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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Provoking Play on Love Leaves Audience Unsettled

This past Thursday through Saturday, May 2 through 4, the College’d theatre program presented the play “The Castle: A Triumph” by contemporary British playwright Howard Barker in the Seeler Studio at Mahaney Center for the Arts. The college website says the play is “blasting with humor, bawdiness, violence, and the limits of desire, pain and sexuality.”

In “The Castle,” a group of 12th-century English Crusaders return to their homeland after a long period of time, but find that the civic, agricultural and religious practices they were familiar with have been turned upside down while they were away. The women who were left behind in the village had radically changed the government and religion into an egalitarian culture. With the return of these reigning crusaders, they brought back an engineer who plan the largest castle in the region in order to regain control over the women. As the construction of the castle went on, they not only transformed the landscape of the village, but also the power dynamics manifesting in gender, sexuality, race and age. The play is serious, mature but yet comical in its exploration of gender and love.

Director Richard Romagnoli, the Isabel Riexinger Mettler professor of theatre at the College, is an authority on the work of Howard Barker. He has directed six of Barker’s plays and a few poems for the theatre department, PTP and companies in Boston and New York City since his first year at the College.

In Director’s Notes, Romagnoli viewed “The Castle” as “a story about love – love rejected – love betrayed – love pursued – the inability to love.”

With inciting action, a series of compelling conflicts and a resolution followed by an ironic denouement, the play formed the theatrical polarities of humor and sadness, a beautifully structured story.
Telling Barker’s story, conventional exchanges between characters were interrupted by direct addresses to the audience, inviting the audience to participate in the dramatic dynamic. The direct connection between the audience and the performer was not only engaging, but also challenged the imaginative boundaries of the audience.

Limited by the space and the budget, set designer Jon Crain and the director decided to have curtains dyed and painted shades of green, furnishing the landscape at the beginning of the play. The castle was revealed through the abrupt, violent tearing down of the curtains. The walls of the Seeler Studio became a part of the castle as the plot unfolded. In addition to that, the set provided the literal embodiment of a forbidding and dehumanizing structure in the space where the show finally took place with concrete columns and cinder block walls.

Instead of using traditional music scores as a melodramatic device to intensify the emotional scenes, the sound designer Cormac Bluestone used construction sounds to underscore some of the emotional moments. “The Castle” starred Christina Fox ’13.5 as Skinner, a witch, Meghan Leathers ’13.5 as Ann, a changed woman, and Noah Berman ’13 as her husband Stucley, a knight, embattled lord of the land.

Tickets sold out for all three performances. Students, professors, parents of the cast and friends of the production crew came and watched the two-and-a-half hour play.

“This play is not likely to leave the audience unaffected and indifferent and that makes for a potentially productive evening in the theater,” said Stephen Donadio, Fulton professor of humanities, sharing his experience in an email after the performance on Saturday night. “For what it is be worth, my own sense is that “The Castle” reveals the nature and scale of Barker’s dramatic ambition, which is Shakespearean, and that the changeable, conflicted texture of the play reflects Barker’s uneasiness with such an ambition, which he cannot help but find suspect, because it may be associated with pretentiousness and a will to power and domination.”

“As Romagnoli’s production makes clear,” he continued, “the playwright’s handling of this bleak assessment involves a lot of humor — subtly ironic humor and humor of the broad, loud, vulgar music hall variety. So, in the end, ‘The Castle’ seems to me unstoppably exploratory and genuinely unsettling.”

Unsettling seems to be a frequently mentioned adjective after the performance. Some of the students refused to leave any comment on “The Castle” because they do not know how to respond to this dramatic theatre work and were not sure if they got the underlying meanings of the work right.

Jack DesBois ’15 said that it was helpful for him to understand “The Castle” better with the experience of learning about Howard Barker in class. He said the abstract concepts of conflicts, domination and power might be hard to get out of the play if the audience came without knowing what to expect.

Precise construction of the castle, demolition of nature, betrayal in love, doubts in religious belief and conflicts in power; there are so many themes discussed and explored in “The Castle” that the general audience had a hard time grasping them all.

From a techniqual perspective, Sumire Doi ’13, who did her senior acting thesis “17 ½,” one month ago, thought “The Castle” was a brilliant project.

“The wall of the Seeler Studio  was always standing there,” Doi said. “It’s nice to see the crew use it as a part of the castle, so the studio itself represents the castle. Besides, I really appreciated the poetic dialogues in the play.”
This summer, “The Castle” will be a part of summer shows in Season 27 of the PTP/NYC project off-Broadway.


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