play reading

My online play-reading group has been exploring, among other things, 19th century English comedy. We've done most of Oscar Wilde's drawing-room comedies (I know, technically Wilde was Irish, but he worked in England) and wondered what else there was. We tried a play by Arthur Wing Pinero, since I knew he was popular at the time, and though the text was genteely anti-semitic (the moral lesson seemed to be that pushy Cockney Jews shouldn't try to socialize with titled gentry; they wouldn't enjoy themselves), but we did enjoy reading the play - it was called The Cabinet Minister - and will probably return to Pinero eventually.

But for our next venture in this area, I suggested that we try a play that I knew was a big hit comedy in its day, the laugh riot of the 1860s, but whose reputation has been besmirched by a tragic event that occurred during a performance. I refer, of course, to Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor, and if you want to read it, it's here.

It turned out to be fairly funny, itself, and again worth reading. As with the Pinero, it's about titled gentry facing money problems - this time they're being cheated by a crooked agent - who are also being faced by a visit by an American cousin who has become the heir to another relative's fortune.

The cousin is from Vermont, specifically Brattleboro, which is at the old, longer-settled end of Vermont, but he sounds and acts more like a Kentucky hillbilly. Before he arrives, another relative who'd gone out to see him writes that he's been out shooting with a party of the Crow people. In Vermont? The Crows live around Montana. Maybe they too were visiting for some unspecified reason, but evidently for Taylor, America is some kind of black box out of which anything can come.

Our member who read the part of Asa, the cousin, had a great time with it. My principal role was that of an inexplicable - there's no explanation of what he's doing there - nobleman called Lord Dundreary, who became the play's breakout character in the first production from a flamboyant performance by the actor. Lord Dundreary is both dimwitted and an inveterate punster, which I guess go together in some people's opinion, and I found it challenging to get across wordplay like this:
Why does a duck go under water? for divers reasons.
Why does a duck come out of the water? for sundry reasons.
According to the misspelling of his dialogue, Lord Dundreary suffers from both an interdental lisp (th for s) and rhotacism (w for r). Trying to perform both of these at once gave me an accent which sounded to me more Eastern European than English.

Interesting play; I'm glad we tried it. We're also finishing up the more obscure end of Shakespeare, our last venture having been Timon of Athens, which is also about a seemingly well-off man with money problems. When it turns out that his open-hearted generosity has left him broke, and none of his beneficiaries will now lend him money in his need, Timon suddenly switches personality and becomes a toxic misanthrope for the rest of the play. His encounter with another, more natively misanthropic character - dueling curmudgeons! - in Act 4 Scene 3 is one of Shakespeare's little-known gems.