A Playwright, a Prostitute, and a Nun Walk Into Spring Break
Spoiler Alert! This week we are once more talking to fabulous director and professor Lance Marsh as he takes on a performed reading of Aphra Behn’s The Rover with a limited showing April 10th-12th. We will talk about what the reading will entail, the maybes and possibilities of Aphra Behn, her position as the first professional female playwright, and the women she wrote in The Rover, and the similarities between the productions and personas of Behn and Shakespeare. We will talk about her adaptations from Thomas Killigrew’s unpublished work and March’s adaptations for the upcoming production at Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park. It’s 1985 Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale and things are gonna get wild.
We also talk about cuts (this was after all a two part play when it was first published) and how to cut while still maintaining authorial intent. We will be talking about the plot of the play AND *trigger warning* the four instances of assault within the play. Note: Marsh cut the severity of those scenes so, viewers, the reading should not be triggering. This is a comedy by a woman about women and the monetization of women in the 17th century. It’s going to get real.
Synopsis: Watch as sisters, Florinda (wife to be) and Hellena (nun-to-be), fight the patriarchy and religion(archy), to find their own paths amidst, and within, the upheaval of Carnival (or Spring Break), and have to define themselves amongst the blanket categorization of women as virgins or whores. They will have to navigate between the honorable men (stay gold, Belvile) and the flavors of bad (bad boys, controlling family members, to real POSs - and the lines are squidgy!) to find the guy that will allow them the life they choose. Remember, it’s the 17th century, even Aphra Behn had to make up a husband.
The arts are under attack, and buying tickets and books is a great way to show your support and fight back.
As promised, here is a link to Siouxsie and the Banshees’ song https://music.apple.com/us/song/cities-in-dust/1443842139 [https://music.apple.com/us/song/cities-in-dust/1443842139] and the playlist is AMAZING.
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Thank you for listening!
Host/Shakespearean Shrew: Karen Feiner
Co-Creator/Brew Shrew: Michelle Coffman
Cover Art Creator/Artistic Shrew: Katie Kimberling www.halfmaverick.com [about:blank]
Intro/Outro Music: “Tangled” by Nihilore: Creative Commons Music
Thank you to our guest, D. Lance Marsh.
D. LANCE MARSH (he/him/his) is proud to be serving in his seventeenth year as an Associate Artistic Director for Oklahoma Shakespeare and in his twentieth year at TheatreOCU, where he serves as a Professor and Head of Performance (and briefly as an Acting Associate Dean). For OSP, he has acted in Hamlet, Emma and Blythe Spirit, and The Merry Wives of Windsor and directed Misalliance, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Merchant of Venice, A Comedy of Errors, The Seagull, Othello, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Blythe Spirit, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, GB Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, and Much Ado About Nothing. A proud member of Actors Equity, he has performed in the City Rep productions of Our Town, Hay Fever, Moonlight and Magnolias, August: Osage County, Much Ado About Nothing and as Mark Rothko in Red and in Peter and the Starcatcher. His most recent projects include playing the role of Sam Byck in Assassins, Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, and Ebeneezer Scrooge (twice) in A Christmas Carol at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma.
