Kahn, delivers Jonson’s cynical comedy as a big, bright
visual confection that misses none of the verbal bite. “Silence
in a woman,” opines one of the play’s more outrageous
egomaniacs, “is like speech in a man.” Of course,
the speaking men don’t win many prizes for sympathetic utterance.
“All discourses but mine own afflict me,” proclaims
the most powerful of the several alpha males, who then proceeds
to assert his authority by forcing servants and tradespeople to
traffic in mime while he indulges his logorrhea.
Although Jonson was Shakespeare’s contemporary, this work
feels both older and newer than much of his better known rival's.
Drawing directly on commedia dell’arte character
types, Jonson wrote comedies of humour. “Humour” here
is not primarily about laughs but rather about bodily chemical
composition according to Renaissance medical science. A balance
of four--blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile--determined
one’s character. In this play, old Morose (played by a delightfully
dyspeptic Ted van Griethuysen) is afflicted with a predominance
of black bile, the source of melancholy. Hence his name and behavior.
He’s also a “pantaloon”--a character type descended
from the commedia’s Pantalone, an old miser who
typically craves (or has) a much younger wife, or who wants to
marry off a young daughter to a geezer with money rather than
to the youthful swain who’s won her heart. Morose can’t
stand noise and also can’t stand the thought of his nephew
inheriting the family fortune. His plan is to wed a young and
very quiet wife, produce an heir quickly, and thwart all competitors
to that heir by cowing his spouse and disinheriting his nephew.
The question in Pantalone plays is never who’s going to
come out on top. It’s how the old crank is going to be outwitted.
So much for “older.” The “newer” feeling
arises from the many ways in which this play is a forerunner to
Restoration comedy. Morose’s nephew, Dauphine Eugenie (Bruce
Turk), is one of a trio of young men about town who assume that
the world is their oyster: fops are there to be tricked and laughed
at, women are there for a combination of sex and ridicule, and
money is what makes life livable. You may have noticed that Dauphine’s
name is feminine. This is not a mistake but rather an indication
that he is the most malleable, and ultimately the wiliest, of
his smart set. Truewit (played by an assured Daniel Breaker) and
Clerimont (Scott Ferrara, looking like a rock star) debate the
merits of artifice over nature when it comes to beauty. Dauphine
has a bit of both, with a slightly effeminate demeanor that enables
the others to think they're leading him around (artifice) while
he’s all the while hatching brilliant schemes to thwart
his crabby uncle (natural intellect).
Epicoene, the titular Silent Woman (Ricki Robichaux), is relentlessly
submissive and demure. She flatters the intelligence of the preposterously
pretentious "knight," Sir John Daw (played by an outré
Gregg Almquist) and willingly submits to the humiliating interrogation
Morose insists on as a pre-nuptial test. Then, having passed with
flying and barely audible colors, she is married and, within moments,
finds voice and mettle, and all hell breaks loose. Abetted by
the determined Dauphine and the mischievous Truewit, and aided
by a trio of “collegiates”--women who run about town
seeking sex and wit minus the freight of husbands--the Silent
Woman pushes Morose’s back to the wall.
Here, the wall happens to be padded. Set designer Andrew Jackness
uses color and texture to reinforce the ways in which everything
about these characters is over the top, even though the mechanism
of the plot is planned to within an inch of its life. (John Dryden
called The Silent Woman “the pattern of a perfect
play,” and Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that it was “the
best comedy, I think, that was ever wrote.”) Morose can’t
stand noise, which he combats, according to the text, with quilts
over the outside door and “a huge turban of nightcaps on
his head, buckled over his ears.” Jackness extends this
conceit with a twenty-five-foot-tall living room whose walls are
covered with tufted, stuffed muslin. Murrell Horton’s costumes
feature a pile of nightcaps with tassels swinging, patterns clashing,
and a leather belt strapped under Morose’s chin to keep
the mini-mountain in place. Clerimont’s plush, chic digs
feature three walls of shiny, leaf-green, plastic tile. In the
side walls are Baroque doors in peacock blue while the central
wall frames a huge double door of bright lemon yellow. John Daw’s
ruby-red study has floor-to-ceiling shelves of showy leather volumes
with his own writings tacked up everywhere. (Don’t ask how
he gets to the top shelves.) In a niche over the doorway is a
bust of himself, with a deliciously self-satisfied grin.
All the elements of this production emphasize fun, although the
text is as damning and didactic as it is insouciant and sexy.
The show is beautifully spoken, lucidly staged, and superbly paced.
The question is whether it is as contemporary as its makers seem
to think. The program notes and publicity telegraph “don’t
worry," as if the driving force behind the whole project
were the assurance that the play is easily accessible and relevant.
Kahn told The New York Times that the targets of Jonson's
satire "aren't really so different from what we might have
fun with today." The photo on the program, the theater's
Web site, and the production's study guide show the title character
looking like she's just been goosed and towering over two cowering
males. It's clear, though (from the jawline and foot, if not the
pose itself), that she is a man in drag. This image suggests that
the cross-dressed actor should come as a shock, that this is "what
we might have fun with today." Unfortunately, though, the
"fun" stays on the level of smirk and smarm, never swelling
into the sort of polymorphous perversity that the play really
needs to hit hard today. Why not cross-gender-cast more than the
obvious character, for instance? Why not go for that broadly damning
punch (wholly in the spirit of Jonson)? Part of Jonson's point
is that boys will be girls and girls will be boys so long as cross-gendered
behavior serves their craven needs. By treating the body of only
a single player as a source of titillation and curiosity, Kahn
safely located his gender- and power-critique in the predictable,
conservative realm of the naughty. In a play that's all about
self-serving sanctimoniousness, the critique has to be broader
than that--literally all over the place. (The only hint of this
is in the bodices that male and female characters wear, which
are all of the same cut.)
Possibly Kahn, like Jonson, shares an anti-audience prejudice
of sorts, believing that genuine social critique would cost his
company at the box office. This production is cautiously billed
as the first-known professional American mounting of Epicoene.
Kahn says he discovered the piece in the early 1970s but tabled
it, as he told the Times, “until we had an audience
that would come see less familiar plays.” His assumption,
though, seems to be that, willing or not, no one interested in
seeing the play has read it. Hence the effort to keep the ending
a secret through the action, even though the advertising and publicity
blatantly give it away.
Jonson is still powerfully present, of course, if only because
of the clarity of the performances. The “collegiates,”
for instance, assert their right to visit Bedlam for amusement
lest they be left forsaken beldames bereft of admirers to make
anagrams of their names. This zingy play on "anagram,"
"Bedlam," and "beldame" must have been clear
even to those who hadn't read the text. The actors made it read
as a kind of Scrabble in action. Later, Morose is done in by two
tradesmen tricked out as a judge and a parson (it takes both church
and state to get the divorce for which he finally begs on his
knees). They spend a hilarious scene spewing Latin phrases with
attitude, and you don’t need to know much more than ante
and post copulam to follow the tomfoolery, which plays
like vaudeville.
Jonson would have been pleased enough to be collecting royalties
on a new production (he loved recognition) but probably irritated
at the riot of colors, outsized walls, and moveable scenery at
work. This is, remember, the playwright who famously broke with
Inigo Jones when the latter’s work as designer put him in
a position to call many of the shots in the Jones/Jonson collaboration
on court masques. Jonson considered audiences an impediment to
real artistry, and his two prologues to this play are ever-so-slightly
bossy reminders that what he’s written will come back to
haunt his listeners (if they only listen well enough) but that
there’s no "libel"--his own defensive word in
the second prologue--in it. Actually, that depends. Originally,
Jonson was answering an accusation by a member of the King's family
who thought she saw too much of herself in one of the characters.
Today, as The Silent Woman proposes that wives who seek
amusement independent of their husbands assert “hermaphroditic
authority,” men who love their wives well and faithfully
are “asses,” and the best wife is a submissive “heifer,”
haunting works in some “unauthorized” ways. Maybe
"libel" is too strong a word, but the happy ending does
involve the ideal woman vanishing into thin air. If I find that
less than satisfying, it’s no doubt due (in Morose's immortal
phrase) to my “Amazonian impudence.”
(Dorothy Chansky is Assistant Professor of Theater at
the College of William and Mary.)
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