Boy, Is This Not Greatness

Mitchell Hall, where (presumably) Boy My Greatness
was to have been performed

A grad school friend of Curmie’s now lives a few miles from the University of Central Oklahoma, which recently suppressed the production of a play that had been scheduled to be produced this month.  He posted about this story on his Facebook page, and Curmie became interested, in part because there is so little press coverage (more on that below).

Curmie doesn’t know the work in question, Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s 2024 play Boy My Greatness, but he did immediately recognize one of the most famous lines from Antony and Cleopatra, in which the Egyptian queen, now captured by Caesar’s minions, predicts that “Antony / Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’ th’ posture of a whore.” (That’s V.ii.265-8, if you’re playing along at home, Gentle Reader.)

The line is not only metatheatrical (there are other examples in Shakespeare, but this is probably the best known), but also, of course, self-referentially ironic: the actor saying that line at the Globe (or perhaps the Second Blackfriars?) Theatre in c. 1607 would almost certainly have been a boy.  It’s possible, of course, but not generally believed, that the role could have been played by an adult female impersonator, equivalent to the onnagata in Kabuki.  But this would almost certainly create an even “squeakier” Cleopatra, as higher pitches do not come naturally to post-puberty males.  The point is taken, either way.

It comes as no surprise, then, that a play titled Boy My Greatness deals with boys playing women in Shakespeare’s plays.  It’s set in 1606, and one of the plays currently in rehearsal is indeed Antony and Cleopatra.  (Yes, it’s probable that the play hadn’t been written yet in 1606, but it’s not like the Bard himself didn’t play fast and loose with historical accuracy.)

It is simply a fact that all women’s roles in public performances (court masques were a different category) in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in England were played by male actors.  Even the most ignorant of university officials must surely know that.  Ah, but two of the boys in this play are, or at least have been, in a romantic relationship.  One presumes that is what rattled the chain of the homophobic idiots censorial asshats university counsel’s office.  

OK, let’s take this one step at a time.  There’s a stupid law at the state level and a directive (not a law) from the feds that forbid the use of public funds to support “DEI” initiatives.  Curmie disagrees with these restrictions, but acknowledges that in a perfect world they would be sensible.  (He also gestures broadly, wearing an expression readily translatable as “does this look like a perfect world to you?”)

But if the laws themselves are problematic, the idea that staging a play in which gay (or curious) characters exist is somehow endorsing DEI is ample evidence that, to borrow a felicitous phrase from Ken White of Popehat, universities should cease hiring legal counsel from the back of a bait shop. 

Showing something onstage is not endorsing it, as ought to be painfully obvious to anyone who can out-think a turnip.  Even portraying a character favorably falls well short of supporting everything about that individual.  Curmie once directed a production of Jean Racine’s Phaedra; that doesn’t make him (or his actors) either a Jansenite Catholic or a monarchist.  He’s directed Mishima Yukio’s Lady Aoi; he’s neither a Buddhist nor a believer in demonic possession.  He’s directed Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold… and the boys”; he does not endorse the racial animus perpetrated (briefly) by the title character.  But you, Gentle Reader, already knew all of this.  That’s because you’re considerably smarter than COU’s legal staff (or president, or trustees, or whoever really made this decision). 

True, the university’s official statement reads “After a review of the requirements outlined in the contract from the national production company with legal counsel, the university’s theatre department decided not to support the local production of the show with university resources at this time.” 

Gentle Reader, if you believe the decision was made by the theatre department, Curmie has some ocean-front property in Kansas he’s willing to sell to you for a mere $10,000 an acre.  This has every earmark of a top-down decision made by administrators.  Curmie’s friend, who may have information that hasn’t been made public, says there were threats of firings, which prompted faculty and students to “back down.”  Of course, any theatre faculty member who willingly capitulated to this nonsense without being somehow threatened should indeed be fired. 

But, as Curmie has suggested before, there is a lesson here: Don’t Fuck with Theatre Kids, who are an industrious and creative lot.  The good news, or at least the promising news, is that a Gofundme campaign raised considerably more money than the $2000 goal, and plans are afoot to find an off-campus venue for the production.  As of this writing, such a space has not yet been secured, but hopes are high.

As noted above, there is remarkably little press coverage of any of this.  There’s a single story from a local TV station which does, at least, seem to have been picked up by yahoo.  The lack of press about the incident suggests that the censors will get away with their bigoted and authoritarian bullshit without the widespread humiliation they so richly deserve.  This post is, perhaps, the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness (Curmie did go to Dartmouth, after all, where Vox Clamantis in Deserto is the college motto), but at least it’s something.  Gentle Reader, you should, of course, feel free to make your voice heard, too (even if you disagree with Curmie).

Curmie closes by turning the floor over to his friend: “Show will be done. UCO will lose theatre majors/students. Faculty and admin will retain their jobs. And the state legislature will gain confidence in their fascist policies.”

What he said.

Will the Release of the Epstein Files Matter? Sort of. Maybe.

The top stories of the last few days all revolve around the “Epstein files.”  Well, them and the myriad frenzied attempts by 47 and his minions to get us to focus on literally anything else: the bullshit deployment of National Guard troops to DC to pick up trash and spread mulch, threats to do the same to New York, Chicago, and New Orleans despite court decisions that such missions are illegal, the unquestionably illegal destruction of that Venezuelan ship that may or may not have been carrying narco-terrorists…  Those distractions have failed bigly, not least because it’s all over but the final score.  The names will come out, and we have GOP Congresscritters Massey and Greene (yes, really!), among others, of course, to thank for it.

More to the point, anyone paying the slightest bit of attention has now determined that the likelihood that the President of the United States is not merely a con artist and an authoritarian bully but also a pedophile and rapist has moved out of “preponderance of the evidence” territory and into “beyond reasonable doubt.” 

Few criminals have ever acted more guilty.  The Trump administration can’t even keep its lies consistent.  The files were on Pam Bondi’s desk, but they don’t exist.  The whole thing is a Democratic hoax, but Bill Clinton’s name appears.  Curmie’s recent appreciation of Luigi Pirandello notwithstanding, anyone with the analytical skills of the dumbest kid in kindergarten knows that all of those statements can’t be true at the same time.  The only question is whether any of them are.

Certainly, moving Ghislane Maxwell to Club Fed was sufficient evidence of rampant corruption to convince all but the well and truly brainwashed, and asserting that survivors’ testimony at the press conference is “irrelevant” or that Republican legislators who exhibit even enough backbone to want the truth to come out are “hostile” certainly should have clinched the issue even for the stragglers who hadn’t long since come to that conclusion.

Of course, those who drank deep of the MAGA Kool-Aid don’t care, and those of us who dare suggest that Dear Leader is anything less than a literal godsend will continue to be called Trump Deranged, irrespective of evidence, even by people who know better (or ought to).  But the hard-core MAGAs seem to be losing at least some of their suasion in the Republican party: when you’re revealed as too big of a sicko for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the proverbial writing is on the wall.  Special elections are showing huge gains for Democrats: breaking the state legislature’s GOP super-majority in Iowa by gaining an easy victory in a district that voted for Trump by double digits a few months ago is but one example.

And that’s significant.  Curmie may find the political stances of the current crop of GOP pols more problematic than those of their predecessors of a few decades ago (yes, they’re considerably worse than Nixon or Reagan), but there are relatively few of them outside of the Manchurian Cantaloupe’s appointees who could legitimately be described as evil.  There are some, of course: Mike Johnson (aptly described by Curmie five years ago as “a hitherto unknown little turd”), Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton come to mind.

Most, though, are simply amoral (as opposed to immoral), cowards.  Some, like Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Lisa Murkowski, will occasionally offer a bit of token resistance before ultimately capitulating every damned time to whatever whim takes shape in what passes for a brain in the Mad King of Trumpistan.  These people cannot be trusted, full stop. 

But others—those who may not have a lot of core beliefs but sure would like to be re-elected—are beginning to recognize that servile obeisance to POTUS just might cause more problems than it solves.  The Astroturf support of billionaire mega-donors is nice, no doubt (or at least Susan Collins thinks so), but the disillusionment of the citizenry is real.  Distancing oneself from a party leader who is underwater on literally every issue, and on some of them even among Republicans, comes a little easier under those circumstances.

Curmie isn’t celebrating an imminent return to power for the Democrats, at least not yet.  The GOP’s willingness to be completely forthright in their declarations that they have no interest in representing their constituents, only in maintaining their party’s control of the government, is concerning.  The leftie press is suggesting that the Trumpsters wouldn’t be so openly seeking to gerrymander if they weren’t afraid of the results in a fair election.  Whether that’s true or not is, of course, a matter for conjecture.  It could be that the GOP seeks a supermajority, or that they’re confident in victory (remember Trump’s almost-admission that Elon Musk had manipulated the 2024 election?), anyway.

None of this is new, of course.  Curmie remembers a dozen years ago when Greg Abbott, then the Attorney General for Texas, cheerfully declared in a court document (!) that of course their most recent gerrymandering was designed specifically to increase the power of the Republican Party, but, you see, it wasn’t racially motivated (note: it was, of course), so it was OK.

And no, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not pretending that the Democrats aren’t perfectly willing to play the same game.  Indeed, they have.  But as the New York Times’s Sam Wang wrote about the 2012 election, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.”  And, of course, Democrats voted 220-1 for the 2021 “For the People Act,” which would have required non-partisan commissions rather than state legislatures to establish Congressional districts; Republicans opposed the bill 209-0, with two not voting.  It was then blocked from even receiving a vote in the Senate by Mitch McConnell.

But this piece isn’t about gerrymandering… although we may return to that topic in the future.  What matters here is the extent to which the Epstein affair matters.  The answer, Curmie suspects, could be anywhere on the continuum from “a lot” to “not much.”  As noted above, everyone already knows that Trump will be implicated if that material ever becomes public.  The only question is how significantly.  But knowing in one’s brain and one’s heart that such evidence exists and being unable to deny that evidence’s existence are two different things.

Still, Trump’s boast early in the 2016 campaign that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose voters” may be a little more true than we’d like to believe.  Certainly, anyone who ever would have actively supported Trump—as opposed to despising him less than the other candidate—is indeed sufficiently lacking in morality (or even humanity) that the only thing that would make such a person change their mind would be for Trump to stop being a racist, sexist, anti-intellectual, plutocratic homophobe.

Still, whereas such people are willing to excuse his lies, his felony convictions, his open grifting, and his incoherent bluster… they might just draw the line at raping junior high girls.  The MTGs of the world will tell the tale.  At the moment there’s a trickle of dissent.  If it stays that way, we’ll have to wait until at least next year’s midterms to see how things play out.  But even one or two significant defections could open the floodgates. All bullies—and Trump is unquestionably in that category—are cowards.  If he stops scaring people, he’s powerless, because he’s too fundamentally stupid and narcissistic to convince anyone to come around to his point of view without at least an implicit threat. 

There is another possibility, of course: that we have the distraction backwards.  If, hypothetically, the files reveal that Trump was less complicit in the Epstein/Maxwell sexual exploitation ring than we had believed, then all the attention given to the files was itself the distraction from other illegal or unethical activity.

Ultimately, though, there is one central question: will the Republicans whom Curmie once disagreed with but respected stop bowing and scraping to the Grifter-in-Chief?  It’s possible.  After all, Trump has already secured the title of Most Corrupt President in US History.  He’s not only won the race, he’s lapped the field, leaving Nixon, Harding, and Grant looking at each other wondering how to even compete with that.  But the average GOP Congresscritter demonstrates, shall we say, invertebrate tendencies. 

Will the courageous and patriotic survivors of Epstein, Maxwell, and Trump who addressed the world this week save the country?  They just might.  Unfortunately, they could be our only chance.

 

Luigi Pirandello and the Mad King of Trumpistan

 

Luigi Pirandello, 1867-1936

Over the years, Curmie has called upon his knowledge of dramatic literature on several occasions to address topics that aren’t really about dramatic literature.  He may be forgetting something, but there are plenty of examples, not including references to novels, philosophical essays, films, television shows, songs, paintings, or other such works… or, of course, essays about censorship of plays or similar phenomena.

There’s a list of Curmie’s linkages of dramatic literature to contemporary events at the bottom of this essay.  Feel free to browse or ignore as you wish, Gentle Reader.

There are actually two plays that come to mind in terms of what Curmie wants to discuss here.  One is Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady Says No!, in which the central character is injured during a historical re-enactment and wakes up believing that he really is the Irish hero Robert Emmet.  Curmie is going to concentrate, however, on Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV (Enrico IV).  It’s better known and came a little earlier: the short story on which it is based was published in 1915; the dramatic version was first produced in 1922, seven years before Johnston’s play.  It’s also a little closer to the point Curmie wants to make.  Henry IV is probably second on the list of Pirandello’s most significant plays: definitely behind Six Characters in Search of an Author, and probably a little ahead of Right You Are! (If You Think You Are). 

Curmie knows the latter two plays a little better, having directed them both, but has taught Henry IV a couple of times when the anthology he was using chose that rather than Six Characters as its representative Pirandello work.  The three plays all illustrate what Pirandello called “juxtaposed planes of reality.”  That is, rather than showing a single, distorted view of the world as occurs in, say, expressionism, Pirandello presents the reader/spectator with different perspectives which logically cannot be simultaneously true, but seem to be so.

In Six Characters, figures from an unfinished play interrupt a rehearsal looking for a playwright to finish their stories.  As such, they are simultaneously real and unreal, physically present and completely imaginary.  Consider that an audience seeing the play is watching actors playing actors playing characters from a different play altogether, and you’ll get an idea of the kind of philosophical gamesmanship in which Pirandello indulged.

In Right You Are!, and man (Signor Ponza) and his mother-in-law (Signora Frola) both declare the other to be insane.  According to him, she became distraught at the death of her daughter, and the only way to calm her was to pretend that his second wife was actually his first.  She, on the other hand, asserts that her daughter was in an asylum, not dead, but Ponza became convinced of her death, so Signora Ponza humored her husband’s delusions and married him again.  At the end of the play, Signora Ponza appears, declares herself to be Signora Frola’s daughter, Signor Ponza’s second wife, and for herself, “nobody” and “who you want me to be.”  It is truly a play in which you can’t tell the players without the proverbial scorecard, but that’s the point: truth is ambiguous, contradictory, and ultimately unknowable, as the raisonneur Laudisi laughingly points out in the play’s closing speech: “You have the truth! But are you satisfied?”

The title character in Henry IV had fallen off a horse several years ago, again in an enactment, and now believes himself to be Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor of the late 11^th century and into the early 12^th.  His colleagues set up an elaborate plan to maintain his fantasy, complete with period sets and costumes.  There are subplots aplenty: a new arrival who researched the wrong Henry IV (the French king who reigned about 500 years after the emperor Henry believes himself to be), a little unrequited love, an attempt to shock Henry back into reality, and so on. 

But the signature event is Henry’s revelation in Act II that he had come to his senses years earlier but chose to keep up the pretense of madness.  By the end of Act III, however, he appears to have reclaimed his madness, grabbing the sword from one of his counselors and stabbing (fatally, we presume) his present-day rival.  He then lapses back into his illusory world as the final curtain falls.  Or does he?

And now we start talking about the US in 2025.  A pedestrian (at best), paranoid, narcissist becomes convinced that he is the king of all he surveys.  A collection of sycophants and enablers cheerfully support his delusions (until he inevitably turns on them, of course).  He is an authoritarian monarch who seems to have little grasp on reality, makes decisions based on petty jealousies, and shows little regard for anyone but himself (or, from time to time, those very much like him).

The incoherent babble he spews, the obvious lies, the puerile strutting: do they mean he is delirious, or are they part of a strategy to test the extent of his associates’ willingness to dance puppet-like to his every whim?  Claiming he’s reduced prices by 1500% is the stuff of lunacy, but his followers, many of whom know better, and the same folks who loudly decried President Biden’s (less frequent and less egregious) lapses, are content to pass that off as “exaggeration.”  N.B., Curmie completely understands that literally everyone makes mistakes like this occasionally—Barack Obama didn’t really think there were 57 states—but normal, sane, people don’t do this with this level of regularity, and they sure as hell don’t double down on their absurd claims.  It is one of the signature characteristics of the Mad King of Trumpistan that he never admits that he made a mistake, even that he misspoke.

Is he as unhinged as he appears to be?  Is he lying, or does he really believe the nonsense he belches forth?  The real cause for concern is that we don’t know for sure.  Curmie has suggested before that intelligence and shrewdness are different things, and whereas this particular despot-wannabe has always been short on the former, he is more than amply supplied with the latter.  It boggles that mind that anyone this obviously self-serving, obviously mendacious, and obviously ignorant could draw a single vote from a reasonably sensible citizen, let alone get elected… but here we are.

Is it time to invoke the 25^th Amendment?  Well, that will never happen, as the entire Republican party has proven itself invertebrate, and SCOTUS is pretty well implicated, too.  Are the antics of the likes of Gavin Newsom unprofessional and distasteful, or are they the only hope of saving a tattered but still breathing democracy?  Curmie fears that the answer is “yes.”  Pirandello would certainly understand that seemingly contradictory ideas can co-exist.  He might even write a play about it.

Oh, wait.  He did.

Previous entries linking dramatic literature with contemporary events:

· W.B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen in a piece on the Catholic Church’s excommunication of a nun/hospital administrator who signed off on an abortion to save the life of the mother (the fetus would have died, anyway, by the way).

· Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida to discuss yet another example of the anti-intellectuality of the Texas Board of Education.

· Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in thinking about a standoff between Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Republican legislature.

· Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People to comment on multiple sexual assault allegations against jocks at the University of Montana.

· Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit to talk about a case in which the idiot repo guys stripped the wrong house and the homeowner wanted appropriate compensation.

·  John Lyly’s Gallathea and Phillida and Alexander and Campaspe in a piece about the debate over student loan forgiveness.

·  Aeschylus’s Oresteia, especially the Eumenides, to comment on President Biden’s pro-active pardon of his son, after promising he wouldn’t do so.

·  Shakespeare’s As You Like It (and some traditional Asian forms) in an indictment of Iowa’s heinous anti-drag proposal.  (Good news: the bill was ultimately defeated.)

·  Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to call attention to the craven insidiousness of the GOP’s decision to declare that there were no “calendar days” remaining in the 119^th Congress.

· Euripides’ Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis to discuss President Trump’s unfettered narcissism, mendacity, and duplicity… and the unlikelihood of a solution that doesn’t involve direct action.