The Boy Who Would Be King: And Six More Plays

By Ethard Wendel Van Stee

This collection of seven plays will stir your love of story and language. A feast for the ears, it represents Mr. Van Stees best dramatic writing over thirteen years. The plays are well-suited to cinematic and stage production as well as to dramatic reading. Book club readers will enjoy taking the various parts and discussing the plays afterwards. Readers will be rewarded by the entertaining plots and the richness of the dialogue.

Mr. Van Stee is the author of eleven previous books including fiction, drama, biography, and literary criticism. He was the director of the Beaufort Writers organization for fifteen years. Between books he is a portrait painter. He lives in Beaufort, South Carolina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475972733

Ethard Wendel Van Stee

Ethard Wendel Van Stee began studying creative writing thirty years ago. He has served on the editorial boards of several learned journals and has had many years of experience on the podium in university lecture halls. He shifted focus three decades ago from science to biographical writing and fiction. He has taught creative writing in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Beaufort, South Carolina. He was the director of the Beaufort Writers organization from 1996 to 2012. Mr. Van Stee’s books include I Didn’t Come From Nowhere, the life of Marie Johnson, daughter of a slave; Moira’s Scythe, a family saga; The Remarkable Life of Frances Emily Steele, a novel; A Woman of No Means, the second Frances Emily novel; The Bloodstone, a novelized collection of linked murder mysteries from the casebook of Frances Emily’s granddaughter Amy Elizabeth Fletcher, and The Hangman, the second book from the casebook of Amy Elizabeth Fletcher. Most recently Madimi and The Monks of Arden, both set in late medieval England have appeared. He is also the author of Pen in Hand, A Meditation on the Art and Craft of the Short Story. All books are available from any of dozens of Internet booksellers or by order from your local bookstore. Google Ethard Van Stee for more than you ever wanted to know. He may be contacted at [e-mail]. His website address is www.ethardvanstee.com.

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Copyright © 2013 Ethard Wendel Van Stee.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-7274-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-7273-3 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 1/22/2013

Table of Contents

Preface

General Introduction

CHAPTER 1 The Boy Who Would Be King

CHAPTER 2 Ashes to Ashes

CHAPTER 3 God’s Will

CHAPTER 4 Oedipus on 11th Street

CHAPTER 5 Cannibals

CHAPTER 6 Mirabelle

CHAPTER 7 Madeleine

About the Author

OTHER BOOKS BY ETHARD WENDEL VAN STEE

Moira’s Scythe [2001]

I Didn’t Come From Nowhere [2001]

The Remarkable Life of Frances Emily Steele [2001]

Three Plays [2001]

A Woman of No Means [2003]

This I Need To Know [2004]

The Bloodstone [2005]

The Hangman [2005]

Madimi [2008]

The Monks of Arden [2009]

Pen in Hand [2010]

To James Stephen Van Stee

Preface

The seven short plays collected here draw upon the author’s body of work from the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title play The Boy Who Would Be King is political satire. Ashes to Ashes is a meditation on death. God’s Will is a study of chattel slavery set in antebellum North Carolina. Oedipus on 11th Street and Cannibals are based on Greek dramas, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and the Oresteia by Aeschylus. God’s Will, Oedipus, and Cannibals are revised versions of plays first published by the author in 2001 and 2004. Madeleine and Mirabelle are mysteries set in London’s late Victorian era. They are adaptations of themes taken from A Woman of No Means and The Hangman, respectively, two novels by the author. This collection offers the reader a single volume that includes the best examples of the author’s dramatic writing.

General Introduction

The roots of the Western literary tradition are buried in the ancient past of Greece. Before the invention of writing, the only way to preserve the culture of ideas was through oral transmission from one generation to the next. Storytellers memorized poems and tales they heard from other storytellers, often changing them to suit their own needs, adding, subtracting, re-telling. The person or persons we know as Homer assembled heroic tales of gods and goddesses, of mortals and immortals, the stuff of their myths and legends, and gave us the epic poems Odyssey and Iliad. Early entertainers were the tellers of tales, bards who memorized long works and performed them for both commoners and kings. Along the way ancient people learned to sing, dance, and to play musical instruments. They formed groups of dancers and choristers. We know nothing of their melodies or of their choreography. But scholars believe that during a period before 600 BCE they joined each other to put on public entertainments. Enter Thespis in the sixth century who is credited with having originated Greek drama by selecting a single performer to step out in front of the chorus of perhaps as many as fifty and speak alone to the audience.

Greek drama underwent a rapid flowering during the fifth century with the appearance of the great dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus added a second actor and reduced the size of the chorus, and Sophocles and Euripides continued the process by adding more actors and further shrinking the chorus. In their time, however, the chorus never quite went away. The chorus in ancient Greece was a character in the play, not necessarily a group of singers and dancers, as we recognize it today. The role of the chorus was to explain elements of the drama to the audience, providing background information and arguments on behalf of the community to which the principal characters belonged. Occasionally the chorus discussed issues with the principals, arguing, expressing the community’s point of view. Who speaks for the community in contemporary plays? We no longer have Greek choruses and so community issues are given voice by an occasional narrator, or by newspaper and television commentaries written into scripts. A device common to Oedipus on 11th Street and Cannibals is the presence of a chorus of townsfolk. They speak to the audience. They speak to each other. They speak to the principal characters. I have tried to present the chorus as an authentic character who has interests that may be in agreement or in disagreement with the other characters, a character with its own point of view. The other plays use a narrator.

The idea to write a contemporary play that includes a chorus as a character came to me one day in 1998 when a company of my actor friends needed to have their spirits lifted during a trying period in the history of playmaking in Beaufort, South Carolina. Recently I had watched David Mamet’s Vanya On 42nd Street, starring Wallace Shawn. So, I came up with Oedipus on 11th Street and invited everyone to the Port Royal Playhouse for a cold reading. More people turned out than there were individual parts to read, which was part of the plan, because Oedipus on 11th Street includes a crowd as a character in the play. Those not taking an individual speaking role would become a part of the crowd. I quickly learned that we needed a leader to start the chorus because, absent rehearsals, the crowd had trouble getting started together, something like an unrehearsed glee club. And so, when the chorus speaks, the leader delivers the first few words, and the rest join in. Like any other character in a play, the character that is the crowd has opinions and sympathies that may remain constant or may change as the story progresses. For example, in Cannibals, Chloe woos the crowd and attempts to bring them around to support her in justifying the killing of her husband Aggie. Initially they seem to be sympathetic, but she loses their confidence. She turns on them, and they on her.

A sidebar to the reading of Oedipus on 11th Street came about as the result of the presence in the audience of a local college English professor. She invited me to her class to talk about the play. This soon evolved into a lecture on Sophocles and Oedipus the King with added material on fifth-century Athens. The centerpiece of the lecture, which I have been privileged to present many times since, is a reading by the class of Oedipus on 11th Street, followed by a discussion of the meaning of Oedipus and why it and the other classical Greek plays have such enduring value for us. Oedipus on 11th Street is by no means offered as a perfect representation of all the subtleties and nuances of the original. It is abridged and abbreviated in the form of a play within a play in which the company of actors rehearses Oedipus the King. As the rehearsal moves through the original play, the outer story of the actors themselves mirrors the story of Oedipus.

I wrote Cannibals after writing Oedipus on 11th Street. It is the story of the Oresteia, a trilogy written by Aeschylus, for which he won first prize at the Festival of Dionysus in 458 BCE, retold in three acts, each representing a play from the trilogy. Agamemnon becomes Aggie, a Miami drug lord. His wife Clytemnestra is Chloe. Iphigenia is Genie, Cassandra Cassie, and so on. In Act Two, the Libation Bearers of the Oresteia, Orestes returns home to kill his mother Clytemnestra, as was his duty, in retribution for Clytemnestra having killed his father Agamemnon. Poor Electra. Orestes’ sister was the person who had kept the watch, who had suffered under the rule of his mother and his uncle, while Orestes spent twenty years in exile, probably having a good time. Since Cannibals is not the Oresteia, I had no particular obligation to adhere strictly to the original, and took the liberty of allowing Ellie [Electra] the right to do the final deed. She earned it.

Shakespeare gave the English language timeless drama, much of it written in iambic pentameter. For complex reasons best known to linguists, if they are known at all, our ears seem to be tuned to this meter. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. Mingled with the iambs are the other metrical feet that give color and variety to the language. When we experience a departure from these norms we unconsciously feel a dissonance, something poorly defined that grates on us. Sometimes writers do this on purpose to achieve particular literary ends. Much of the time it is inadvertent and the result of nothing more than the clumsy use of a marvelous tool.

Consider the following passage. [Cannibals, Act 2 Scene 2] Ellie, Ellie, my sister. You devour yourself. Perhaps one day he will return, but until that time, control your words lest Gus should overhear. You must know he needs but small excuse to make you disappear. Nor would our mother grieve for very long. O’er your grave she’d shed a single tear, and then congratulate herself with another link to her judge and executioner now broke. Read it aloud and notice the rhythmic patterns. They are quite regular until the last sentence that calls attention to the character by the change in rhythmic pattern, as well as use of the archaic broke to put a sharp, cutting end to the speech. Or this. [Oedipus on 11th Street, Scene 2] Long before Laius was murdered, some distance away between Corinth and Thebes, men appeared bearing a swaddled child. They were about to heave the child from their chariot into a ravine, when they saw me tending my sheep. They hailed me and said, Here, shepherd, a gift from your king, and made me take the infant, a boy, whose ankles they had bound after being pinned with a spike. Go back into the hills, they said. Let this child never be seen again, and they sped away. The meter in this passage is less regular, not like our everyday speech, but yet has a strong, metrical structure. You might ask, So what? Why not have your characters deliver their lines in the style of everyday language? The answer is simple. The plays are entertainments, meant not only to tell a story, but also to create an aura of sound that falls melodiously on the ears. Plays deliver beauty and ugliness, comedy and tragedy, the elements that affect the senses through plot and action. In addition, when we hear or speak the words, a resonant quality, a music of the language should suffuse the experience with a dramatic quality that affects us at a deep level. The property should not call attention to itself, but rather function as a consciously inaudible melody that colors our perception. It is related to what distinguishes art from illustration, literature from journalism. The plays in this volume are intended for informed and thoughtful adults. Cannibals is about the transition of society from governance by blood feud to the rule of law. Oedipus on 11th Street can be interpreted as about how we deal with the unpleasant facts of our lives, God’s Will about the evils of chattel slavery and religious madness.

God’s Will is an adaptation of the fictional 1839 trial of William Marsden Brandt from my novel Moira’s Scythe. The chorus or crowd is less well defined in this play than in the two based on the Greek tragedies. They are brought into sharp focus with the final speech of the play, which serves as an epilogue to the story. [God’s Will, Final scene] People of Wisharton, my countrymen, look on Marsden Brandt. He thought he solved the mystery of salvation. He achieved great power. Who could not envy him? Now, what black sea of horror has circled round to envelope him. Are all his wrongs made right? Only in the mind of God is the answer known. We have done our duty, and kept our watch, o’er his final day. We count him happy now, free of pain at last.

The Boy Who Would Be King is a political comedy that exploits the infamous buffoonery of the 43rd president of the United States, well known for his tendency to mangle the English language. The play is set in a fictional kingdom in the distant past.

Ashes to Ashes tells the story of a budding young pyromaniac who grows up to enter the business of cremation, a pursuit with tragic consequences for both his personal life and his tentative grip on sanity.

Mirabelle is a music hall entertainer who runs into a bit of bad luck. Plucky lass that she is, she is able to set aside her scruples and pull herself back up. Her hapless sidekick is not so lucky and comes to an ignominious end as Mirabelle re-launches her temporarily abandoned career.

Madeleine is loosely adapted from the story of the real-life Margaret Dickson, a young woman of seedy reputation who lived in 18th century Scotland. Her infamy is memorialized to this day in the form of the Half-Hangit Maggie Pub, Grassmarket, Edinburgh.

PART I

The Boy Who Would Be King

Introduction and Summary

Credits Shameless borrowings from William Shakespeare and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 2; translations by Rolfe Humphries and Ted Hughes.

Setting The Boy Who Would Be King is an unnamed monarch who reins over an unnamed country sometime in the distant past.

Scene 1 Blind seer Tiresias stands alone on the stage to introduce the play.

Scene 2 The king’s privy counselors, Cardinal Richelieu, General Grenzky, and Prince Nicholas discuss plans for war on Crete. Toaddy, Richelieu’s aide and general factotum is also present. Grenzky describes the military preparations and Tiresias issues a warning. The king, in company with his palace entourage, announces that he has created an entertainment for the children to help keep the people’s minds off the endless drumbeat of war.

Scene 3 The king, queen, the king’s mistress Nellie, and Toaddy discuss his plans for the entertainment. They will perform his version of the tale of Phaëthon, adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Scene 4 The senate, led by Doge Lorenzo di Garda, discuss their worries about the impending war, and the motives driving the king and his advisors. They talk about the king and the privy counselors politicking the senate. They discuss evidence that the king’s brother Prince Nicholas lusts for the throne. The king comes to the senate to lobby them in favor of the war. The privy counselors feed him his lines.

Scene 5 Lorenzo, his wife Lady Caroline, and Nellie decide there is only one way to stop the king’s madness. They devise a plot for his murder, for which the prince will be blamed.

Scene 6 The king and his acting company perform their play. At the end a messenger arrives with the news that the fleet has been destroyed by a great storm.

Scene 7 Nellie makes love to the king, after which she pours poison in his ear as he sleeps. She departs, leaving behind an earring belonging to the prince’s wife Catharine. The queen enters the bedchamber, and finding her husband dead, drinks the poison remaining in the phial, and dies.

Scene 8 The privy counsel meets to advance their plan for survival after the loss of the fleet. They are arrested for the murder of the king.

Scene 9 The senate tries the privy counselors and the princess for conspiracy and murder. They are found guilty based on the evidence of the lost earring left behind. The princess, Richelieu, and Grenzky are sentenced to life imprisonment in the cardinal’s new dungeon. The prince is sentenced to die. The senate elects Doge Lorenzo the new king.

Scene 10 Tiresias offers some observations on the preceding events.

Cast

The King

The Queen

Nellie, queen’s lady-in-waiting & the king’s mistress

King’s privy councilors

Cardinal Richelieu

General Boris Grenzky

Prince Nicholas, the king’s brother

Princess Catharine

Toaddy, Richelieu’s aide

Senators & Guards

Doge Lorenzo di Garda

Lady Caroline di Garda, Lorenzo’s wife

Blind Tiresias

Mehmid al Fatih

Messenger

Scene 1

[Enter Tiresias]

TIRESIAS

Welcome. Please bear with me as I find my place. I trust that you can see me well enough. Blinded by Hera long ago, I cannot look into your eyes, but nonetheless discern with ease the text embroidered on your souls. Do not fear, I come not to betray your inmost thoughts. I am no entertainer on a stage, armed with crib-bed clues to open up to ridicule the petty peccadilloes you thought you’d locked away. The sordid business revealed tonight would swallow whole the worst you’ve ever done, so watch your backs, secure your flanks, our tale has just begun.

[Exits]

Scene 2

[Enter Richelieu, Grenzky, Prince, Toaddy]

RICHELIEU

What is the word from the front? You have news, do you not?

GRENZKY

My dear Richelieu, our navy has nearly surrounded Cyprus. Four hundred galleys and one hundred twenty supply ships are completing the blockade. I have established garrisons in Athens and at the ports of Izmir and Alexandria. The noose tightens around Mehmid’s neck.

PRINCE NICHOLAS

What do you hear of the threatening weather?

RICHELIEU

Ah, yes. That worrisome part of the plan. Summon Tiresias.

[Enter Tiresias]

RICHELIEU

Step into