Kate Mulley

To the right, I’ve added a widget to the fundraising site for my theatre company here in New York. We’re on a site called kickstarter.com which allows artistic endeavors to raise money online. What’s cool about it, is that if you don’t reach the goal, you don’t get any of the money, which I feel gives people more incentive to contribute.

Please click through and take a look at what we’re asking for and what we’re offering in return. I’m very proud of this company and excited about the upcoming production of Fuente Ovejuna. If you have any questions, let me know.

I’m a sucker for plays about playwrights. Bill Cain’s Equivocation (at Manhattan Theatre Club) takes this on in his play about what would have happened if Shakespeare (in this play, he’s known as Shagspeare) had been commissioned to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot. As someone who is intrigued by the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day and is still coming to terms with the founding of the Anglican Church (yes, I know, I’m a few hundred years late), this play was exactly what I hoped it would be.

It’s a funny, quirky, historical play about creating theatre, redefining history, theatrical inspiration and family. I sat through the play thinking that Cain had essentially taken the bits of Shakespeare that interest me and turned it into a play. I’ve always been interested in the father-daughter relationships (and wrote an essay about them in college), and Shagspeare’s daughter Judith is very smart and angsty, while dealing with her father’s disinterest in her and bereavement over her brother’s death. The three other actors play multiple parts and while I overheard the women behind me saying that they wished that it had been like Japanese (or Chinese) theatre where people wear masks and you don’t have to worry about which character the actor is playing. I didn’t have this problem, and thought that the clues through costume changes, physical changes and different accents were easy to figure out. My favorite moment was when the actor playing both an actor playing Macduff and King James I went back and forth between his Scottish accent as the King and his Scottish part (but not accent) as Macduff. It was a great show of theatricality that couldn’t exist anywhere but on a stage.

It’s very much about the abuse of power and subtly (or maybe not) about the Bush Presidency and the reaction to 9/11. Cain is a Jesuit Priest (which I didn’t know when I saw the play), but he certainly writes very convincing parts for the Jesuit “terrorists.” It seems like it should be a good show to make the regional rounds (it premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, was at the Geffen Playhouse and is opening at Marin Theatre Company soon).

I’m curious about whether this play could/would work in the UK. I don’t see any obvious reasons why it shouldn’t. It’s directed by Garry Hynes, the Artistic Director of Druid, in Dublin, so it has an element of European “legitimacy” Maybe it would work at the Cottesloe? Or the Tricycle? I like predicting which London theatres will take plays because I’m usually completely wrong.

In other London theatre news, I’ve just read that McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane will be at the Young Vic this summer.* I’m not sure how I feel about this. As an emerging playwright, I have the stereotypical reaction of “Oh, can’t you do a new play instead”, but I know that the Young Vic tends to focus more on emerging directors and it’s definitely a play that will be interesting to revive 15 years after its premiere. I still haven’t seen Behanding in Spokane, but you’ll be the first to hear when I do.

*Beauty Queen was first discovered and directed by Garry Hynes, interestingly.

On Thursday night I attended The Book of Grace by Suzan-Lori Parks at the Public Theatre. I’d somehow managed to not see anything in the main space at the Public in all this time and it’s a gorgeous space that I hope has been reworked to take advantage of it’s uniqueness. I found the play itself uneven. I had high hopes for the newest play from Parks, and left the theatre confused and unsure of what I had seen.

It’s a play about America. About the different pieces of America that make up our country. The types of ideologies that we subscribe to. And it’s a play about complicated relationships and optimism and fear and displacement. At least, I think that’s what it was. A son returns to his father and step-mother’s house. His father who is a border guard about to be honored for stopping some drug smugglers. His step-mother is a blindly optimistic waitress who’s creating a book filled with all the things that make her see the good in the world. They clash and connect throughout the play to various degrees. But a lot of the play moved too slowly for me. I never really cared enough about what was unfolding, until about an hour into the play when things seemed to kick off. But that made me feel like I had missed something important in the earlier parts of the play. Thinking back on it, I wonder if that’s intentional. And if it is, it makes a powerful point, but as an audience member (and one who had celebrated St Patrick’s Day a little too enthusiastically the night before), I felt had.

Parks is an important voice in American theatre. But I missed the urgency of this play and wonder if in the hands of a different director it would have come across differently. I’ve had trouble understanding James MacDonald’s interpretation of “difficult” texts in the past (most specifically Caryl Churchill’s drunk enough to say i love you– side note, that was the first Churchill play I saw onstage, and this was my first Parks play!) and perhaps this is another case of not connecting with his work. It also made me yearn for a good old English program playtext, because it’s a play I would very much like to read to try to understand it better.

March is Women’s History Month and Monday was “International Women’s Day.” So I celebrated by buying lots of books by women at the Strand. Despite my already tall pile of unread books at home, I was too tempted by the half price books and the idea of adding to my slightly old-fashioned book collection to keep myself in check. Some are books I’ve already read but don’t own (The Buccaneers by Wharton and Middlemarch by Eliot), others I want to read as research for my new play (London, Observed by Doris Lessing) and others I just thought I should keep on the back burner. I spent a long time in front of the Women’s Studies section but found it hard to commit to buying books like Bachelor Girl and Singled Out when there was all this good fiction to buy.

And I suppose it’s fitting that Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar during Women’s History Month, though I still find it bizarre that different minority groups get “months.” It seems very patronizing.

In addition to my new play, I’ve been thinking about how to obtain the film rights for a book. Despite my experience in publishing, I’m quite naive about numbers and how one would go about doing that, but it’s led me on a fun hunt through the internet to London literary agents and websites for female writers I’m in awe of. Which is why I feel a need to share this Nobel Prize speech by Doris Lessing. It wasn’t a Pinteresque self-indulgence, it was a thoughtful, slightly scattered, brilliant piece about literature and reading and intelligence and the present. I’m a little late coming to it, but I’m glad I have. The clip of her hearing the news about the Nobel Prize is also pretty excellent. And let’s not forget that she was 88 when she won. May I live to be that gracious and quirky and amazing at her age.