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Week of 3 April 1998 Vol. I, No. 26 Feature Article Willing Suspension puts obscure Renaissance drama back in play by Eric McHenry John Marston hasn't heard of you either. Because he's been dead for 364 years, that's understandable. But his dramas have been dead to the world of theater for almost as long, and that's something the members of Willing Suspension Productions can't understand. Comprising BU graduate students and a few undergraduates, Willing Suspension is a six-year-old theater group dedicated to staging rarely produced Renaissance plays. The company will present Marston's The Malcontent April 2 through 5 at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre. Colin Harris (GRS'00) (left) and Justin Shilton (COM'98) are Pietro and Mendoza in John Marston's The Malcontent, a Renaissance-era drama in contemporary costume that will be staged for the first time in America by Willing Suspension Productions. Photo by Vernon Doucette Its title character is a banished Duke of Genoa who returns to court disguised as a fool named Malevole. Director Michael Walker (GRS'01), a second-year graduate student in English, calls The Malcontent "a play of courtly intrigue." The Italian setting, he says, was a device playwrights of Marston's day used to comment critically upon local politics without drawing the attention of censors. Walker's rendition retains that location, but pulls the action forward into the 1930s. Despite its satirical aspect, The Malcontent doesn't lend itself as readily as Shakespeare's plays to genre classification. Critics have called it a satirical comedy, a tragicomedy, and a tragedy. Nor is its obscurity, Walker says, an unmitigated tragedy from a dramatist's standpoint; Marston was not of Shakespeare's caliber. But the play holds considerable academic and historical interest, he says, and deserves a venue. "It's an important play. It was written just before Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and is very closely tied to it in some thematic ways. It may very well have been something Shakespeare saw at the time, and I think it's as likely as not that he took some cues for particular scenes in Measure for Measure from The Malcontent," Walker says. "Measure for Measure is, of course, better written on the whole, but that's because Shakespeare is Shakespeare." Malevole, played by Jonathan Mulrooney (GRS'00) (right) tells a disquieted Pietro, Colin Harris (GRS'00), that he's a cuckold in John Marston's The Malcontent. Photo by Vernon Doucette Although critical interest in Marston and The Malcontent has not flagged through the years, the play is almost never staged. English companies have put it on only three times this century, says Walker, and to his knowledge it has never been performed in the United States. "Recently I attended a conference and had a chance to speak to a number of Renaissance scholars," he says. "Nobody that I've talked with has said they've seen The Malcontent performed. That, I think, comes as close as I'm likely to get to confirming my belief that it has never been staged in America. But even if there have been one or two productions, it's still a real rarity." Renaissance means rebirth. So Willing Suspension has turned its restorative attention to an appropriate era. Most of its members are students of drama from that period. Cofounder Lauren Kehoe (GRS'99), who is completing her Ph.D. in Renaissance theater, says that bringing the works from the page to the stage can make them much more accessible. "It's really helpful to work on the plays. You realize so many things that you can't from simply reading them," she says. "What's refreshing about this company," Walker adds, "is that it combines the academic and the theatrical approaches. I did a lot of theater before coming to BU, and I encountered quite a few theater professors who were not as well informed as they might have been about all the things that can contribute to the creation of a character -- history and context. It helps to bring that additional knowledge to the productions." Although the company does not produce Shakespeare, its members study his work indirectly by becoming familiar with the writing of his contemporaries. The Malcontent, Kehoe says, is not the first production Willing Suspension has undertaken that has a clear connection to one of the bard's plays. "The first show that we did, The Revenger's Tragedy, is very much a relative of Hamlet . . . probably a descendant. It uses many of the same motifs, including talking to a skull. It's very conscious of the kinship. No one really does that play anymore, because the feeling is that if you're going to do The Revenger's Tragedy, you might as well do Hamlet." Willing Suspension is governed by a 12-member board and receives funding from the Humanities Foundation at BU. In 1996, the company stepped up its production pace from one play a year to two. It has revived works by Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Robert Greene, and Thomas Kyd, along with one obscure non-Renaissance drama, Wordsworth's The Borderers. Kehoe says that as a rule, each production is better attended than the one that preceded it. "Productions tended to be small and underadvertised when we started," she says. "Now we're gaining a following, especially from the city's academic community, which obviously is pretty big. And it's not only from Boston anymore. We have people coming to the shows from New Hampshire and Connecticut. It's the only chance most people have to see these plays. "Occasionally we'll get BU undergraduates who are taking a drama class and are required to write reviews. Our audience can really be all over the place, which is another one of the challenges of doing Renaissance drama. Some people are going to get the jokes, some aren't. We have to imagine that was the case when these plays were new, when you had all those people standing on the ground in front of the stage cracking hazelnuts on each other's heads." "Our primary goal is always to entertain," adds Walker. "We're not interested in writing papers with people's bodies." The Malcontent will run from Thursday, April 2, to Sunday, April 5, at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave. Show times are 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $6 for the general public and $5 for students and senior citizens and are available at the door or by calling 353-2506.