'Lifeblood' acts as crowning achievement

Author: Robert McKay

Sometimes in the middle of a play or dance performance, I get a twinge of ire at the article I have to write on it.?I've caught myself on the edge of my seat, but for the wrong reason - I'm poised like a cat at a mousehole, pen aimed at the performers, waiting for a good sentence to poke its head out of their work, which I am completely failing to appreciate on its own terms.? Not so with this weekend's "The Lifeblood."? I was so absorbed in this play that not a single critical quip broke the surface of my consciousness while the house lights were down.? Allison Corke '08 and Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki '08 (acting) and Franny Bohar '08 (costume design) chose Glyn Maxwell's densely layered historical drama for their senior work.?Backed by an exceptionally strong ensemble on acting, direction and design, they produced a thoroughly well-wrought interpretation of the difficult script.

Corke's portrayal of Mary Queen of Scots crackled with the curbed intensity of a caged tiger, as she paced the various cells in which history and her enemies confined her.?Corke did not shy from the queen's sometimes desperate rises of emotion, but she never allowed Mary to become the damsel in distress.? Even in her worst moments, the queen's regal poise, fierce political keenness and beleaguered wit remained visible.?Mary's figure was perfectly set off by Bohar's dress, whose pleated skirt subtly quotes Elizabethan royal ruffles and translated them into a metallic slate that complimented the set's noir ambience, and fit Corke's urbane understatement and stoic edge.

Tirrell-Wysocki played the shrewd political "pawn" who wins Queen Mary's trust, betrays her and then, we suspect, falls in love with her as she goes to her death.?He portrayed a talented working man whose cruel deception is part of his job description.?His fast-talking and offhandedly gallant manner wins Mary over, and the character continues in this suave vein - which must have convinced much of the audience too - until the play's conclusion, when storms of guilt and terrified self-justification break through the unflappable surface Tirrell-Wysocki maintained.?The scene is riveting - a character who had seemed to live on a frighteningly sunny island amid the moral thunderstorms that buffet the other characters is revealed as yet another fraught and self-conscious human being.

Eric DePriester '09, Xander Manshel '09 and Willy McKay '11 filled out a tight cast.? DePriester played the Puritan landlord charged with keeping Mary under house arrest.?His humorless sincerity and rigid observance of duty elicited chuckles and hisses throughout the play, but he too was humanized in the final scene, when the schemes of Manshel's cruel psychological mastermind reduced him to quivering terror before a judgment he cannot understand.? As he rummaged frantically through his conscience like Job to find some whiff of sin, we can do nothing but pity him.

McKay gave the play's most wrenching performance as Claude Arnaud, Mary's loyal secretary, whose love of his mistress is fierce but secretly fraught, and finally leads him to betray her.? McKay played opposite Corke with equal precision and poise, and in their early scenes his thorough understanding of the character's subterranean conflicts and jealousies transformed the script's expository dialogue into a conveyor of close and complex relationship between mistress and servant.?Arnaud is aware of Mary's trust and respect, and when she finally rejects his advice and makes the risky political move that will undo them all, he feels it as a rebuke not only to his careful intellect but also to his faith and love.?

As betrayal follows betrayal and their disasters multiply, and Arnaud finds himself caught up as one of their causes, his pain reaches an almost unbearable pitch by the end of the play.? At each stage of his character's undoing, McKay's treatment was restrained and devastatingly convincing.

Manshel sat behind the rest of the cast as the shadowy mastermind of their destinies, the cool and pitiless Sir Francis Walsingham, head of Elizabeth I's secret service.?His constant presence onstage, positioned behind a weighty desk on a dais above and behind the other actors, gave the impression of a malignant omniscience.? I had been inclined to see Walsingham as the only unambiguously satanic character in the play, but Manshel's comment after the show opened a subtler understanding I had missed.?Walsingham's last line, addressed to DePriester's Puritan character, releases the latter from his guilt, and sends him through the redemptive sunlit door at the back of the house.?As DePriester exits, hardly believing his good fortune, Walsingham calls after him to "tell [the border guards who will guarantee his safe passage] that you're with me.? Tell them we're together."?Manshel interprets this line as Walsingham's subconsious plea to share in the pious Puritan's redemtion.?

Although he has mocked his pawn's piety throughout, he is finally the only character left in the stage's darkened space of perdition, as all the other characters, guilty or innocent, are released into the mezzanine's simulated sunlight.

Manshel's read is typical of the ensemble's subtle interpretations, which are borne up by the set design of Erin Rokey '10 and Stephanie Strohm '08.?The scene placed all the characters in a rigid grid that severs and rearranges time and space like the sectioned chessboard into which the characters are locked.?In an ingenious move typical of the play's many moral reversals, it is clear that Manshel's character at the end is actually outside in the sunlit space of freedom, beckoning the others to him.? But since the play has accustomed us to seeing his position reversed, with his addressees seeming to see him but actually facing the other way, the morally privileged viewpoint of the audience shows Walsingham in the darkness, although the historico-political world of the play places him in the light.

Alex Mark's '10 stark but unobtrusive lighting and Ward Wolff's 08 sound design accentuated the clipped intensity of "The Lifeblood's" strongly realized vision.