Peter Whelan’s “The School of Night,” now playing at the Mark Taper Forum, imagines a different kind of spy than James Bond. What if James Bond was not just highly literate, but a first-rate poet who favored blank verse and was also a budding playwright? And, what’s more, what if he were gay and perhaps, an atheist?
Whelan takes us back to the time of Elizabeth—the Virgin Queen not the current one–to meet a very peculiar Christopher Marlowe (Gregory Wooddell). He is speaking to his deity, Dog, and he soon is flirting with a man, Tom Stone (John Sloan), whom we will later learn is really Shakespeare. In the summer of 1592, Marlowe is at the home of Thomas (Adrian LaTourelle) and Audry (Alicia Roper) Walsingham.
Although for many years, historians believed that Marlowe was murdered during a drunken fight at a tavern when he was only 29, in the 1920s a scholar found a coroner’s report have brought this to question. Wasn’t it odd that Marlowe was murdered so soon after he was brought up before the Privy Council and his colleague Thomas Kyd had been seized and confessed that a heretical writing found in his lodging belonged to Marlowe? The coroner’s report contradicted the tavern story and listed the names of the men present, men who, like Marlowe, had been or were spies.
Whelan’s play takes this piece of news and plays with it, but he can’t seem to decide where to go with it; the play is unfocused. Is this a spy thriller? Is this play about freedom of speech, recalling a meeting of minds called “The School of Night” where men like Kyd and Marlowe could speak freely about their religious and political thoughts during a time when Protestants under a church founded by King Henry VIII to justify his divorce from his first queen, mother of Mary, were persecuted when Mary became queen. A time when the Protestants then rose to power and persecuted Catholics when Elizabeth succeeded Mary to the throne. During such dangerous times—when queens and their entourage easily lost their heads quite literally, an atheist was afloat between the persecuted Catholics and the persecuting Protestants.
Adding William Shakespeare and then an Italian actress, Rosalinda Benotti (Tymberlee Chanel), who can be Shakespeare’s Desdemona and Rosalind and the dark lady of his sonnets, Whelan teases at the conjecture that Shakespeare didn’t write his works but someone more educated did. Whelan also includes a worried Sir Walter Ralegh (Henri Lubatti)—Whelan prefers this spelling to the more accepted Raleigh—the gallant man of the grand gesture has fallen out of favor with the queen for having secretly (without her permission) married one of her ladies. He was also connected to this School of Night.
The Walsingham estate is swarming with spies and even a husband cannot count on full support from his wife—Roper’s Audry is a humorless bitch. Whelan has her lusting after one of the henchmen who will eventually kill Marlowe.
In this play, Marlowe recklessly displays his disregard for religion and his preference for men. Wooddell makes a charmingly articulate rebel, much more interesting than Sloan’s Shakespeare or Lubatti’s troubled Ralegh.
Unfortunately, Whelan’s play is not a spy thriller, a political treatise or a morality play or even a historical literary what-if. It tries hard to be all of these and director Bill Alexander moves the actors around these disparate genre well enough. Yet in the end, this historical romp isn’t satisfying enough to fill an evening, even with the gorgeous costumes by Robert Perdziola and lovely set by Simon Higlett.
“The School of Night” continues until Dec. 17 at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. For more information call (213) 628 2772 or go to www.centertheatregroup.org.
