Capital Fringe Festival: The 5th Musketeer

Traditional musketeer outfits

Dear Friends,

Tonight we went out to the first of 7 events we have bought for out of a host such things that make up the Capital Fringe Festival this years — a combination of plays, musical performances (including one opera), reviews and other entertainments. Each summer for several years now for a couple of weeks in a few central locations in DC, such events are staged by this umbrella group. We have gone for about 3 years; one year we went for a weekend to a festival of this type in NYC.

We didn’t have a lot of hope for something really superior: the theatre looked like a warehouse which was not in very good condition; the seats were old benches with cushions; there was rap playing while we sat, no air-conditioning, not much light, and the play started late.

We were very pleasantly surprized. Paco Jose Madden’s play, The 5th Musketeer was not a silly sequel to Dumas’s tale: it was a genuine small costume drama situated in France during the late middle ages (or early Renaissance if you prefer) when powerful groups in France attempted to exterminate and/or repress Huguenot groups like the Camisards. The story begins with D’Artagon grown old and living with his daughter, Cecile. They are oppressed by a rent-racking local landlord, Rochefort, who we later learn is otherwise busying murdering or forcing to convert a group of Camisards. He is not a religious fanatic, but a man seeking to please those above him and gain power for himself. His wife, Rochelle, is profoundly disturbed by his inhumanity and goes off to confess on his behalf daily to a local priest. Through Cecille’s attempts to learn to fight with a sword (like a man) and persuading Treville, a military man who lives humbly and simply, we discover this priest is Treville, and Treville is the 5th musketeer who is spending her (yes her) life trying to avenge the murder and rape of her sister, and save the powerless from the likes of the savage Rochefort.

As the play unfolds, Cecille learns to fight, and Treville’s secrets (which include the truth that it was she who ws rapped by Rochesfort many years ago), her father dies, and Rochelle falls in love with Treville (she does not realize the priest is a woman). Rochelle has no sexual intercourse with Rochefort; she loathes him; the marriage was arranged. He tries to force himself on her, and she resists, and he then sends her to a convent to have her branded and sent out to the streets as a whore. A final scene has Rochefort and Treville duelling; Cecille as backup saves Treville’s life by running Rochefort through. They are too late to save Rochelle who has committed suicide by the time they reach the convent. The play ends with Rochelle on Treville’s lap with Cecille looking on.

This was really a play about three Renaissance women: Treville who was raped and lost her family, and became a musketeer; Cecille who is about to be fleeced and thrown off her land, and must part from her father (who then died alone) to save them from the rapacity of the landlord and becomes musketeer; and Rochelle, forcibly married to a horrible man, who turns to a priest and falls in love with him, and ends a suicide rather than be forced into the streets as a whore by her husband.

In our end is our beginning. How I loved biographies of Renaissance women when I was young. My first “grown-up” book was a fat brown tome on Jeanne d’Albret, my second a book on Margaret de Navarre. That I spent a quarter century translating Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara was in the cards.

The props were simple. Mostly tables and chairs. The actors were dressed in outfits enough like musketeer outfits to signal what they were. Rochelle had a lovely looking dress (flounces of pink silk over a white satin full skirt, a sort of bodice, a scarf around her head) which seemed Renaissance-ish. And there were swords.

The play is melodramatic, and at the same time intelligently written, persuasive, and effective. The language of the speeches was naturalistic with some archaic words and older attitudes thrown in. Despite the latter, it was relevant to out times: religious and class pogroms, ruthless power plays, women badly treated and exploited, landlords rack-renting tenants, crony capitalism in courts; everything was there. Madden is an unusual male author because of his strong sympathy with women (feminism); his solution is to give women mens’ skills to protect themselves, and show us and the characters how they are equal to men on every plane.

It was also history told from a woman-centered point of view and could have satisfied Jane Austen’s criteria: imaginative used humanely and entertainingly. The characters come alive — in the costume drama way. I wished someone had had a flourishing large hat with feathers (Gainsborough-studio style or something of the sort Keira Knightley gets to wear in The Duchess),

Knightley as Duchess of Devonshire in traditional Gainsborough-studio hat,

but perhaps this was too expensive :).

The drive to show women acting out traditional men’s roles in life, especially fencing murderously, did make me a little uncomfortable. I’m not sure the way women can be fully integrated into society wholly equal to men is by imitating their violence, competition, & aggression.

Tara Garwood (Cecille in this play) in the same kind of part in another play

But it was so well meant and hemmed about with qualfication: Cecille and Treville never want to kill anything; Treville is against revenge; they merely seek t protect themselves from harm physically and socially.

Plays in the Fringe festivals are usually done inexpensively. This was no exception. They had the right suggestive faux medieval garments, swords, sticks, and the rest just a bare space in the middle of the enormous room. The success of the production (and they pleased the audience who stood applauding for a bit) shows the metonymy was the right way to go about staging. The play’s effectiveness was much more due though to the effective subtle and nuanced acting: I single out Kelly Slagle as Treville, Rachel Holt as Rochelle, Tara Garwood as Cecile, Matthew Wilson as Rochefort and fencing coach and choreographer.

Kelly Slagle (will appear in satiric movie, Women’s Studies)

Rachel Holt (played Mrs Coaxer in Beggars’ Opera)

The night was cool for a July night, soft dry winds, and we walked to a Chinese restaurant Isobel had gone to one summer Jim and I were at Exeter for a Trollope conference. A big underground place, pleasantly decorated, not too expensive good Chinese food, crowded for a while.

We go again tomorrow a little earlier for another play, something about Irish people held hostage. Saturday is our second of two operas by Britten, The Rape of Lucrecia; last week we saw at Castleton festival (mid-Virginia) a powerful production of Britten’s Turn of the Screw, screenplay by Myfanwy Piper (a Welshwoman). We will see a third there, The Beggar’s Opera (from John Gay’s play), the following week. We see an opera at the Fringe festival too, an Edgar Allen Poe story made the basis of a raw, cruel experience of terror. Two weeks ago now we went to Art-o-matic for a long day: it’s an organization with hires a great building, and includes everyone and anyone who wants to exhibit their art. Each year it’s been really interesting; this is the third time we’ve spent a long afternoon walking through nine floors of art. Some of it very good, and often not that of the overly commercialized sort. I am sometimes tempted to buy even (most of the pictures are set at reasonable sums, like $100).

I’m reading a couple of good books at once jnow, which I mean to report on here when I’ve done: one which gives a new form of history is Mary Trouille’s Wife Abuse in 18th century France, another for my Reveries blog (under the Sign of Austen), a new form of autobiography, Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet. Soon I’ll start Trollope’s short stories, and autumn Sutherland’s life of Walter Scott.

I write this blog to call attention to a remarkable play, and a good playwright’s work, to show how feminism is far from dead, and record a little of how I’m manging to live a fulfilled enough life with my beloved daughter and husband this summer.

Ellen