Wittenberg
Wittenberg
Windfall Theatre
February 25 2012
I had never heard of this theatre before (Tis very tiny) but when I saw the advertising for this play, I could not resist. John Faustus(David Flores), Martin Luther (Robert W.C. Kennedy)and Hamlet all meet up at Wittenberg University. It sounded like some awesome crossover fanfiction. Essentially, that's what it was.
Like all really good fanfiction, it's entertaining with only a surface knowledge of the source text, and really really entertaining if you're very familiar with the source text.
I am very familiar with two out of the three, and surface knowledge of the third, so I got a lot of the jokes.
The play had a lot of funny bits, but it was a bit heavy too. Very talky. Luther and Faust spent a lot of time debating about things. Luther is a priest and professor of theology and Faust is a philosopher who believes in nothing. Listening to the two of them go at it was sort of exhausting. They were an odd sort of friends. They fought about almost everything, and yet for most of the play were still sort of friends.
The theatre was actually a bunch of chairs set up in a room. There was no stage per say, but the set pieces were there. Faust's desk with an assortment of books and props. There was a large door with lots of bulletins posted on it. I went closer to it. There were advertisements for different classes being run by Faust and by Luther. My favorite was Hamlet, looking for a carpool back to Denmark.
I'm not sure who my favorite person in the cast was. They were all very good. They also were all very impressive, as they all had a lot of very complicated lines.
First off, there was the Girl. Lindsey L. Gagliano played four different roles. I liked how she was credited: "The Eternal Feminine."
First, she played Gretchen, a barmaid at the place where Faust and Luther met often to drink and chat (and argue). She brought them a lot of beer, that's for sure. She actually sets Luther off by bringing up his least favorite person, and least favorite practice: the buying and selling of indulgences. Luther kept calling her on different sins, to which she'd respond: "It's covered!" because she bought something that would pardon her of all her sins for the next month. It was pretty funny.
Next, she played Helen, a former-nun turned courtesan and the love of Faust's life. She was dressed in bright red. I think it was symbolic. Faust loves her, and he proposes to her, but she turns him down. Repeatedly. It's sort of sad. After Faust goes on about how the only thing he believes in is his love for her, she shoots him down. Before that, though, she and Faust were engaged in a rather steamy scene. The two of them were under a red blanket, and it was pretty clear what they were doing. This scene was made pretty funny because of what was going on in the foreground while the two of them were going at it. Luther was conducting a service, and he was reading a passage from Song of Songs. Song of Songs, of course, is a chapter in the Bible that is pretty darn steamy and racy in its own right. The passage is describing God as a lover, while the two lovers in the background were… well…
It was pretty funny.
A bit later, Hamlet is reading something that Luther gave him, while eating the "candy" that Faust gave him for concentration. Suddenly he hallucinates (or has a vision) of the Virgin Mary. She had a great line: "Why are you neglecting my son, my son?" As she departed, she told Hamlet to "remember me." Hamlet quoted his play a bit, from the scene where he sees the ghost of his father.
Finally, she played an ambassador from the Queen of Denmark who comes to bring Hamlet the bad news that his father has died, stung by a snake in his garden. Now young Hamlet is to be king. She didn't have a huge role as this character, but she had a very pretty green dress.
Kyle Queenan played Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. (I can't say that phrase without thinking of it RSC style. Anyway.) First and foremost I must say, he has great hair. Now that that's out of the way, I can talk about his acting and the character.
In a way, it seemed like Hamlet was there as a reason to have conflict between Faust and Luther. Admittedly though, they didn't need that much "help" to fight with each other.
For the most part, Hamlet spoke in iambic pentameter, using Shakespearean-sounding lines. They made a lot of lines that were pretty close to the real famous Hamlet lines. At one point, Faust (Hamlet's philosophy professor) is trying to convince Hamlet that the most important question in life is not "to believe or not to believe" but simply if one desires continued existence or not. So they have this exchange:
Faust: "To be or not to be."
Hamlet: "That is the question?"
Faust: "Yes!"
Faust also gives Hamlet a magazine to read, it's all the scandal around a lot of noble families in Europe. The main story of this edition is the murder of Gonzalgo. "I hear they're going to make a play out of it," Faust reports.
Faust had a human skull on his desk, and at one point, while waiting for Faust to arrive, Hamlet studies it curiously. At one moment, he picks it up to look at it, holding it up in traditional Hamlet-Skull fashion.
Hamlet is a champion tennis player, but he was having difficulty for a little while. He went to see Faust, who is a doctor of medicine too, who prescribes him some special "candy" to help with his balance issues. It was rather funny to hear Hamlet explain to Faust, in Shakespearean English about how he fell and rather than hitting the tennis ball, he hit some other ones instead.
Eventually, dressed all in white, with his hair pulled back, it is time for the championship tennis match between Wittenberg U. and their rivals, some school from France. The champion of the rival school? Laertes of course! Laertes was not seen, he was an off-stage voice. I'm not sure if it was a recording or someone saying the lines live. I couldn't quite tell. It was a really funny scene because they were almost directly quoting the famous fencing scene from the play. Hamlet won the match, not letting Laertes score at all. At the end of the game, Hamlet did the "kneel and point to heaven" thing, which I thought was interesting because one of the themes of the play is Hamlet struggling with his faith.
When we got to the theatre, one of the chairs had a reserved sign on it. As it turned out, that chair was reserved for Hamlet. He darted into one of his "classes" late and took a seat - the reserved one. (I think it was his theology class)
Another "inside joke" that I really liked with Hamlet was that in his first few scenes, he was dressed in bright blues and greens, and then later, he was dressed in all white. It wasn't until the very end that he was dressed in his characteristic black. He was dressed as a monk, all in black, so there was a logical reason for it. But then that's also when he gets the bad news about his father.
One major story in the play is that Hamlet has had a terrible dream: He stands at the edge of a pit of whirling confusing, while in front of him, is a large empty tombstone. He looks down into the pit and has a vision of his father, and himself, and he feels that he will fall, and then he wakes up.
Hamlet tells his two favorite professors about it: Faust and Luther. The two men have very different interpretations of Hamlet's dream.
Faust says that it is showing Hamlet's struggle with faith. It is a tombstone for God, and if God is dead, then what else is not true in the world? The whirlpool represents the chaos that Hamlet believes will follow from God being dead, and jumping into the chaos is the only way that Hamlet can learn what is true and what is not.
Luther, on the other hand, says that the tombstone is for Hamlet's father. It's reminding Hamlet that one day, he will replace his father as king, and that he needs to be ready. The chaos represents the turmoil that will surround Hamlet when he is king, and that he has to put order to it.
This scene was rather entertaining because Faust and Luther were telling Hamlet how they were interpreting his dream… at the same time. If it had been a movie or TV show, they would have been switching back and forth between scenes rather quickly - the idea being that first Hamlet had gone to Luther and then he had gone to Faust. With the way the scene played out on stage, the two of them kept tugging Hamlet back and forth between the two sides of the stage.
At one point, Hamlet was kneeling between them and each of the other two men had a hand on one shoulder - shoulder angel and shoulder devil.
In the very end, Hamlet decides on his own interpretation of the dream.
As it turns out, all three of them are wrong. The dream is just a warning, that either his father is going to die, or that his father already had died. I have no idea how long it takes for news to travel between Denmark and Germany.
Luther and Faust were in conflict a lot. Another way that they illustrated this was through their costumes. Luther was tall and thin, dressed in his plain brown monk robes with a lot of sharp edges in his manner. Faust, on the other end was dressed in red, with furs and jewels, and a lot of soft rounded lines. I liked the contrast when the two of them were onstage together. (which, admittedly, was most of the play.)
As I said before, the play was very talky. Faust spent a lot of time talking to the audience (or Hamlet, if he was there) about how important it is to question everything, and arrive at your own judgments about life and the universe in general. Luther spent a lot of time talking to the audience (or Hamlet, if he was there) about how important God is, and how important it is to trust in his holy gospel to be your guide. I think that Faust spent a lot more time preaching at Hamlet than Luther did.
Luther and Faust first interact when Luther goes to see him about some stomach problems. Faust prescribes him some beans that he got from the middle east. He tells Luther to crush them and make a tea out of them. They will help clear out his stomach. Faust tells Luther that the beans are called "café" and that it might have the side effect of making Luther a little wired. Later, when they meet up at the bar, Luther tells Faust that those beans, that café drink, is the best thing ever. It was inspirational! (And Luther was just a wee bit jazzed up on caffeine at the time). The café kept him awake, and so he decided to use the time productively, and work on his sermon for Sunday, and that's when inspiration hit him. It was fun to listen to him recount the historical version about the passage that bothered him. So in a way, coffee is what started the whole movement. Which is really appropriate, given that Lutherans cannot assemble together without coffee.
The two of them talk for awhile, and start drifting into the dangerous waters of things that they don't like about the catholic church. An upset, and slightly inebriated Luther tells Faust that he could come up with around a hundred good solid logical arguments against the selling of indulgences, and Faust challenges him to do so. (Well, Luther only manages to come up with ninety-five, but that's close enough to a hundred).
An important plot point was that Hamlet spent some time in Poland, studying under the famous astronomer Copernicus. He heard of the disturbing theory that the Earth goes around the Sun instead of the other way around. He tells Faust of this, who reads Copernicus's work and is delighted by it. Then he give it to Luther, who is stunned and upset by it. He still doesn't like the implications that the church is wrong about things, (even though he's questioning it left right and center).
Luther is worried about Faust. The two of them are working at a catholic university, and Faust has this scroll which is outright heresy. A concerned Luther tells Faust that they could fire him for having it.
At which point, Faust replies with the best line of the entire play: "They can beat me, they can shun me, they can kill me, they can excommunicate me, they can damn me to hell but they cannot fire me because I. Have. Tenure!"
One thing that they did periodically in the play that I was not a huge fan of was something they did with Faust. I sort of thought it detracted from the whole thing. Besides being a doctor of many many different subjects, Faust apparently likes performing at the local tavern. So sometimes he would stand up on the steps and make jokes and sing. I admit that it was kinda funny, but overall, they weren't my favorite scenes. He wasn't a bad singer, I just thought that it didn't fit in very well with the overall flow of the play.
The play ends on Halloween. Faust is dressed up as the devil, and Luther… is dressed as a Franciscan. It was a pretty funny exchange when they discussed costumes. The two of them engage in their usual banter, but then things turn south when Luther finds out that Faust made copies of his "95 theses" and mailed them off to various church officials, as well as nailing them to the front door of the church. Luther is not pleased at all with Faust, and I think that this was the end of their friendship. They fought a lot during the play, but nothing like this.
I sort of liked how the play ended. The three main characters were all on stage together, but clearly in different places. Hamlet, all in black, starts giving one of his famous speeches from Hamlet - I think it was the "what a piece of work" speech, but I'm not sure, I don't remember. Luther was giving his famous speech in his defense to the church. And Faust laments about how nothing is certain.
Windfall Theatre
February 25 2012
I had never heard of this theatre before (Tis very tiny) but when I saw the advertising for this play, I could not resist. John Faustus(David Flores), Martin Luther (Robert W.C. Kennedy)and Hamlet all meet up at Wittenberg University. It sounded like some awesome crossover fanfiction. Essentially, that's what it was.
Like all really good fanfiction, it's entertaining with only a surface knowledge of the source text, and really really entertaining if you're very familiar with the source text.
I am very familiar with two out of the three, and surface knowledge of the third, so I got a lot of the jokes.
The play had a lot of funny bits, but it was a bit heavy too. Very talky. Luther and Faust spent a lot of time debating about things. Luther is a priest and professor of theology and Faust is a philosopher who believes in nothing. Listening to the two of them go at it was sort of exhausting. They were an odd sort of friends. They fought about almost everything, and yet for most of the play were still sort of friends.
The theatre was actually a bunch of chairs set up in a room. There was no stage per say, but the set pieces were there. Faust's desk with an assortment of books and props. There was a large door with lots of bulletins posted on it. I went closer to it. There were advertisements for different classes being run by Faust and by Luther. My favorite was Hamlet, looking for a carpool back to Denmark.
I'm not sure who my favorite person in the cast was. They were all very good. They also were all very impressive, as they all had a lot of very complicated lines.
First off, there was the Girl. Lindsey L. Gagliano played four different roles. I liked how she was credited: "The Eternal Feminine."
First, she played Gretchen, a barmaid at the place where Faust and Luther met often to drink and chat (and argue). She brought them a lot of beer, that's for sure. She actually sets Luther off by bringing up his least favorite person, and least favorite practice: the buying and selling of indulgences. Luther kept calling her on different sins, to which she'd respond: "It's covered!" because she bought something that would pardon her of all her sins for the next month. It was pretty funny.
Next, she played Helen, a former-nun turned courtesan and the love of Faust's life. She was dressed in bright red. I think it was symbolic. Faust loves her, and he proposes to her, but she turns him down. Repeatedly. It's sort of sad. After Faust goes on about how the only thing he believes in is his love for her, she shoots him down. Before that, though, she and Faust were engaged in a rather steamy scene. The two of them were under a red blanket, and it was pretty clear what they were doing. This scene was made pretty funny because of what was going on in the foreground while the two of them were going at it. Luther was conducting a service, and he was reading a passage from Song of Songs. Song of Songs, of course, is a chapter in the Bible that is pretty darn steamy and racy in its own right. The passage is describing God as a lover, while the two lovers in the background were… well…
It was pretty funny.
A bit later, Hamlet is reading something that Luther gave him, while eating the "candy" that Faust gave him for concentration. Suddenly he hallucinates (or has a vision) of the Virgin Mary. She had a great line: "Why are you neglecting my son, my son?" As she departed, she told Hamlet to "remember me." Hamlet quoted his play a bit, from the scene where he sees the ghost of his father.
Finally, she played an ambassador from the Queen of Denmark who comes to bring Hamlet the bad news that his father has died, stung by a snake in his garden. Now young Hamlet is to be king. She didn't have a huge role as this character, but she had a very pretty green dress.
Kyle Queenan played Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. (I can't say that phrase without thinking of it RSC style. Anyway.) First and foremost I must say, he has great hair. Now that that's out of the way, I can talk about his acting and the character.
In a way, it seemed like Hamlet was there as a reason to have conflict between Faust and Luther. Admittedly though, they didn't need that much "help" to fight with each other.
For the most part, Hamlet spoke in iambic pentameter, using Shakespearean-sounding lines. They made a lot of lines that were pretty close to the real famous Hamlet lines. At one point, Faust (Hamlet's philosophy professor) is trying to convince Hamlet that the most important question in life is not "to believe or not to believe" but simply if one desires continued existence or not. So they have this exchange:
Faust: "To be or not to be."
Hamlet: "That is the question?"
Faust: "Yes!"
Faust also gives Hamlet a magazine to read, it's all the scandal around a lot of noble families in Europe. The main story of this edition is the murder of Gonzalgo. "I hear they're going to make a play out of it," Faust reports.
Faust had a human skull on his desk, and at one point, while waiting for Faust to arrive, Hamlet studies it curiously. At one moment, he picks it up to look at it, holding it up in traditional Hamlet-Skull fashion.
Hamlet is a champion tennis player, but he was having difficulty for a little while. He went to see Faust, who is a doctor of medicine too, who prescribes him some special "candy" to help with his balance issues. It was rather funny to hear Hamlet explain to Faust, in Shakespearean English about how he fell and rather than hitting the tennis ball, he hit some other ones instead.
Eventually, dressed all in white, with his hair pulled back, it is time for the championship tennis match between Wittenberg U. and their rivals, some school from France. The champion of the rival school? Laertes of course! Laertes was not seen, he was an off-stage voice. I'm not sure if it was a recording or someone saying the lines live. I couldn't quite tell. It was a really funny scene because they were almost directly quoting the famous fencing scene from the play. Hamlet won the match, not letting Laertes score at all. At the end of the game, Hamlet did the "kneel and point to heaven" thing, which I thought was interesting because one of the themes of the play is Hamlet struggling with his faith.
When we got to the theatre, one of the chairs had a reserved sign on it. As it turned out, that chair was reserved for Hamlet. He darted into one of his "classes" late and took a seat - the reserved one. (I think it was his theology class)
Another "inside joke" that I really liked with Hamlet was that in his first few scenes, he was dressed in bright blues and greens, and then later, he was dressed in all white. It wasn't until the very end that he was dressed in his characteristic black. He was dressed as a monk, all in black, so there was a logical reason for it. But then that's also when he gets the bad news about his father.
One major story in the play is that Hamlet has had a terrible dream: He stands at the edge of a pit of whirling confusing, while in front of him, is a large empty tombstone. He looks down into the pit and has a vision of his father, and himself, and he feels that he will fall, and then he wakes up.
Hamlet tells his two favorite professors about it: Faust and Luther. The two men have very different interpretations of Hamlet's dream.
Faust says that it is showing Hamlet's struggle with faith. It is a tombstone for God, and if God is dead, then what else is not true in the world? The whirlpool represents the chaos that Hamlet believes will follow from God being dead, and jumping into the chaos is the only way that Hamlet can learn what is true and what is not.
Luther, on the other hand, says that the tombstone is for Hamlet's father. It's reminding Hamlet that one day, he will replace his father as king, and that he needs to be ready. The chaos represents the turmoil that will surround Hamlet when he is king, and that he has to put order to it.
This scene was rather entertaining because Faust and Luther were telling Hamlet how they were interpreting his dream… at the same time. If it had been a movie or TV show, they would have been switching back and forth between scenes rather quickly - the idea being that first Hamlet had gone to Luther and then he had gone to Faust. With the way the scene played out on stage, the two of them kept tugging Hamlet back and forth between the two sides of the stage.
At one point, Hamlet was kneeling between them and each of the other two men had a hand on one shoulder - shoulder angel and shoulder devil.
In the very end, Hamlet decides on his own interpretation of the dream.
As it turns out, all three of them are wrong. The dream is just a warning, that either his father is going to die, or that his father already had died. I have no idea how long it takes for news to travel between Denmark and Germany.
Luther and Faust were in conflict a lot. Another way that they illustrated this was through their costumes. Luther was tall and thin, dressed in his plain brown monk robes with a lot of sharp edges in his manner. Faust, on the other end was dressed in red, with furs and jewels, and a lot of soft rounded lines. I liked the contrast when the two of them were onstage together. (which, admittedly, was most of the play.)
As I said before, the play was very talky. Faust spent a lot of time talking to the audience (or Hamlet, if he was there) about how important it is to question everything, and arrive at your own judgments about life and the universe in general. Luther spent a lot of time talking to the audience (or Hamlet, if he was there) about how important God is, and how important it is to trust in his holy gospel to be your guide. I think that Faust spent a lot more time preaching at Hamlet than Luther did.
Luther and Faust first interact when Luther goes to see him about some stomach problems. Faust prescribes him some beans that he got from the middle east. He tells Luther to crush them and make a tea out of them. They will help clear out his stomach. Faust tells Luther that the beans are called "café" and that it might have the side effect of making Luther a little wired. Later, when they meet up at the bar, Luther tells Faust that those beans, that café drink, is the best thing ever. It was inspirational! (And Luther was just a wee bit jazzed up on caffeine at the time). The café kept him awake, and so he decided to use the time productively, and work on his sermon for Sunday, and that's when inspiration hit him. It was fun to listen to him recount the historical version about the passage that bothered him. So in a way, coffee is what started the whole movement. Which is really appropriate, given that Lutherans cannot assemble together without coffee.
The two of them talk for awhile, and start drifting into the dangerous waters of things that they don't like about the catholic church. An upset, and slightly inebriated Luther tells Faust that he could come up with around a hundred good solid logical arguments against the selling of indulgences, and Faust challenges him to do so. (Well, Luther only manages to come up with ninety-five, but that's close enough to a hundred).
An important plot point was that Hamlet spent some time in Poland, studying under the famous astronomer Copernicus. He heard of the disturbing theory that the Earth goes around the Sun instead of the other way around. He tells Faust of this, who reads Copernicus's work and is delighted by it. Then he give it to Luther, who is stunned and upset by it. He still doesn't like the implications that the church is wrong about things, (even though he's questioning it left right and center).
Luther is worried about Faust. The two of them are working at a catholic university, and Faust has this scroll which is outright heresy. A concerned Luther tells Faust that they could fire him for having it.
At which point, Faust replies with the best line of the entire play: "They can beat me, they can shun me, they can kill me, they can excommunicate me, they can damn me to hell but they cannot fire me because I. Have. Tenure!"
One thing that they did periodically in the play that I was not a huge fan of was something they did with Faust. I sort of thought it detracted from the whole thing. Besides being a doctor of many many different subjects, Faust apparently likes performing at the local tavern. So sometimes he would stand up on the steps and make jokes and sing. I admit that it was kinda funny, but overall, they weren't my favorite scenes. He wasn't a bad singer, I just thought that it didn't fit in very well with the overall flow of the play.
The play ends on Halloween. Faust is dressed up as the devil, and Luther… is dressed as a Franciscan. It was a pretty funny exchange when they discussed costumes. The two of them engage in their usual banter, but then things turn south when Luther finds out that Faust made copies of his "95 theses" and mailed them off to various church officials, as well as nailing them to the front door of the church. Luther is not pleased at all with Faust, and I think that this was the end of their friendship. They fought a lot during the play, but nothing like this.
I sort of liked how the play ended. The three main characters were all on stage together, but clearly in different places. Hamlet, all in black, starts giving one of his famous speeches from Hamlet - I think it was the "what a piece of work" speech, but I'm not sure, I don't remember. Luther was giving his famous speech in his defense to the church. And Faust laments about how nothing is certain.